Me too…
For me, the computer (or the phone) turned into a tool and away from being an end in itself. I still tinker plenty, and I use my laptop to thinker with; I just generally don’t tinker at it. Back in ‘the day’ when I was building computers, I found myself constantly chasing down bugs, drivers and whatnot and I found no fun in that. I do find it frustrating that it’s more of a chore to upgrade to a new SSD or whatnot; but I feel that cost is far less than the price I used to pay.
I understand the urge to tinker, but I think most people want their computer (or their phone) to be a toaster and have no interest in monkeying with what’s inside.
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It used to be that computers, by being so imperfect, set problems for the nerd community to compete in solving. Who knows how many people learned to code because they once thought they could make desktop Linux usable?
But (outside of the nerd community) it’s hard to argue that having technology actually work as advertised is a bad thing. It just means you have to set and solve new problems. Yeah, it was more exciting when everyone had a common mission (“make computers do the stuff we know they should be able to”), but that mission’s over now, we won.
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The greatest trick the devil ever pulled…
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Next year is always the year of desktop Linux.
There was a time when the computer maintenance staff would run diagnostics 20% of the time, because the odds of a tube going bad in the night were excellent.
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I used to be a die-hard tinkering Android user before work made me switch to iPhone (it was free! and the latest!).
It took me a few months to get over the grumbling, and while there are still a couple of sore points, overall I’m happier.
The iPhone is a more seamlessly functional device for me. It doesn’t have general-purpose NFC, but in exchange Apple Pay has become a “just works” feature that’s way better than the terrible experience of Chip-and-Pin (and I’m saying this as an ex-European, which has had chip-and-pin for decades. The US sucks there). The camera is awesome: immediately ready and high quality (Nexus 6 users know what I mean). The software library is great and high-quality (it helps that I don’t mind paying for apps)…
Like Rob, I’ve evolved from “tinker all my tools” to “my tools need to just work & I’ll tinker on nonessential stuff”.
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I work in embedded systems, and I’ve come to understand that “small, efficient, tinkerable” is a “pick only two” proposition.
Anyone remember Google’s Project Ara modular phone? It died because it couldn’t find a sweet-spot of (manufacturing) cost, performance, and value.
There’s this story that when Apple’s engineers showed Steve Jobs the first iPhone prototype, he asked why it wasn’t smaller, then dunked it in an aquarium. Bubbles came out, and Jobs went “see? there’s still wasted space in there.” (Edit: it was the iPod, not the iPhone, but the point still stands)
That “wasted space” (both physical and design/manufacturing cost-wise) would be the headspace you’d use for tinkering. Most people don’t care.
Hence, android. icraps are for those people who can’t figure out how to use technology. It’s a overpriced status symbol that makes you swallow the KoolAid and makes you pay 4x the amount for inferior hardware and software.
I think it’s also notable the ages at which he describes himself. I had very different priorities and time constraints when I was 15 than I do now. When you’re a teenager you do a lot of things because you tend to be time rich and money poor. I still like to tinker, but I increasingly need or want things to just work because I have crap to do.
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I fundamentally disagree with the premise you can’t tinker with an iPhone. Sure, you can’t really tinker with the hardware. But you don’t need a developer account to run code on your iPhone anymore. There are IDEs of varying complexity from Workflow to Pythonista that run on your phone, and let you run your own extensions. And Mobile Safari has always been at or near the cutting edge at exposing HTML device APIs like location, accelerometer, orientation. There’s a tonne you can do in a web app. It just depends on what your definition of “tinker” is.
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Oh, good, I’m glad we’re all being mature informed adults here. Knew it wouldn’t last.
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You have your opinion, I have mine. I’m not asking you to agree with me. This isn’t erudite discourse, it’s opinion. Most of it non-factual, which is what makes it opinion.
This has been a real change in my lifetime. I’m old. I remember when you had to take the tubes out of your television set every so often, take them down to a shop with a tube tester, find and buy replacements for the burned out ones, then put all the tubes, new and old, back into your television just so you could enjoy the vast wasteland. I remember tweaking carburetors as the seasons changed so the engine would idle properly in the summer and in the winter. It was a whole different world of cranky appliances and finicky machines.
To be honest, I don’t miss any of that. On the plus side, I’ve been tinkering with various Arduino scale processors controlling LEDs, sensors, EL wires, relays and the like, and find it amazing. When I was young, I longed to be able to build complex electronic gadgets. I had a cousin who built his own television set from scratch, but every little thing i tried to build seemed to be made of wheels within wheels, so building anything useful was ridiculously complicated and required an incredible amount of work and more money than I could spare to do right.
Now, I can put together all sorts of gizmos by combining little cards or boxes containing high level functional units. Is the boiling sugar water near softball? Just hook up a thermocouple, a thermocouple adapter and read the temperature. There’s no multi-transistor circuit to design, build, and calibrate. Want to control a light panel, just write a little program to pick the colors and send them down the control wire. There are no filters to hack, resistances to calculate or mare’s nest of wires. It is wonderful being able to work with high level components.
Even the iPhone fits in this category. There is almost always an application that does what I want. Sometimes I have to play thesaurus and go a page or two down in the app store, but for a dollar or two, I’m set. A dollar or two was the cost of playing a song or two on the jukebox at the diner, except now the gadget in my pocket can scan documents or flash pretty colors or track my stock trading. It’s like a Swiss army knife with a portable, discount blade store. I can’t understand why anyone feels limited.
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That’s for sure.
Oddly, most people are able to express opinions without sounding like 5th graders.
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it begins
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I used to think that too. But then I cautiously started experimenting with desktop Linux about 8 years ago when Windows Vista (which admittedly is not the best example of an OS) got extra-sucky on my laptop and I got too cheap to buy a new machine. I had a few false starts, but within 6 months was using Linux more than I was Windows. Within 18 months I was booting Windows about once a year (just imagine the Windows Update hell that went with that…). Nowadays I don’t even have Windows installed on my machine, though I bought a new laptop in 2011 when the battery and the backlight on my old one both died.
So all that said, I tend to the geeky side and I’m not afraid to work with a command line. The Linux desktop is not for, say, my totally competent but un-geeky wife who wants her computer to Just Work. Or so I thought. A year and half ago she needed a new machine and specifically requested a Linux box. I thought I’d turn into a round-the-clock support person, but I can count on less than one hand the number of times she’s asked me for help. And we recently bought a new laptop, one that she insisted run Linux.
Agreed 100%. And I guess you can say that my iPhone generally works as advertised. But the advertisement includes constant iCloud nagging and a walled garden that I find obtrusive and undesirable, and restrictions on how developers and apps can work that are often good for Apple, but not necessarily for the user. For example, I’ll bet 99.9% of Dropbox users would like Dropbox for the iPhone to sync invisibly in the background like it does on every other device, but Apple doesn’t allow that. To be fair, that is “as advertised,” but that doesn’t necessarily make it good or desirable.
I am willing to – and do – pay for Android because I can generally make it work how I want, not how somebody else thinks it should, but I only have an iPhone because that’s what they give me at work (though they prohibit me from using iCloud – but not Dropbox – or installing iTunes on my work-issued Windows laptop because of “security concerns” – go figure…). On the other hand, I have the vague sense that Android spies on me more, probably because of the persistent login to Google. Somehow, despite the company’s old mission statement, that somehow seems more evil than being logged into Apple all the time.
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Well you need to have small hands to handle those small chips, adults are just too damn tall!
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For the riled up amongst you, the better title would be that for the author, the iPhone (and subsequent devices) killed the need to tinker. Not tinkering in itself. I would equate it to a car owner reminiscing about how he used to have to tinker all the time to keep his old hot rod running, compared to how his BMW just purrs along without tweaking.
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Here’s your fish. 
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