Apple keeps a very close eye on its app store, and it rejects anything “controversial” or “pornographic”. For example, it banned a cartoonist Mark Fiore’s app, and reversed that decision only after Fiore won a Pulitzer. And it recently banned a bunch of “overt sexual content” from second-tier publishers, while retaining apps from Playboy and Sports Illustrated.
Here are Steve Job’s latest remarks on the controversy:
Fioreās app will be in the store shortly. That was a mistake. However, we do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone.
“You know, thereās a porn store for Android,ā Jobs said. āYou can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. Thatās a place we donāt want to go, so weāre not going to go there.ā
It’s funny and telling that someone who clearly thinks that he’s the coolest guy around can still mouth bullshit like “moral responsibility” 15 years after the Internet transformed the way we look at porn. And it’s also telling that Google, the maker of Android, keeps a much looser rein on the apps used by its phone.
Apple’s moral responsibility is to make good hardware and software. I want to use my their products to control my life, not the other way around. If Steve Jobs is really concerned about kids downloading porn, he needs to remove Safari from every device he builds.
Unabogie
On that note:
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/04/20/on-adobe-flash-cs5-and-iphone-applications/
The Grand Panjandrum
I guess he’s just never quite recovered from being laughed at in the shower after gym class.
SGEW
– Steve Jobs
Well, now there’s a slogan for an ad campaign, innit?
Ella in NM
Yeah, I vote for my 12 year old to be able to secretly down load porn, too.
I’m not anti-porn, but as a parent, I think it’s perfectly fine for a company that is certainly NOT the gatekeeper for adult content to say it doesn’t want to get into that business, especially in light of the fact that tons of minors use their products.
J.W. Hamner
I’m sort of scared to ask this, but what would be the advantage of a pr0n “app”… versus just going to the porn site on the browser? Is the iPhone blocking your 15 year old from doing that?
Napoleon
What? You can get porn on the internet? Who knew.
mistermix
@Ella in NM: If your son has any of the devices that use the app store, he also has the ability to access the Internet via that device to look at all the porn he wants.
@J.W. Hamner: We’ll never find out on an Apple device, will we?
LGRooney
I’m part of the problem here. I think parenting is much more important to my child’s well being than any attempts at censorship and, while I am extraordinarily tired of any American attempting to moralize to anyone else, I couldn’t care less about this issue. I understand the principle, mistermix, but as one who has never had much interest in the form after adolescence, I can’t agitate myself to really care about this. Plus, I love the product.
Blame me…
Arguingwithsignposts - ipod touchs
Apparently Jobs pissed off Bild when they took the boobies out of the iPhone store earlier this year too. Euros with their loose morals!
PeakVT
āYou know, thereās a porn store for Android,ā Jobs said. ā…. weāre not going to go there.ā
Apple: Think Different by making your own pr0n.
stuckinred
Wonder what “Private Browsing” is for on Safari?
thomas Levenson
Truly the “Duh!” moment.
If Jobs cares about kids and porn, he should raise his in a latex wrapped mansion surrounded by a Van de Graaf cage through which no external signals may enter.
Short of that, it sure looks like our culture has kind of already made its choice here.
Culture of Truth
snap!
Ella in NM
@mistermix:
The point is, Jobs owns the App Store, and he can decide what he wants to sell there, even if it is a drop in a bucket.
Believe me, as a parent who’s seven year-old daughter misspelled “Disneychannal.com” in the browser and found herself on a site where a Jessica Simpson look-alike performed oral sex on a 12-inch, throbbing male member–while I was four feet away “supervising” her–I know the dangers of Safari.
toujoursdan
I’m know Apple products are intuitive to use and generally well made, but I won’t touch them with a 10 foot pole because of their control freak culture. I do not want that kind of culture to that dominate the computer/electronic industry.
Wile E. Quixote
Do you really want a pr0n app for the iPad/iPhone? I mean you’d just be limited to buying all of your pr0n from the iPr0n store and they probably wouldn’t have any really good stuff, just lots of hairy bobbin’ man ass and a Wah-wah pedal.
On the other hand Jobs is coming off like a dick here. I mean this is the man who named a computer after his illegitimate daughter so listening to him bloviate about morality is a bit much.
EconWatcher
Ella in NM: Ten years ago, I would have agreed with mistermix. Now I agree with you. Difference? I’m a dad now, and I’ve found out how hard it is to keep young kids from being exposed to inappropriate stuff.
I was and always will be a civil libertarian. But this means I oppose government bans on speech. Private companies offering kid-safe products is a good thing. Other companies can offer alternatives. FSM knows there’s plenty of profit incentives for companies to offer products for those who want to partake, as long as the government does not interfere.
Confusing kid-friendly products with censorship is an error and doesn’t really help the cause, with all due respect.
AhabTRuler
@12: I thought it was a Faraday cage?
Culture of Truth
HOPEY AND THE BANDITS
ellaesther
Ahem. As far as I know, you can still watch the YouTube on your iPhone, and if memory serves, YouTube serves up p0rn (“2 girls and a…” anyone?). Am I mistaken here?
Also, I tend to agree with Cory Doctorow re: the iPad, and it applies to the iPhone as well – I bought it? It’s mine. Back off, Mr. Designer Man. http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/so-the-ipad/
(This, by the way, from a dyed-in-the-wool feminist who thinks p0rn damages women in particular and society in general. It’s not Apple’s job to fix that problem for me, and certainly not via social control and a wagged finger. It’s mine and my society’s job).
ETA: Also, it should be noted that I’m the parent of two young children, as well. It’s my job to stand between my kids and what might damage them, not Steve Jobs’ job.
kommrade reproductive vigor
It’s telling that Jobs is so threatened by Google’s product that he felt the need to launch a Moral Majority Won’t Someone Think of the Children! campaign.
Congrats to Google.
stuckinred
They are just computers, the idea that one company is better than another is silly.
ajr22
Shorter post “Iz want Porn App.” I don’t see why this is even a discussion, who the hell would look at porn on their phone. I have yet to hear anyone say “I was on the train trying to watch porn on iphone and the apps were blocked.”
Culture of Truth
sorry, forgot to block quote the last part
mistermix
@Ella in NM: I don’t dispute that. He has that right, just as he has the right to mandate a porn blocker in all the browsers on his computers. And he has the right to remove the Playboy app from his app store.
I simply want to point out that he’s full of shit, and that his “think of the kids” bleat is a crock.
Justin
I love the Iphone. But Steve Jobs connecting porn to Andriod, makes me want to go out and buy an Android.
That said, there is a difference between providing an app that connects you to the internet where you can buy porn. And providing an app that has porn on it. I see the distinction, and I’m not sure people freak out that you can’t buy apps for porn, when you can just click on Safari and get it. Which I do.
kommrade reproductive vigor
ISWYDT.
Adam Collyer
@mistermix:
It’s fair to say that’s an entirely different circumstance, though Safari allows people access to the entire internet, which certainly includes pornographic material, but is also home to a tremendous amount of other information. Safari is also an Apple application that allows users to access the internet, where content is completely out of their control.
However, Apple admittedly regulates applications and aggressively controls content. The closed universe of Apple products means that all content is completely within their system.
I can’t answer for the Playboy or Sports Illustrated issues, but to me, the above presents two separate systems and Apple isn’t be hypocritical by dealing with each system to the best of their ability.
AhabTRuler
Wile E.@16: Steve Jobs is a dick. Brilliant, but a dick.
Facebones
This reminds me a little of Blockbuster Video refusing to stock “Unrated” cuts of movies or Playboy releases back in the 90’s, and making a big deal of how they were family friendly.
How’s that Blockbuster stock doing these days?
I own an iPhone and I love it, but jeez, Steve. If anything will make people run away from your products it’s pointless moralizing making apps people want hard to get.
(And as mistermix pointed out, you can already look at all the porn you want on Safari on your iPhone, so get off the high horse already and get a version of Flash licensed so I can watch Hulu vids on my commute.)
Ajay
I must say I am shocked. I would have never put Jobs in category of “Moral Police”.
Adam Collyer
@Justin:
In shorter form, this.
mistermix
@Ajay: Fashion Police, yes, but not “Moral Police”.
WereBear
@SGEW: Since marketing is all about making distinctions, perhaps so.
Since the commercials I’ve been seeing highlight the fact that you can give the iPhone to your 3 year old to amuse them on long car rides, perhaps rightly so.
Sam Hutcheson
@EconWatcher:
You can keep your kids from watching porn by gouging out their eyes. Otherwise, when they hit puberty, they’re going to find it.
Jrod
Uh, you all do understand that the problem is not the lack of porn apps, but that Apple is using porn as an excuse for banning things that aren’t remotely pornographic?
The Fiore app is one example. There was also an e-reader banned because the Kama Sutra could be downloaded for it. Yessir, that’s keeping the children safe.
But hey, that sort of thing suddenly becomes cool once you have kids, I guess. You concerned parents are acting to have web-browsers banned too, right? You wouldn’t want to be revealed as craven hypocrites, I assume.
Tractarian
@Facebones:
Sorry, had to fix.
GregB
I hope he’s banned the app for National Geographic. That was my source for porn back in the early 70’s.
TR
So one tech platform is siding with porn, and the other is siding against it.
Someone might want to tell Steve Jobs a little more about how the whole VHS vs. Betamax thing panned out when they had a similar breakdown.
Max
I still want an iPad.
The Moar You Know
@Ajay: Me either. His decades-long tenure as America’s Most Psychotic Control Freak CEO would never have led me to suspect that he might treat matters of sexuality the same way he treats everything else in his life; with paranoia, secrecy, outright bans, senseless rules, and copious lawsuits.
J.W. Hamner
@Jrod:
And of course, that’s Steve Jobs’ right too. I wonder whether there will ever be a Rubicon for them to cross with their clampdown on content that will bother people other than open source geeks? If there is, Porn probably isn’t it, though.
Ripley
Jobs: He got old.
Tazistan Jen
If Steve Jobs is really concerned about kids downloading porn, he needs to remove Safari from every device he builds.
I don’t see Steve Jobs trying to make it impossible for people to find porn. Instead he is saying he doesn’t want his company to provide porn. I think that is fine. It isn’t like he is the Chinese government controlling what everyone can see or hear.
But I must admit – I too am the mom of teenagers. I’m sure that colors my attitude. I know that my kids can go find porn on the web if they want to. And yet I am still glad they can’t download porn apps from the iTunes store.
celticdragonchick
@Ella in NM:
I have to agree.
Uloborus
@EconWatcher:
It IS his right. I don’t think that’s being disputed here. However, just because he’s allowed doesn’t mean we can’t disapprove of what he’s doing. It’s still juvenile, moralistic in the most narrow and patronizing way, and a little hypocritical.
Also, guys, Apple is not ‘providing’ an app for porn. I have an iSpud. Half the time I’m reading Balloon Juice on it. If you want that porn app, you gotta dig it out of the iStore and buy it, which is at least as hard as finding porn on a web browser. Plus, you’d have to pay for it. He’s protecting exactly nothing here.
If his argument were ‘I have to police this or there will be 5 times as many porn apps as any other apps and then I’d have a practical rather than moral issue’, I might buy that one.
Evinfuilt
Its not like I need to build an App for the iPhone, its just as easy for me to code something in HTML5 with some of the nice multi-touch javascript libraries, and create a “boob” site accessible via Safari, and in return it should also work on Android.
Thank you Jobs, you make my life easier.
Sadly, I only code Library Apps, so it doesn’t bother me anyways.
Tazistan Jen
There was also an e-reader banned because the Kama Sutra could be downloaded for it.
Cite please. That seems extremely improbable to me.
mdeatherage
I do this for a living, as my link will show (though due to health I haven’t done it much lately). And by “this” I mean “cover Apple,” not “make porn.” Then I’d really be poor. These are my informed personal opinions.
Jobs is stretching the truth. If he feels any “moral obligation,” it’s to his shareholders. Apple wants to keep control over the App Store for reasons that it is very publicly not specifying. When asked why, we get deflections and semi-logical statements like this one. When asked in ways that would incur legal jeopardy (like by analysts during quarterly conference calls, or in SEC filings), we get platitudes about how Apple is the only company that can control the experience from top to bottom, and that makes it a better experience. This has proven true on the Mac, but the Mac marketplace is open. The iPhone OS marketplace is not.
“No porn” is not the reason why. There’s some component about not letting apps have access to the 3G radio in iPhones (and some upcoming iPads) that could cause problems on the cell phone network. There’s probably some legal agreement with carriers (especially AT&T) that Apple can’t discuss. It’s not really profit; Apple has said (in legally binding places like SEC statements) that it runs the App Store at just above break-even, and does it to advance the platform and not make it a profit center.
I’m sure that allowing porn would bring legal problems in a bunch of states, like requiring extremely fine-grained controls for schools and governments that use iPod Touch devices (also capable of running apps), and they just don’t want to open that can of worms yet.
But individually approving or rejecting every single program for a growing platform is not sustainable, and they know that every bit as much as I do. They never explain why they think they can pull it off despite massive evidence to the contrary, and their business decisions in these matters in the past shows that they’re not this stupid. There’s something else going on here, and they’re disguising it for reasons that none of us know. I have no idea if that something is good or bad, or just equally stupid (like some promise made to AT&T or other carriers that they regret but can’t discuss).
I just know that something else is going on here.
MikeJ
It doesn’t bother me at all that Apple won’t sell certain things in their store. It bugs the shit out of me that they can delete anything they don’t like off your phone if you did manage to get it somewhere else.
After I buy a device, it’s mine. I don’t need or want somebody saying what programs I’m allowed to run.
celticdragonchick
@ajr22:
My spouse’s boss left his phone in the mens room on accident. An employee found it and what was running on it.
Nobody wanted to clean the bathroom after that.
gwangung
I agree, even though I’m a big Apple fan…
Joey Maloney
I don’t think it’s a moral question, unless you want to imbue corporations with personal morality. Jobs doesn’t want the Apple-branded App Store to sell pr0n. He’s all about controlling the brand.
I think it’s stupid, you think it’s stupid, and when we’re CEOs of our own multi-billion dollar companies and stick-up-the-butt bluenose busybodies complain to us about selling teh sexxy through our distribution channels, we can tell them to get fucked with one of these. Or one of these. (VERY VERY NSFW as if the context wasn’t enough of a clue for you.)
And we won’t need to couch it in that mealy-mouthed lawyer-approved corporate-PR-speak, either.
I still plan to buy my first iPhone as soon as the 4G comes out.
AhabTRuler
Are people really giving their kids & teens a $300 cell phone? Because that’s kinda fucked up.
Jrod
@Tazistan Jen: Here’s the cite. To be fair, Apple did eventually allow the app after the ban raised a shitstorm. The issue is that the so-called “porn” provided a handy excuse for banning a free app that competed with Apple’s preferred paid apps.
Jobs’ moralizing here is blatant bullshit.
mr. whipple
Don’t have anything Apple, so can someone explain to me what the difference is between an ‘app’ and a browser? Can’t you just use an iphone and enter a url?
Fitzwili
Look this is a business decision really, not a moral one. Apple is taking over the education market – remaking the educational market. There are colleges that are requiring Freshmen to enter with a Apple product(computer/ipod touch) because their class will be run through itunes U. This will trickle down eventually to grade schools – and you can see why Apple wants to avoid being pornified.
The world of Apple is designed, I think, to be cradle to grave – not only the concerns of the adult world are being given consideration
Joel
@mistermix: Black turtlenecks are fashionable?
MikeJ
@Joey Maloney: But it’s not just the Apple app store. You have to have Jobs’ blessing for every app that run on the iPhone. Because they hate freedom.
Open standards are what built the internet. The opposite of open standards is some freak deciding for you what you should see. The opposite of open standards is the Apple iPhone.
Jon H
“If Steve Jobs is really concerned about kids downloading porn, he needs to remove Safari from every device he builds.”
The last thing Apple needs is to have some podunk Texas deputy shutting down an Apple store for selling iPhones because there are porn apps on the App store. Or because some fundie’s kid was able to buy a porn app on the store.
Websites are one thing. Apps are entirely different, because they are distributed and sold (if they’re not free) by Apple.
That’s a crucial difference.
I can’t blame Jobs for not wanting to get into that minefield for, frankly, minimal benefit.
And that’s not even getting into the hassles of navigating the laws of all the different states and countries iPhone, iPad, and iPod users are in.
Look, freedom of the press doesn’t mean you’re entitled to use someone else’s press. The App Store is Steve’s press, and he has every right to control what goes on it.
stuckinred
@Fitzwili: I’m an iTunes U admin and I see no way to “run” a class through iTunes U instance. Enhance maybe but it’s no CMS.
Malron
Jobs has a right to decide what his products can and cannot do. Just as consumers have a right to buy from his competitors. I don’t see the problem here. But then I think Iphones are stupid and I have no problem acquiring porn.
cleek
@mr. whipple:
an ‘app’ is an application that runs on the iPhone outside of the browser, and likely has nothing at all to do with the browser – think of a word processor on your PC. while a web app runs inside the browser.
stuckinred
What really pisses me off is the “mandate” that we all have to buy Apple. . .oh, we don’t? Damn.
Shalimar
@AhabTRuler: Not if you’re making $500k a year and up. You can buy each of your kids one in a different color for each day of the week and still not miss the money. I imagine the market for lots of the fancier gadgets is the 5% of the country that still has increasing income.
dan
@Facebones:
Blockbuster stock dip has nothing to do with it’s decision re porn.
Tazistan Jen
@Jrod:
Wow, sure enough. Very dumb, and I am glad it was reversed.
Calouste
@TR:
Indeed, that was the first thing I thought of too. This might have some positives in the US, but in most of the rest of the world it is a marketing failure.
Pixie79
I disagree (as someone with NO kids)…it’s a company’s perogative to determine what type of products it wants to put out. If Jobs wants to eliminate pr0n from apps, then whatever, you can take your business elsewhere. NM the fact you get porn on the internets. Quit bitching about it and get your porn the normal way.
Uloborus
@mr. whipple:
An ‘app’ is a program. Like… well, anything. A game, an email browser, the software that runs the camera attachment. You can theoretically get them straight from a publisher, but that is *difficult*. I have one only because it’s in Beta and he had to hand-certify me.
All programs for your iPhone you buy from the iStore. All of them. 99% of them are not made by Apple, but Apple does insist on approving every single one of them. There’s actually a very good reason for this, as my utilities programmer father explained to me. Windows is a Frankenstein Hell because every driver rewrites how Windows itself works. Apple is ensuring that EVERYTHING works together smoothly, shares memory, etc. etc.
That reason doesn’t justify this, though. And like I said, to get this ‘app’ – a program, something that sits on the front page rather than having to go through the browser to use it – you have to specifically find it on the iStore and buy it. Like every other app.
stuckinred
@cleek: @Shalimar: iPhones are $99
Jon H
@Jrod: “The Fiore app is one example.”
That had nothing to do with porn.
eric
The real issue for many is “who owns my phone?” If I bought a renegade app and put it on my phone, why is it Apple’s business? Or, am I merely renting my phone?
This is all about branding with a demographic that has aged and has different “concerns” now? (See parents’ comments above.)
The other problem can be summarized thusly: “First they came for the pr0n apps and I said nothing…..”
eric
MikeJ
@Malron: Except for the fact that after he sells it, it is no longer his product. It belongs to the person who bought it.
Kyle
“If Steve Jobs is really concerned about kids downloading porn, he needs to remove Safari from every device he builds.”
You say it right there.
Jobs isn’t saying he doesn’t want porn on the iPhone/iPad. He’s saying he doesn’t want that porn to flow through the Apple-branded, Apple-run App Store. It’s not like the Android: if Apple approves a porn app, they literally become a distributor of pornography, with all the legal dangers contained therein. It would be like if they started having racks of Hustler in every Apple store.
I agree that Fiore’s case was ridiculous. And I’d like for Apple to come clean and tell their developers exactly what will be approved and what won’t. But the sense of self-righteousness among the Apple bashers irritates the shit out of me.
Oh, and when there is a single mobile device available anywhere that can run Flash well, then we can talk about how foolish Apple’s boycott of it is. In the meantime, let’s stop comparing the iPhone to products that don’t (and probably won’t) ever exist.
west coast
It’s Jobs’ store, he can sell what he wants. If you want to buy what he’s not willing to sell, you have plenty of options.
Tazistan Jen
@AhabTRuler: my 14 year old daughter got an iPod touch for Christmas. It was what she wanted more than anything, and all her relatives went in on it for her.
Both our daughters have cellphones and laptops too. And they aren’t unusual.
On your side of the argument, my father in law once pointed out that when he was a kid he got a rolling dog on a string for Christmas. :-)
Perry Como
Steve Jobs is a douchebag.
Fitzwili
Run is the perhaps the incorrect word- I meant any variation of posting of syllabus, class readings,lectures etc. EVERYTHING is early days now, but I believe, with the ipad, Apple will eventually become omnipresent in the classroom.
cleek
@stuckinred:
que ?
kommrade reproductive vigor
It’s an attack straight out of the neo-con campaign play book. (My fellow Americans, I don’t peddle in filth. If you want filth, my opponent will give you filth and shove filth down your childrens’ throats!) There was no other reason to bring Android into it at all.
If he isn’t careful he’ll attract the TalEvangical set who will think they only have to whimper a bit to get everything that offends their delicate sensibilities (i.e. Everything) blasted out of the AppleVerse. When that doesn’t work they’ll start screaming.
malraux
First, as soon as your kids hit puberty, they are going to start seeing porn. It’s really just not possible to block it. If you control your house’s data network perfectly, your kid’s friends will bring over an iphone that isn’t restricted. Or a thumbdrive full of smut. Or go oldschool and bring over a magazine. Once kids hit the age that they will want to see porn, you aren’t going to be able to stop them.
Second, itunes allows you to set up parental controls. If you don’t want your kids buying adult content via itunes/the app store, turn on the parental lock.
Jon H
@eric: ” If I bought a renegade app and put it on my phone, why is it Appleās business? ”
Go ahead, but don’t expect Apple to go out of their way to not break your phone, or at least the ‘renegade app’, with the next software update, because you fiddled with the software in order to put a stupid porn app on it.
Oddly, I don’t recall this much butthurt from people wanting to put their own apps (porn or otherwise) on Motorola RAZRs.
Sentient Puddle
@TR:
The adult film industry also sided with HD-DVD.
Jon H
@MikeJ: “But itās not just the Apple app store. You have to have Jobsā blessing for every app that run on the iPhone. Because they hate freedom.”
Do what you like with your phone, but when an update breaks your phone, don’t go crying to Apple.
sherifffruitfly
Thanks, Mr. Jobs, for directing me to the platform where users have the freedom to use what apps they wish to use. Much appreciated.
MBunge
“Appleās moral responsibility is to make good hardware and software.”
A sentiment echoed by weapons manufacturers and global arms dealers everywhere.
Mike
Fencedude
The porn aspect is being used as a distraction. The point isn’t that most people want to put porn, specifically, on their iPhone, its that they can ONLY put Apple approved apps on it, and porn apps are NOT the only apps Apple won’t allow.
They just know that by using porn as the example, they get to lump all the complainers into a convenient, easy to dismiss box.
Smart strategy. Also shows that Jobs is a major asshole. But a smart one.
Jon H
I have to say, though, that in this day and age, if you’re paying for porn (apps or otherwise) you’re doing it wrong.
scav
@malraux: soon as kids see a chunk of car or beer (or fill-in-the-blank) ads they’re seeing soft porn half the time, puberty or no. Cheap Purity Posturing by a control freak trying to bad-mouth competitors. Be still my beating heart.
Jon H
@Fencedude: “Smart strategy. Also shows that Jobs is a major asshole. But a smart one.”
Okay, try this. Scrawl a bunch of racist teabonics slogans on construction paper. Take them to your local bookstore, and tell the manager you want to sell them there for $.99 each.
I’m guessing they won’t be interested.
So why should Apple accept, and sell, a bunch of racist teabonics slogan apps?
anonymous
What a cockbag.
Jon H
@scav: “Cheap Purity Posturing by a control freak trying to bad-mouth competitors. Be still my beating heart.”
I think you’re the one doing the “cheap purity posturing”. Just a different kind of purity.
stuckinred
@cleek: iPhone 3g $99
mr. whipple
@Uloborus:
Thanks(cleek, too), but I’m still foggy.
If I have an iphone, can I browse the internet with it, and if so, what the heck is the diff between surfing porn on that browser and an ‘app’? IOW, what would an app do differently, and why is there a distinction?
Fencedude
@Jon H:
Point. Missed.
Midnight Marauder
@Tazistan Jen:
Not the same issue, but just as similar, is this app that was removed from the App Store earlier this year by Apple. The app? Wobble, which let you rather realistically jiggle to your photos. The reason for removing it? āOvertly sexual content,ā despite only using imported photos and not actually providing sexual content.
This is not some kind of new thing from Apple or Steve Jobs. The moral posturing is really just cover to allow them to have ultimate control over all aspects of content in the App Store. It’s the same reason they got flack for removing the app by swimsuit retailer Simply Beach — an innocent app with content no more sexual than a Sears catalogue — but somehow leaving Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition app and “lad mag” FHM’s app.
The moral posturing is outright bullshit.
freelancer
@Wile E. Quixote
Somewhere in the nether-regions of Google HQ:
“Let’s call this app ‘Waitress Daisy Chain’!”
“Good title, Timmy, Motion Capture my butt!”
WhackachicaWhackachicaWhackachica!
Goddamnit!
Who watches this?!
Brachiator
Non issue. Jobs can sell or restrict whatever he wants. You can choose not to use the product or work around it, ya know, like your kids will do.
Jobs may also be cutting himself off from sources of creativity and innovation since p$rn often leads to cutting edge products and services, but again, this is just not a big deal.
If kid has any device with a camera and a keyboard, then they have a sex machine. Haven’t you people been keeping up with news stories about sexting and kids sending nude pics?
Parental controls. Hah!
Culture of Truth
Scrawl a bunch of racist teabonics slogans on construction paper. Take them to your local bookstore, and tell the manager you want to sell them there for $.99 each.
Manager:
“Buddy, we already have enough copies of Glen Beck’s book.”
Jon H
@mr. whipple: “IOW, what would an app do differently, and why is there a distinction?”
Apps are distributed and sold (often for $0.00) through Apple’s iTunes store.
That’s the distinction, I think. Apple could probably avoid prosecution for browser-viewed porn by arguing that the browser is a common carrier and they don’t control what goes through it at all.
But the app store likely carries a higher degree of risk. Apple evaluates what goes into the store, and often profits from it.
And given the recent convictions of Google executives on privacy violations, by an Italian court, this doesn’t seem to be very hypothetical risk.
fucen tarmal
i am of the belief that the way you “kill” porn, strip clubs, etc, is by mainstreaming them and removing the outlaw sensibility, or at least the illicitness from them. to that end, i applaud steve jobs. i will try not to judge apple users for the implicit choices they have made, they make my choices possible by driving people to them for relief from them.
chopper
people who are making the point about safari, you’re forgetting that this is apple’s app store. these are apps they sell. so yeah, apple should have the right to decide not to sell porn apps through their store.
the fact that you can check out such sites on teh internet doesn’t matter.
terry chay
@J.W. Hamner: I think you can turn on parental controls on the iPhone: http://www.tipb.com/2009/04/13/iphone-101-set-parental-controls-iphone/ A savvy kid is going to find a workaround, but if I had a kid, Iād probably turn it on for them at least until they figure a workaround (I would guess a couple years before they hit puberty using me as a benchmark).
A lot of you don’t understand the iPhone economy. It’s kind of mind-bogglingly large. It’s also very large with kids. If you go to an iPhone game site (which I would bet alone, games/entertainment is over half the appstore business), you’ll find a lot of reviewers and commenters writing, “Oh, I’m going to wait to buy that until after X date.” and I was thinking āWTF? It’s 99 cents. Why not just go to the appstore and download the fāker?”
Here is what is actually going on. They can’t just download from Appstore because they don’t have a credit card attached to the iTunes account (they are underage). A lot of kids have an allowance which they choose to spend on iTunes GIft Cards which then give them money to download games. The economics makes a lot of sense really, for the price of one Playstation 2 game, they can buy about 50 decent iPhone games and about 5 decent iPad games.
Apple feels it in their Appstore would take a huge hit if they didn’t restrict porn. Initially when they put controls and “explicit” markings on the iTunes Music Store, I thought that was a bit totalitarian, but now looking back at itāit’s a good thing. I have known a lot of engineers and entrepreneurs who have worked in internet porn and the Appstore and the video store would have been overrun with it if they didnāt restrict.
Apple feels there is a competitive advantage in controlling the whole toolchain: hardware-software-developertools-distribution. The success of iTunes, iPod, and the iPhone have (at least for now) shown this strategy is a good one. One consequence of this is that they cannot make the appstore a free-for-all (or even close) like the internet is.
ā¦
Don’t believe me? Look up the recent history of Marc Andreesen’s (yes the guy behind Netscape) “Ning” social network sometime. It was well funded, suffered a huge hit from porn that millions of dollars in funding and big name backing edge didn’t overcome despite years(!) of trying to correct the mistake of being too open and allowing 50% of their networks to be porn sites (Porn is like the spam of social newtorking. All social networks, and I mean ALL OF THEM, police porn heavily. The fact you see it is a trickle of the stuff that got by. Trust me.). Just last week they let go of their CEO, fired a third of their employees, and removed the free service.
ā¦
Silicon Valley is full of the biggest amoral libertarian fucks I know. If they could make a could make a buck off porn without getting tainted by it, they would. They canāt and donāt.
It’s a business decision, not a moral one. And if Google doesn’t do something about it, trust me, what happens to the Android platform will be the brunt of jokesāand not just by Steve Jobs.
Culture of Truth
“The moral posturing is cover to allow them to have ultimate control over all aspects of content in the App Store.”
Assuming this is true, is it not as bad or is it worse?
mr. whipple
@Jon H: Thanks!
YellowJournalism
Amen. In fact, I’m actually more worried about my kid coming across one of those gross-out websites with the nasty pictures of car wrecks and videos of beheadings rather than coming across (pun not intended, pervs) pictures of lewd acts and boobies. But, still, it’s my job to make sure that doesn’t happen, and if it does, then as a parent I need to be prepared to talk about it with my child. That’s not to say that I don’t mind having kid-friendly options in a device like the iPhone. I just think it should be an option, not a mandate.
I think I get that attitude from my father. When the Faces of Death movies and the copycats were popular, you’d often find them on the video store shelves not far away from the family movies. My father read the back of one and started to get angry. He said, quite loudly, “Why don’t they just pull all the p0rn out from the back and bring it up here? I’d rather my kids be exposed to that than this sick shit.”
My dad is a pretty conservative guy when it comes to cursing, so it was one of the few times I heard him say “shit” in public. And it was the first time I’d heard my dad even use the word “p0rn” at all. But it made an impression on me, especially since those video covers freaked me out as a child.
Brachiator
@fucen tarmal:
Yeah, right. And people stopped drinking booze when Prohibition ended. If people walked around naked, there would be clothes smut the next day (Oh yeah, babe, that sock looks good on you!). Cause that’s how we roll.
Apple’s only responsibility is to make stuff that people will buy.
Corpsicle
All Steve is saying is that he does not want his company to actively make money off porn. Apple makes money off everything in the App Store. Why on Earth is that so confusing to you? They are not making any effort to block internet smut, and as others have pointed out, only morons pay for porn these days.
Church Lady
Apple has a right to sell or refuse to sell whatever they want. If you want something that they refuse to sell, someone else will be glad to accommodate your desires and you are free to take your money elsewhere. Free markets bitchez!
Jules
I guess I’m a lousy parent but why would a kid have an iPhone?
Jon H
Another problem with allowing porn: some porn is quite definitely illegal.
I doubt Apple wants to pay people to sit there using submitted porn apps all day, looking for kiddie porn, and who have to decide if it’s real kiddie porn or just 23-year-old-who-looks-young porn.
Who the fuck needs that kind of hassle? What’s the business case?
More to the point, why bother taking that hassle on when porn *is* available via Safari, via the desktop, etc.
And, really, people who need porn while mobile just need to get a fucking life instead of watching German scheisse videos on the bus to work and traumatizing their neighbors.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@toujoursdan:
Yup, you people who like a control freak in charge of your system can hug your iCrap all you want. I’m a parent and I couldn’t care less about pr0n since what my kids do on the internet is my responsibility and not someone like Jobs.
Closed platforms are for closed minds. They’re a match made in hell.
James K. Polk, Esq.
Have fun playing in your walled garden, chumps. You don’t care about the porn apps because you aren’t looking ahead to what the implications are with respect to the intertubes as a whole.
My smart phone has no restrictions and requires no hacks to utilize all its awesome capabilities. Did I mention the 3G data plan costs $10 a month on T-Mobile? The phone was $100 with NO contract too.
Nokia ftw.
mr. whipple
@Jules:
“I guess Iām a lousy parent but why would a kid have an iPhone”
Being kidless, this is an infinate mystery to me, too. (I don’t own a cellphone, let alone an iphone.)
scav
@Jon H: oh, really? I’ve noticed him at the forefront of ever so many moral projects that didn’t involve his ability to control stuff on the damn boxes forever and ever.
snarkout
@terry chay
It’s not quite that they want to have complete control of the tool chain, it’s that they’re adamant that nobody else have any control over the tool chain. This is the crux of the freakout about Flash, which has never run well on non-Windows machines; it sucks and someone other than Apple controls it, so they simply excised it. Apple has been a good citizen over HTML5 and WebKit (the open source browser engine, which they have a large number of developers working on; it powers Google Chrome, among other things).
The App Store, on the other side, is full of clueless low-level bureaucrats making stupid decisions (the e-reader/Kama Sutra issue [other e-readers, including a good one called Stanza haven’t had this problem]; the Mark Fiore app) and genuine anti-competitive dick maneuvers (Google Voice; the tethering app AT&T got Apple to yank; etc.). The porn issue seems distinct from either of them, and I think you’re right that Jobs is mostly concerned that it’ll make the category “apps” seem seedy. I still don’t see how the app store review process is going to scale up.
Nemo_N
I love the arguments in the form of “I agree with what he is doing so I don’t care if it is right or wrong”.
Jon H
@Jules: “I guess Iām a lousy parent but why would a kid have an iPhone?”
Could be a hand-me-down from when the parent upgrades.
Could also be an iPod Touch, which also does apps, but doesn’t have the phone component.
Anyway, the expensive part isn’t so much the phone, it’s the contract. Parents are unlikely to want to give their kids pay-as-you-go phones, because they’ll want the kid to be able to call at any time. And if the parent has an iPhone it might be easier just to add on another phone to the account, rather than dealing with another wireless company.
Jon H
@scav: “oh, really? Iāve noticed him at the forefront of ever so many moral projects that didnāt involve his ability to control stuff on the damn boxes forever and ever.”
Name five.
terry chay
@GregB: Nope. Not banned. Zinio App for iPad and iPhone allows you to subscribe to National Geographic. It also allows you to subscribe to Playboy and even Penthouse.
Apple implements a double standard. Zinio is a respected newstand application so it gets a pass. An app that just shows the latest tweets gets a thumbs down because at the moment it was being tested at Apple, someone tweeted the work, “fuck” (that is, until there is an uproar and Apple askes them to resubmit and it gets let throughāsame thing happened to Fiore).
A lot of commenters don’t understand the concept of type I and type II error in statistics. Incidents like Fiore and double standards like Zinio are bound to happen because Apple is erroring in the side of caution. Porn is a weird industry in that once you error on the other side of caution, itās *very* hard to take back what it does. Until Apple finds some acceptable median (because clearly with Fiore they were wrong (and Steve Jobs admitted it earlier in the e-mail quoted above), and there are tons of other incidents that have been reported, the editorial cartoon one is the first one to go widespread, probably because of how close it is to the journalists writing about it), they’re going to be a lot more Fiore-type incidents.
If you want Apple to have a porn app, you’re going to have to change the buying public, not Apple. Right now, when you think about it, none of you are going to not be buying an iPhone simply because there are no porn apps (as many of you already noted, you can just use Safari, leave off the parental controls, and get your porn). I’m sure the porn people have figured out if you’re coming in from an iPhone/iPad browser and send you a quicktime version of their videos instead of a flash one. I don’t know and I haven’t asked.
One of my friends was the software architect at the #1, #2, ā¦ etc busiest free porn site on the internet (just one of those sites gets more traffic than the #3 largest social network in the U.S. where I worked). They’re really savvy, but there is a lot of churn in that industry. He just left for a smaller company that is probably paying less. He sounds much happier now.
I’m sure he has no problem with pr0n (he worked for them after all), but the industry as a business is taint (pardon the pun) that really makes it a risky business.
Morally, I’m all for the free for allāI was downloading porn off the intenet in the early 80ās before I hit puberty and there was little my parents could do about it. But when you start getting to edge cases like a five year old accidentally seeing cocks because she clicked on the wrong thing, you realize that why companies like Apple do what they do, and why that’s good business (for them).
Felonious Wench
@mr. whipple:
Think of it this way, an application has a purpose and a set of tasks it allows people to do.
Browsers allow people to connect and surf the web. They’re a window in. That’s their mission in life. Using Job’s analogy, they’re morally neutral. What you do when you use a browser to connect to the internet is your business, they just gave you the ability to DO it. The application that allows people to browse the web using their iPhones is Safari.
Applications on the App Store live on the iPhone as well. Those applications have various purposes. One might be “Create a Shopping List,” which to Jobs is morally neutral. One might be “Teach Your Kid Math,” which would be “good.” And another app on the phone might be “Show me random pcitures of wild sex acts.” Jobs calls that pr0n, and says he doesn’t want those apps to be available through his store.
That’s the distiction. You take the purpose of the application, then say “Is this a good purpose, a bad purpose, or neutral?” Then decide what you’re going to make available on the iPhone based on that judgement.
Or at least, that’s his justification. :)
Culture of Truth
If they could make a could make a buck off porn without getting tainted by it, they would. They canāt and donāt.
Well then it is a moral decision, or they would go ahead without caring about the taint – so to speak.
fucen tarmal
@Brachiator:
its already happened to both porn and strip clubs.
both have moved so close to the mainstream that there really isn’t any “quality”, quantity sure, variety perhaps. but in terms of people in the industry understanding and satisfying the basic drives that motivate people to look to them, hit or miss.
some young girl dancing in her swim suit may be variety, but she is dancing poorly, and doesn’t understand what her customers want her to pretend to be, i’ll pass.
Persia
@Jon H: I also wonder if some of it involves payment systems. “Porn” carriers pay much higher credit card fees.
scav
@Jon H: The point is I haven’t.
ETA: Given that I was arguing it was all bout marketing and control, I thought what I said was an obvious reading.
Jon H
@scav: Then you’re incoherent and not making any sense.
Midnight Marauder
@Culture of Truth:
In this case, I would say it’s a bad thing, and a stance that will most likely turn out not to be to Apple’s benefit in the long run. Someone upthread mentioned that the case of Fiore’s cartoon app being rejected doesn’t have anything to do with the brouhaha over porn in the App Store. Which would be true, if the battle over the App Store was actually about porn. What it’s really about are the seemingly arbitrary standards Apple sets for apps to be sold in the App Store. Fiore’s cartoons were rejected from the App Store, explicitly, for violating Apple’s anti-satire provisions.
It’s the same principle that was displayed when Apple took down Stern magazine’s (a German weekly news magazine) entire app after they published the same non-gratuitous erotic photos that ran in the actual magazine; they just integrated the pictures into their usual sections on the app. Someone else mentioned what happened with Bild upthread, and it’s the same thing.
Last December, they released a new mini-app called Bild-Girl, which shows a woman moaning and getting rid of her clothes every time you shake the iPhone with your free hand. Apple asked them to put a bikini on the girl, and even though Bild complained about it, they did so anyway. No big deal, right? Flash-forward a little bit later, and Apple all of a sudden demands that Bild censor the naked girl that comes in the PDF version of the printed newspaper, which is accessible from the Bild application too.
Sure, they can say it’s about restricting access to perceived pornographic materials, but that’s a canard to disguise the egregious power grab over editorial control in the App Store Apple is setting up to further exploit down the road.
snarkout
The other thing is that porn is genuinely a hard infrastructure problem (no pun intended); the number of real and spurious charge-backs involved — from “some script kiddie got my address and signed up for thirty-five Hot Chicks in Handcuffs websites” to “no, honey, I have no idea where that $60 bill from dudesanddonkeys.com came from!” — make credit cards processors super-leery about getting involved. I imagine that someone will eventually create a specialty market for Android and charge an arm and a leg.
Peter J
Actually, folks who want porn can install Android on their iphone.
Bill Section 147
First they came for the PornAppsā¦
mr. whipple
@Felonious Wench:
Thanks. I’m a dinosaur.
Harley
Couple things. First, sure, Jobs sounds like an asshat. Second, wanting to keep porn out of the hands of kids doesn’t make you a Calvinist. Third, there are over a 100k apps in the app store. That oughtta fill up your phone no problem.
terry chay
@Tazistan Jen: It’s called Eucalyptus. The important thing to note is that it WAS indeed rejected for the reason cited, but if you go to the Appstore now, you can indeed buy it. I don’t know if you can still download the Kama-sutra, but it looks like it.
Like the Fiore thing, these are accidents. This shit is known as Type II error. Apple wants to not let porn into the Appstore: some porn will get in anyway (Type I, false positive), but they want to minimize that. In doing so, there will be an abundance of instances where valid apps get rejected as having inappropriate content (Type II, false negative).
Midnight Marauder
@Jon H:
Right. Because the only people who have ever looked at porn on their mobile smartphones are social deviants.
snarkout
@Midnight Maurader
The thing is, Apple doesn’t have an anti-satire policy, as indicated by the immediate reversal of the Fiore ruling (and other, similar, apps that had already sailed through). The human judgment that happens in the app store review process is frequently ridiculous; you’re asking a bunch of customer service people to rule on apps that might represent thousands of hours of developer time, and I continue to think that eventually this side of things is going to have to go away.
Jrod
I’m perfectly fine with itunes not selling porn apps.
The problem is that content is being used as an excuse to ban things that aren’t porn.
Someone asked why you’d want a porn app rather than just using the browser. Mostly, I’d assume it’s because phone browsers don’t play flash video. For pics, you’d want lower resolution than usual.
I assume, anyway. *ahem*
Jules
I did not want my 18 year old (for some reason now lost to time) to watch South Park when he was 8 or 9.
Know how I did that?
I didn’t let him watch South Park by not having a TV in his room.
We thought that he did not need a computer in his room until he was about 13 so you know what we did?
We didn’t get him a laptop, and kept his computer in the living room with the screen turned to the room so anyone in the living room or the kitchen could see what was up.
I promise you guys that porn will not hurt your kid, wacking off to porn will not hurt your kid, it really won’t unless they are stupid enough to create their own with sexting.
(not saying I’m a better parent, I’m probably not and could care less if he looked/looks at porn…my point is is that it has always been my job to keep what I think he does not need away from him not Jobs or anyone else. I get a bit tired of the whole “think of the children” BS.)
terry chay
@MikeJ: Not true. I own two apps that have been deleted because of Amazon (pocketpedia and delicious library). They are no longer available on the appstore, but I can still download my copy to my iPhone (and even my iPad) any time I want.
You are confusing things with Amazon Kindle (which I also own) which can modify and remotely remove apps (it’s because of the “cloud” model they have puts the responsibility on them). BTW, I have not had a single book purchased deleted by Amazon yet, but I have had features (like audio playback) turned off/crippled. The same is true for Appstore apps. If an app is not deleted, the developer can choose to cripple functionality in a release that (unless I’m really careful) will end up irreversably changing my apps (because old versions get thrown in the Finder trash when you do an update). That’s developer choice, not apple (similarly with Amazon the feature turn off is publisher choice).
There’s no point in doing it because Amazon killed their API keys and, in the case of pocketpedia, they killed their sync (to try to get Pocketpedia 2 under the licensing hurdle at Amazon).
BTW, if you read their reason for rejecting Pocketpedia 2, you can see that Amazon is legally incorrect. They cannot claim ownership of public data like price, ISBN, and book title (they can claim ownership over images, reviews and the like, as well as anthology). If the summary of the call from Amazon is correct, their engineers need to talk to their lawyers before calling a developer again, because while what they have done is within the power of their licensing, the *reason* they say they’re doing what they’re doing is actually illegal.
malraux
@mr. whipple: Once kids become semi-functional individuals with their own schedules, cell phones make a large degree of sense. Band practice is running late, or everyone is headed to timmy’s place after school, etc. Moreover, a lot of families are dropping land lines, so either the kid has their own cell or no phone whatsoever.
As to an iphone vs a basic cell phone, they aren’t that much more, especially if the family already includes a data plan. Sure, it’s giving in to the cool factor some, but given that the kid probably already wants an ipod and a cell anyway, plus a ds or similar game system, the iphone makes some sense.
Jules
@Jon H:
You are probably right, but I guess my point is that if you don’t want your kid looking at porn on an iPhone, or iWhatever, don’t get them one.
Fitzwili
@ Jules @ Mr.Whipple
Well my 5 year old godchild had an iPod touch. I saw the value of it while sitting next to her on a 6 hour airplane ride. She was able to watch Spongebob, make pictures for me by using a drawing app,we played hangman, tic tac toe and some bouncy animal game together, we worked a bit on reading flashcards from another app, she listened to Neil Gaiman read her a fairytale, and finally she drifted off to sleep listening to a set list of music that she picked out herself. I think that is pretty good value for a 99$ device.
terry chay
@AhabTRuler: Yes they are. But more importantly, they’re lending their phone to their child to play games with.
I live in the tech world, and when you see a kid (or child) play with a parents iPhone, it kind of blows you away. :-)
Gunner Billy K
I was actually starting to like you, mistermix. Why are you bringing this crap here? Buy an Android phone and grind your anti-Apple axe elsewhere.
I’m eagerly awaiting your rant on the fact that Target doesn’t carry Hustler magazine.
Jon H
@Midnight Marauder: “Because the only people who have ever looked at porn on their mobile smartphones are social deviants”
Well, if you’re so dependent that you need it available at all times, and you get angry because a phone vendor doesn’t cater to your needs, well, I think that speaks for itself.
Good lord, wait until you get home. At least then you’d have a decent-sized screen and both hands free.
Joey Maloney
@MikeJ: That’s a different issue, though, and ties in with the reason that Mobile Safari doesn’t run Flash – Jobs wants the best possible user experience and, control freak that he is, has decided that the best way to do that is to make sure that anything that’s allowed on the machine has been vetted. I’m pretty sure malicious apps are also a concern, given the privacy concerns of having your smartphone hacked.
I bet if there were some way to impose the same regime on his desktop computers he’d do it, but that ship sailed about 25 years ago.
It’s a legitimate gripe, and your position is certainly legitimate.
chopper
true, but it isn’t Jobs’ job to provide a product that matches all of your wants. if Jobs doesn’t want to sell porn, he should have the ability to say ‘no, i aint sellin porn’.
Peter J
That Betamax lost because of their stand on porn isn’t true.
Malron
@MikeJ: And the person who bought it is free to search out all the porn he or she chooses. Jobs prefers not to provide it himself but he isn’t blocking anyone’s ability to acquire it.
I chuckle at the idea of defending people’s right to acquire the pr0n, mainly because I still remember the days when mousetraps were built into almost every pr0n site I accessed back in the day. I also have a friend who’s pc became inaccessible recently after surfing a few unsavory sites with scantily clad women. Good times.
Midnight Marauder
@Jon H:
Why the idea that someone who decides to look at porn on their mobile phone is “dependent” on doing so? It could not be that they find themselves in a situation (acutely painful blue balls?) and desperately need help in relieving said pain? Or maybe they’re just maxin’ and relaxin’ somewhere, hanging out with friends, and want to gawk at some boobies (or a wang or two) on the device they spent a few hundred dollars on? Or maybe they are just a regular human being that decided to look at porn that day on their phone because, you know, free will and all that jazz?
I mean, I get it, Apple is under no obligation to provide an outlet to those deviant and freakish sexual desires. But let’s not act like those desires are exceptional in any way, nor is it crazy to be upset that a business you make regular monthly payments to refuses to acknowledge that such needs are reasonable and moral.
terry chay
@terry chay:
Please excuse the deliberate puns in my statement above.
mike in dc
almost 150 posts, and nobody makes a “and that’s also why they don’t support Flash” joke?
I’m disappointed…
Apple: Because if we had won the hardware wars, we’d be ten times worse than Wintel.
terry chay
@Jules: How about an iPod Touch (which is connected to the same appstore) in place of a Gameboy?
Peter J
The problem here isn’t that Jobs doesn’t want to sell porn in the itunes store, the problem here is that Jobs has decided that Apple can tell you what you can or cannot install on your iphone.
This would never have been an issue if there were other ways to install apps on your, not jailbroken, iphone than through the iphone store, then those that wanted an app on their own iphone that Apple didn’t approve of could have purchased or installed it from somewhere else.
aimai
I don’t get the shock and Horror. Jobs is a businessman, and he’s making a businessman’s decision. If he’s wrong, he’ll pay for it in lost business. If he’s right, and the writer at 103 seemed to think he had good reason to avoid an open apple store to porn, he’s made a good business decision. I’m a parent and I either applaud the decision, because I like it, or I’m indifferent. Jobs’s decision doesn’t take anything away from my parenting job, or from my parenting decisions.
The app store is part of Apple’s Brand, they are obviously going to want to protect it. In addition, itunes is effectively a drain placed directly into your credit card if you maintain an account with them. If you had children who handled your iphone, or who had their own iphones on that account, you’d want to be sure that they couldn’t download and charge your account for anything sleazy or age inappropriate. Precisely because you can’t control for everything and you are trying to teach your children to be responsible with invisible things like credit and information you might prefer (I do) that the Apple Store be porn free.
But I really don’t get all the angst. Control freak billionaire is control freak? Nu?
aimai
Robertdsc-iphone
I load my own pics & video via iTunes if I need to. No app required. I do have to wonder what a pr0n app would do given that many sites offer mobile phone optimized access through Safari.
terry chay
@snarkout:
You raise good points. I do think, however, on an app-by-app basis it’s EITHER clueless bureaucrats or anti-competive control freaks, but not both.
These people are auditing tens of thousands of apps and the near continue updates that follow. It’s obvious there are going to be some inconsistency.
Stanza was passed, but Eucalyptus was blocked. iSutra was allowed. I think those things are accidental and here is why. Tons of books are sold as apps which is in direct competition wiht Apples own iBooks, if evil anti-competitive, why not block that? Also Eucalyptus was rejected almost a year before iBooks and the iPad were launched. I don’t buy the evil argument, I blame stupidity.
Jiggle photos app being rejected? Again, incompetence. What was going on just before it was rejeted was some of the top selling apps on the Appstore that mangaed to make it through were apps that allowed you to jiggle boobies. I can just picture someone worried that this would allow people to inch across the line, an edict was issued, and some people took it a bit too seriously.
Mark Fiore? Apple has a clear policy about politically partisan speech (because they’re worried about hate speech laws in other countries no doubt, or perhaps just a lot of people complaining about tea party apps that are out there. Besides we know that Jobs and Gore are buddy buddies and Fiore tends to be pretty middle of the road, so it doesn’t make sense that this was some evil-genius ploy. Just that people didn’t realize Fiore was not just some random online artist. When he won the Pulitzer, it was mentioned in the Times and other publications that his app was rejected. I bet Jobs read that and basically turned it around.
When you mention tethering and Google Voiceā¦ now you are getting somewhere. That stuff is evil.
My suspicion is this. Apple gets a great deal from AT&T and AT&T doesn’t want tethering. End of story. Why do I believe this? Because tethering is available outside the U.S. on the iPhone.
Google Voice? I suspect the same thing. The incident occurred before the fallout between Apple and Google. Besides that hurts Google more than it hurts Apple.
Tethering or WiFi routing on the iPad? Shit I don’t have a 3G iPad, I have a WiFi only one and a Sprint MiFi 2200. My guess is that the iPad is SIM unlocked so the only reason to co-market with AT&T is to get a sweet deal from them, but the price is no tethering or wifi hotspot routing. Apple has already proven that they can make both so inconvenient as to be not marketable by 3rd parties (they did once leak tethering and used an iTunes update to disable it, you can install this stuff on hacked iPhones which Apple practically bricks with every update).
How good a deal? Well I pay $50/month for 5GB on my MiFi. AT&T’s 3G deal is like $30/month for unlimited. If you could tether or wifi hotspit the iPad I guarantee it’d be $50/month for 5GB just like it is everywhere else.
The same could be said with flash on the iPhone (Yes, it sucks, but I’m sure the iPhone is such a hot property, Adobe devs would get their head out of the ass to make it work if Apple wantedā¦ so it’s really about going to war with Adobe over flash vs. HTML5/Quicktime).
The same could be said about CS5/flash being able to write native apps on the iPhone. As a developer and open source programmer (I work at WordPress), I’m offended that they wield a license as anti-open weapon. But as an iPhone and iPad owner, web developer (and former Palm developer), I know that all those apps are just going to be pure crap on the iPhone anyway. Not saying it isn’t wrong, I’m just saying you’re going to have to work harder to make me go to bat on behalf of a multi-billion dollar corporation like Adobe when Adobe isn’t exactly playing above-the-board themselves (HTML5).
A Manly Man
Facebones:
“…get off the high horse already and get a version of Flash licensed so I can watch Hulu vids on my commute.”
I think you’re missing the point of the iTunes Store. Jobs doesn’t want you watching free content from any site, including hulu, when he can charge you for that content at the iTunes Store. I believe that’s why there is no Flash on any Apple device. I could be wrong, but I’m not.
A Manly Man
I’m not aware of many children who can afford to purchase their own iPhone, iPad, iPodtouch.
Lisa K.
Well, yes, and I actually have no issue with this. None. If Steve Jobs doesn’t want people using an Apple product to download porn, I think he is well within his business right to do that myself. This seems like much ado about a whole lot of nothing. Porn is everywhere, my ex had it programmed into the remote, and so I have a hard time sympathizing about outrage arising from not being able to get it delivered to your phone.
Can we say, altogether now, “more important progressive goals”?
Brachiator
@fucen tarmal:
Uh, no. The VCR put smut movie houses out of business. It didn’t so much mainstream it as make it private. Amateur smut and web sites that pirate pro smut are running the pros out of business. Still, people can dial up adult fare at home, at hotels, etc. But there is a vital market for this stuff.
As soon as people could paint, they painted nudes and smut. When the camera was invented, thousands of nude and smutty photos were taken. When movies came into being, people used the equipment after hours to make dirty movies. Cell phone cameras have spawned a whole new genre of smut.
Eating, fighting, screwing is what we do. And when we ain’t doing it, some of us want to think about it, read about it, watch it. It ain’t about mainstream vs outlaw. It’s about life.
Peter J
@stuckinred:
No, they are not. Unless I can buy one for $99, and then get no monthly charges if I don’t use it.
But for $99 I can’t. Cause the cheapest AT&T plan would mean that I would pay $69.99 every month for 24 months. Which amounts to $1779. Sure, I get a number of free minutes with the plan, so what does AT&T charge for the same kind of plan if you don’t get it with an iphone? $39.99/month.
My epic math skills then tell me that the real price of the $99 iphone in the $99 deal is $99+30*24.
Which is $819…
Martin
@aimai:
This, precisely.
Job’s genius isn’t in his sense of design or whatever. His genius is in his ability as CEO to say ‘no’ to things better than anyone else in business today. If the market is clamoring for an iPhone, they’ll get it when it’s ready, not before. When everyone screamed at Apple for not having a netbook, they didn’t rush one out. Instead they build a product that they felt would be better. Apple turns down ideas that any other manufacturer would jump at.
The porn argument on the store is the stupidest fucking argument I’ve heard yet. The iPhone ships with the most feature complete web browser of any phone out there – and Apple’s browser is now the standard on every phone out there. Using the browser you can reach 99% of the porn content that exists – and you can download and save that content locally, yet people are complaining that they can’t have dedicated porn apps? It’s not that Apple is preventing you from getting to porn – in fact, Apple has expanded that access more than any other manufacturer *ever* has, but they suck because they refuse to allow it down a single channel that they control.
Fencedude
@Peter J:
Yes. This. Like I said earlier, the porn aspect is a distracting tangent.
4tehlulz
Decoded for your convenience.
terry chay
@terry chay: @Culture of Truth: All this talk of taint. How apropos :-)
The thing about the industry is that it affects your business in other ways, instead of in isolation. Imagine if you are a venture capitalist and you decide to fund a porn startup. That’s not in isolation. Forever you will be known as the guy funding porn startups and your other startups hurt. And soon you’re the last in line for people asking you for money.
The same goes if you’re a lawyer, marketing person, or even an engineer, believe it or not.
Not only that, but churn in the porn industry is insane. I don’t know a single engineer who has managed to work there for over a year. I don’t know why because on paper the pay is good (about 20% above industry average for the same position) plus the barrier to actually get the job is much lower), but I’ve seen it. Granted my sample set is small (about 10 engineers I’ve met who have admitted to working there or who I know have worked there), but the result is 100%. Plus, word of mouth tells me that is true among people I haven’t met/interviewed/worked with. I don’t know why this is true (without going into morals), but I do know it is true and it affects both the costs and success rate.
Another issue is that while there is a lot of money in porn it is money that really is only profitable to people at the top of the industry and relative to say investing in Google or Facebook is actually pretty small (meaning, if you invest in porn, you really can’t invest in a Facebook, and you’re much more likely to be able to ride a Google or Facebook to $$ in Silicon Valley than the next PornHub or Adult Friend Finder).
The final issue is that because porn is considered a vice, it is rarely protected. This is true with gambling also. What I mean is if your porn site (or gambling site) gets attacked by a DDoS as an extortion attempt, good luck getting any help from law enforcement. (And it will be DDoSd because the people know this.) This adds costs and rewards those people who are most willing to skirt the laws and morals, and when coupled with the fact that the paydays only occur for the wildly successfulā¦ it actually is a slippery slope (or self-fufilling prophecy).
Shannon
If I were the religious type, I’d pray nightly that Google speeds up its inexorable march to overtake Microsoft in the non-Apple world… because as much as I do love my iPhone, I really cannot stand Apple.
iElitists.
terry chay
@Midnight Marauder:
The Stern thing. I know a reporter at Stern. And I think he believed that the takedown reasoning was an exuse. Jobs and Stern had a number of run-ins just before the takedown occurred.
I don’t know. But I do know that Stern is like TIME magazine in Germany. So the rejection shows a really extreme provincialism at best.
Martin
@Brachiator: Porn (all vices, actually) are always the first adopter of new technology. The first DVDs were porn, the first BluRay, the first online video. By comparison, pot growers have probably done more with hydroponics than any other industry.
If you are already in a risky business, early adoption gives a real market advantage relative to the risks that tend to be smaller than what they’ve already factored in.
Steve D
So Steve Jobs doesn’t want to sell porn. BFD. Nor do I.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@aimai:
That about sums it up for me. I find it kind of funny that folks upthread are ready to tell parents to take direct personal responsibility for censoring what their kids have access to and then failing to recognize that corporate brands (such as what Apple is trying to uphold in this case) are one of the many tools which parents use to do precisely this in navigating the shoals of our consumer culture. The Disney Channel, etc. have as much audience share as they do on cable in large part because parents can trust that they will color only within certain lines when it comes to content, and that is a big time savings compared with vetting every episode of every show on a starting-from-scratch basis. Micro-managing your kids access to content sounds to me like one of those libertarian fantasies which sounds great until you have to actually live it out – and when it hits the logistical and time-management nightmare that is a modern middle class family with multiple tweens, something’s gotta give.
Doesn’t mean Jobs isn’t a world class control freak, but that ship sailed in the previous century.
Peter J
@Lisa K.:
Are you a net neutrality fan? Would that be a progressive goal? Maybe even an important progressive goal?
Or would you be ok with an ISP either throttling speed to certain sites or just blocking them? Wouldn’t that be well within the company’s business right?
Really not singling you out, it’s more of a question to anyone who is ok with what Apple is doing here.
Martin
@Peter J: They haven’t though. It’s just that nobody is taking advantage of the alternatives. For $99 or less you can get a dev license that will allow you to install anything you want. Apple also provides a different application layer that doesn’t go through the store at all – it’s more restrictive in terms of the APIs it can reach, but a lot of Apple’s own apps are written as these kind of apps. Surely the porn apps would work fine in this space.
Nobody really uses these because nobody really fucking cares. 99% of consumers just want to find out the movie times, download the app, and are happy. They’re not going to get caught up in abstract ‘rights’ issues over their damn phone. Nobody gets caught up in these rights over their TiVo or their Wii either.
twiffer
@stuckinred: read the footnote. that’s a promo price for nabbing new business:
i considered buying an iPhone untill i was informed that, despite having unlimted text and data, i’d have to buy an additional data plan specfically for the iPhone. on top of paying the “early upgrade” price, as i’d already blown my “free” (only $18 for the free upgrade) on the piece of shit LG shine that simply ceased being able to hold a connection for more than 3 seconds.
needless to say, i did not buy one. couldn’t care less about apps. since i tend not to mastrubate in public restrooms, i don’t really need porn on my phone either. anyway, a company can do what the want in regards to the product they provide. it’s not censorship. if they want to be moralizing assholes about it, fine. such behavior is certainly not going to endear me to their products, but whatever.
Martin
@Peter J: This is a totally bullshit argument. Apple isn’t blocking you from using your browser to access it. Apple is merely saying that they won’t sell it in their store. Guess what, I can’t buy porn at the Hallmark store either.
The ISP isn’t selling content, they’re selling infrastructure. You can view all the porn you want on your iPhone. You can browse to any porn site, you can download movies and photos freely. Apple hasn’t touched the infrastructure in any way – just their store.
Brachiator
@Peter J:
I didn’t realize that this was an active urban legend.
Beta lost because housewives could tape a week worth of soap operas, and guys could tape an entire baseball or football game on a single VHS tape. With beta you had to use tapes of different lengths and the max tape wouldn’t work for overtime or long games.
Also, the VHS backers made sure that there were plenty of VHS machines. Sony only allowed Toshiba and a few others to make beta machines.
And when you duped movies, smut or mainstream, you could fit more on a VHS tape.
Sentient Puddle
@Peter J: That’s not a particularly comparable point. Access to the Internet isn’t really much like what a company will and will not allow you to do with the hardware they make. And the comparison is undermined further when you take into account the fact that there are plenty of systems out there that let you do whatever you want to them, because if you don’t like the amount of freedom Apple gives you, you have alternatives.
And this is all setting aside the fact that Apple can make a very strong case for locking down their hardware (in the form of it running as smoothly as they want it to), whereas it’s not as easy for an ISP to make a case for throttling access.
RP
Doesn’t the fact that porn is easily available via a web browser support Jobs’ point? Why should apple bother with supporting porn apps if its customers can get porn so easily from other sources on the web?
I just don’t get the hand wringing about the “walled garden.”
Xboxershorts
A free market gives Apple all the right in the world to limit/restrict or otherwise control the use of their rightfully patented hardware and software.
Don’t like it? (I do not) Then vote with your wallet. (As I do.)
I will never, ever, consciously own or operate an Apple product if I can avoid it. I hate having to have quicktime on my computers.
Apple sucks. Period. Vote with yer wallet and quit yer whining.
Peter J
@Martin:
You obviously haven’t read the agreement you have to sign to get a dev license (besides the $99).
Mr Furious
I don’t have a problem whatsoever with Job’s/Apple’s stance on this.
I don’t have time to read 170 comments at work, so forgive me if this is a repeat, but…
There is no hypocrisy between supplying a full-access browser such as Safari, complete with a “private” feature on their computers, and Apple exercising restraint in what they offer for the iPhone.
Watching pr0n on your computer at home is you’re own damn business, and I’m sure Jobs would agree. But iPhones are ubiquitous and often used in public, and I don’t have a problem with Apple not offering a direct path to pr0n on their product.
If you want it bad enough, you’ll figure out a way to get it on your iPhone, but it’s not their responsibility to hand you a (m)ap.
Martin
@Peter J: As long as you aren’t distributing, why do you care? Why make the case that Apple is morally wrong with the store and then when presented with a solution stand and say that Apple is morally right with the agreement? Pay the $99 and install whatever the fuck you want on your phone.
Brachiator
@Martin:
Yeah, I noted this in an earlier thread. When photography came around, almost immediately there were thousands of dirty pictures taken. And as should be obvious, when movable type was perfected in the West, dirty books soon became the happening thing.
Also, the demand for smut is relatively constant and easily satisfied. The customers want it quick, hot and dirty. Early adopters always find a waiting market to be exploited or satisfied.
Martin
@Mr Furious:
But the phone browser is the same as the desktop one, so Apple offers precisely the same direct path on the phone as on the desktop. And yet people still complain.
artem1s
not and not. setting boundaries isn’t juvenile or moralistic. demanding that everyone drop their boundaries because you want them to is juvenile and patronizing.
Mr Furious
@Martin: That’s why the people complaining that Jobs is censoring content are full of shit. He’s simply deciding that they are not going to endorse, distribute or sell pornography through their store.
You can look at all the pr0n you want, but you’re not going to get it from him.
His moralizing is annoying, but as noted above, it’s not necessarily a bad business decision to do so.
pk
I support Steve Jobs. And you are wrong on this one.
Corner Stone
@AhabTRuler:
I disagree with this a little. I think in a lot of situations similar to mine the only real advantage you can give a child is early exposure to technology.
And I think cell phones stopped being “just” cell phones for a huge chunk of people several years ago.
Peter J
@Martin:
I’m not saying that they are morally right with the agreement.
But your idea is for me to pay Apple $99, sign an agreement, and then violate it so that Apple can revoke my license?
And if you didn’t know, the $99 is a yearly charge.
James K. Polk, Esq.
Ever wonder how many comments on a thread like this one are paid Apple shills?
Amanda in the South Bay
@Corner Stone:
There’s still a ton of class privilege inherent in giving your kids iPads and iPhones as compared to a shitty little phone that is good only for talking and texting.
Yeah, by all means kids should know about tech growing up, but buying those for the kids is well out of reach for a lot of people.
I mean, yeah, I’d love an iPhone or iPad myself, but you need to have quite a bit of disposable income for that to happen.
burnspbesq
@toujoursdan:
You must not be a parent.
The Guilty Carnivore
Stupid post.
“If Steve Jobs is really concerned about kids downloading porn, he needs to remove Safari from every device he builds”
The camera store doesn’t sell porn, but you can make porn with the camera. The camera store may also sell photography magazines. What you are saying is that they should absolutely be required to sell porn because their cameras can create porn?
Steve Jobs is not belaboring the existence of porn on the Internet, nor denying the ability for anybody to access it.
He just doesn’t want it in his store. I would be tacky and unseemly from his perspective, just as Borders doesn’t sell porn but your corner liquor store does. Your false equivalency is disingenuous.
burnspbesq
@Jrod:
No. Ever heard of parental controls? Like a browser that’s limited to accessing sites that mom and dad white-list?
You’ll understand when you grow up and have kids of your own. In the meantime … naah, not going there. I’m not stooping to your level.
Amanda in the South Bay
@burnspbesq:
I really don’t have a bone to pick in this argument, but didn’t someone say earlier that the App Store/iTunes also has parental controls?
Facebones
@A Manly Man:
No, you are exactly correct. Apple wants to maximize revenue, and I understand that. But please don’t run ads telling me how you offer the “complete, uncensored” internet and then refuse to license a very basic web application on the Safari for iPhone.
Video sites like youtube and dailymotion work fine on the iPhone. It’s just annoying that the web site that is becoming the leading destination for TV content can’t run on it. That’s not going to be a problem for Hulu, it’s going to be a problem for Apple.
Amanda in the South Bay
@The Guilty Carnivore:
Actually, I thought Borders sells Playboy and other staples of the mainstream adult magazine genre. Don’t they usually have plastic bags or something on them so they aren’t visible? And possibly signs saying you have to be 18 or older? TBH I don’t really know or care, since I haven’t been to a Borders for a while.
burnspbesq
@terry chay:
You are a very brave person to admit that on this blog.
Chuck
The porn issue is a red herring. The control-freakery doesn’t end there. All apps for the iPhone and iPad must now be written in Objective-C, C++, or Javascript for the Safari Browser (yes they do explicitly mention the browser).
They have been diligently removing every alternative language platform out there from their ecosystem, including those that compile other languages to ObjC. Latest was Scratch, a visual programming environment for children. You dragged blocks around to connect them to make multimedia mashup things. But since it’s Turing-complete and describes itself as programming, out it went.
But yes, on will sing the chorus, The Steve can do whatever The Steve wants. And if you write for The Steve’s platform, you will want what The Steve wants, and you will do what The Steve says. The Steve can do no wrong and The Steve may not be denied.
Screw The Steve. I normally don’t give a flip about open-source-this or open-standard-that other than “it’s a nice way to go all other things being equal”, but this is way too much. And while I don’t see The Steve destroying the whole field of programming, I do see him quite deliberately making every effort to lock down a very significant part of the ecosystem to satisfy his need for control. Even Microsoft never went that far.
burnspbesq
@Facebones:
Sorry, but no. Flash blows on every mobile platform known to man, and any distribution system that relies on Flash is going to pay heavily for that reliance.
Surly Duff
I don’t really care that much, but I think some of you are missing the point. Apple and Jobs are not refusing to have any porn available, just non-established porn. The VP of public relations admitted that they will still have apps for nudie mags like PLayboy, and try to explain away the obvious contradiction by saying, āThe difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format.”
So don’t try to tell me this is apple trying to protect the children from the porn.
Sentient Puddle
Whoa, missed this one…
@A Manly Man:
If so, why is it that ABC has a free iPad app that lets you watch their shows on demand? Why is it that I can browse to most any provider (Hulu being about the only exception) and watch TV shows without a hitch?
If the point of locking out Flash is to force users to go through iTunes, then Jobs is doing a pretty shitty job at it.
burnspbesq
@James K. Polk, Esq.:
Nope. Virtually everyone who has commented on this thread is a regular.
What’s your point?
Harley
James,
Do you have application/resume information re the paid Apple shill jobs? This sounds like a good fit for my interests. Thanks.
Mr Furious
Damn, I’m well-known as an Apple shill, but I had no idea I was supposed to be getting paid.
Where do I pick up my check?
Cris
Not really.
stormhit
@burnspbesq:
Probably something along the lines of this, I’d assume:
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Fix’t.
Bill Gates could only dream of such a loyal ball-washing fan base.
asiangrrlMN
@Surly Duff: Yeah, this. I don’t really give a shit because I will never buy an Apple product with an i in front of it and yeah a kid having a three hundred dollar phone seems fucked up to me no matter the justification, but I don’t think this is about pr0n at all. Jobs is ever intent on gaining more and more control over his products. His right. Apparently, lots of people have no problem with that. Their right. Still, he’s a dick about this, and I would be happier if he just said, “We want to decide what goes on our phone period. We don’t give a fuck if it plays nicely with others. You don’t, either, or you wouldn’t have bought one. End of story.”
James K. Polk, Esq.
What is always surprising to me is the multitudes of liberals that rush to defend this (and only this) corporation from any slight whatsoever.
Martin
@A Manly Man: Flash is unsupported precisely because it cedes control over the phone experience to Adobe. Apple will not give up that control unless they are forced to, and in this case, they aren’t. That’s why the 3rd party API restrictions. That’s why the iPad runs a CPU that Apple designed.
Apple has been burned by these issues countless times. Nearly killed the company in a few cases. If Apple crashes and burns, it’ll be at their own hand.
As it stands, AT&T is without question the single biggest threat to the iPhone, not RIM or Nokia or Google.
Martin
@Mr Furious: E*Trade. If you had read the fine print, you were supposed to buy stock 14 years ago.
maus
@James K. Polk, Esq.:
Yes, but they’re defending them unconditionally because they’re morons, not because they’re Liberals.
maus
@210 I’m not entirely against the purging of flash from the iPhone/iPad, though I certainly am against the “may not be originally developed in languages other than C, C++, and Objective C” policy for apps.
Martin
I don’t see the problems here. Everyone is pissed off because Apple isn’t making the product they want the way that they want them to. There’s no undue influence on the market. They aren’t driving competitors out of business. If you don’t like their products, don’t buy them. What’s the problem?
toujoursdan
@burnspbesq:
You are completely missing the point. (And I am not a parent but I have two nephews aged 7 and 9 whose welfare I care about deeply. It doesn’t change my statement one bit.)
I am to the left of Lenin and am completely mystified that people defend any company, but especially a company with an over-the-top, control freak culture that want to manage content the way Apple does.
Peter J
This isn’t like the dystopic 1984 Apple ad, that was a dark and moody place. The ipad and the iphone are both shiny, so nothing to worry about!
No need to smash anything with a huge hammer. Just follow your leader, he knows what’s best for you!
Admiral_Komack
@RP:
“Doesnāt the fact that porn is easily available via a web browser support Jobsā point? Why should apple bother with supporting porn apps if its customers can get porn so easily from other sources on the web?”
“I just donāt get the hand wringing about the āwalled garden.ā
-Waitaminnit!
You can get porn easily from other sources on the web?
Damn!
(sound of iPhone being thrown in trash can)
:-)
Corner Stone
@Amanda in the South Bay: I agree with you. I didn’t have enough time to flesh out my previous comment, just a stab at what I was thinking.
Of course there’s some inherent consumer classism at work there. That’s why I used the caveat of “similar” to my situation for shorthand.
I’m probably middle/upper middle, white collar, not wealthy, no debt, not connected politically, etc.
I have access to technology through work/subsidized access to technology, and enough disposable income to buy my child his own laptop and a few other techno gadgets. Not saying this is everyone or any thing like that.
Just saying I can’t afford the “right” private schools for him, or special tutors, or the things other financially connected families have access to. But I can afford a Nintendo Wii, a Netflix subscription, broadband access, and a handful of $300 or less techno gadgets that keep us thinking big and having fun together.
I know others are not in this situation.
Corner Stone
I just wonder if 15 yr old boys nowadays know how lucky they are in the category of spank bank material.
In my day we had to walk uphill both ways just to get a little Rosey Palm action.
tom.a
Re: the “walled garden”.
Apple makes appliances. Appliances do a few things very well and those things are supported by the company that makes it. Other things the company is not interested in are not supported by the company and the market has other options for you or you can get all basement-tinkerer on the device and do it yourself.
Re: porn.
Apple could care less if you look at porn, they just won’t install the porn for you via their distribution network (iTunes).
mike in dc
Not supporting Flash = Internet Fail. Flash is all over the net. I can’t go to Kongregate or a million other Flash game sites on an iPad. Hulu? Nope, not them either. Lots of flash-content-only sites out there. And Apple walling off their appliances from Flash won’t make a dent in Adobe’s net share. But it will hurt Apple, at least a bit.
hamletta
I just want to say that the title of this post is way out of line. I don’t know anything about Steve Jobs’s religious beliefs, but I do know he was raised Lutheran, and Lutherans and Calvinists are very, very different.
Calling a Lutheran a Calvinist probably falls under the legal penumbra of “fightin’ words.”
I also don’t have a problem with his refusal to sell pr0n. I seriously doubt it’s a moral decision, and many commenters have offered up very good business reasons why Apple wouldn’t want to mess with it.
And I’m writing this post on my 8-year-old G4. Neener, neener.
limniade
Even with the iPhone (iPad ownership not calculated in the following comment), Apple still only has about 10% of the total Internet-capable device market share. Their control-freak nature may or may not hurt them, their ability to make pretty gadgets that work well may help them, but you still have the other 90% on which to do whatever you please.
Apple seems like a bigger company than it is because of the visibility they draw to themselves. Which, hey, if there were Nobels handed out for marketing, their team should get one. And yes, thanks to the iPhone, their market share has gone up considerably year-over-year just in the last few years. But still…10% market share. Let’s not give Apple more credit for their power over the market than they actually deserve.
burnspbesq
@toujoursdan:
No mystery. It’s actually pretty simple.
I am the ur-Apple person. I am not a geek. I don’t have time to be a geek, even if I had the inclination. I work in a demanding and time-intensive profession, and I am trying to raise a kid. All I want from my productivity tools and my toys is that they work, predictably, 100 percent of the time, with no drama. That’s what I get from Apple, precisely because Apple is obsessive about maintaining end-to-end control over the user experience.
master c
sorry-but this all makes me love apple more…
and I know my husband gets lotsa porn on his iphone….
so the point is?
James K Polk, Esq.
Apple is the second biggest corporation in America.
Bigger than their foil, Microsoft.
Can you imagine if
liberalsmorans defended Exxon like this?