I'm not normally a great fan of Apple. I think their products are over-hyped, over-priced and too hard to tinker with. I think in some sections of society (and that includes a fair few friends of mine from theological college), they've reached the status of a pseudo-religion. I remember one of my best friends had an apple laptop. It fell off the sofa and stopped working, necessitating a long drive to the nearest Apple franchise shop then cost a lot to repair. My PC cost half as much, as the same sort of performance, is a lot harder to break and a lot easier to fix.
But then this comes along. I've deliberately linked to Albert Mohler rather than the original story because I think his analysis of this is good. I've got to say, I agree with Steve Jobs on this. Freedom from is often far more important than freedom to.
Of course, I think that freedom is actually meaningless unless we specify "freedom from something" or "freedom to something". We are never free to do whatever we want - we can't fly to the moon unaided, for example. And as a Christian, I think the freedom that really matters is freedom to follow God, a freedom which only comes through slavery to Christ. But that's a different story...
3 comments:
`We are never free to do whatever we want' -- not until our wants are conformed to what they should be, anyway.
Hey, it's great to have you back, Custard!
That's an impressive sentiment from Steve Jobs. However, surely the ability to keep tight control on his apps store is part of what both of us dislike about Apple, which is their products' hermetically sealed nature? We can't tinker with and fix Apple gadgets because they're locked down like the store, so while an anti-porn crusade is good, this one won't work without sacrificing any hope of the open source ethos that powers a large proportion of the internet via Apache, Linux etc.
Yes, before you ask, I'm writing this on Firefox under Ubuntu!
Dan - yes.
Greg - quite (though I'm using Chrome on Vista because Ubuntu was just too buggy for me). On the other hand, some well-known computer companies fail to give enough control in other directions. File-sharing sites which don't give the ability to create content filters are in some ways worse.
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