The difference between ARM and APPLE
Being older than most of your contributors I remember the BBC, BBC Master and Archimedes ion all of its various guises. These machines were light years ahead of the boring PC's and over hyped Apple's of the time. I was involved in the installation of networks of BBC's, Master and Archimedes in over 100 schools in just 1 LEA in the UK and we were one of the smallest LEA's using these machines. Programming and getting inside the machines was actively encouraged. the speed, graphical capabilities and innovative software available was way ahead of anything else. Unfortunately BG's monolith killed these machines off and provided slower, buggier, poor quality OS after OS. It took more 5 years before transparency was available in graphics on the PC. Apple was a mess for most of this time with a small niche market in design and DTP.
Nowadays we have APPLE, who give normal control freaks a bad name, nobody is allowed to produce anything for their machines unless granted the royal JOB's approval, even now he seems to haunt the corridors of Cupertino. They killed off almost as much innovation as Microsoft did in the early years. I worked with some of the early RISC personnel who would be horrified by the way in which these people have taken a fantastic open architecture and way of thinking and turned it into grossly inflated cash cow.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
