My condolences go out to Steve Jobs’ loved ones.

This message by +Malcolm Locke caught my eye:

Meanwhile, on twitter, all the Mac users are tweeting a solitary U+F8FF unicode character, which to them appears as an Apple logo, but displays nothing on non-Apple fonts. A poignant tribute to the empire’s views on interopability.

For those wondering whether they can see it → “”. I could, but most other people apparently could not. I do not care particularly much about fonts so I did not decide to delve deeper into that.

Mr. Locke does indeed raise a very valid point. Apple seems to have almost made a point out of pushing everybody away. You’re either 100% with them or you can get the fuck out. As a company, you can see their reasoning on it. People buying one of their devices are almost forced to buy the rest too to have any decent form of interoperability. The other reason of course is that they are assholes. No seriously, fuck them. They’re the Microsoft of this decade, trying to create a monopoly by pushing every competition into illegality.

Apple’s philosophy is nice enough “keep it as simple as possible for the consumer”. I am with them on that one, people do not need to be forced to delve into the depths of their technological devices just to do what they want. However, when you feel like “jailbreaking” your device, when you do feel like exploring every little cranny of the hardware you paid too much money for (I really do hope you have or get that craving), then you should be allowed to. You should not have to worry that the company you got it from will send update after update your way to make sure that you cannot use the device in any other way than the one they intended. Let alone they come sue you about it.

Jobs was a visionary, I have to give him that. However I hope, now that Apple needs to go on without him, that the company might finally become less of a stickler on those kind of things. Stop trying to block any form of creativity or innovation that does not come from your end, things will only go better for all of us in the end.