I’ve always had a problem with the term “jailbreaking” when it comes to Apple’s mobile devices. The term “jail” came into usage long before iOS in reference to isolated user-space instances, but that old meaning seems to have been obscured through both overuse and continued attempts to paint Apple as a dictatorial company interested only in hamstringing users of its devices. I’ve let “jailbreaking” slide until now because even though I think it’s a loaded term, it’s also a nice, short way to describe the act of opening the device to greater customization than Apple offers out of the box. It’s also a better term than Android’s “rooting,” which sounds a bit rude in my part of the world.
In the wake of Richard Stallman’s epically tasteless diatribe against Steve Jobs last week (Google for it if you’re truly curious, I’m not serving him any page views), I’ve decided I can’t let this slide anymore. In addition to saying he was glad Steve is gone, Stallman also called Jobs “the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom.” So according to him, Mac users, iPhone users, iPod and iPad owners are all imprisoned and too stupid to realize it.
It’s at this point that I have to wonder whether Stallman or any of the other members of the free software movement have ever spent any appreciable amount of time in an actual jail or jail-like environment. I’m betting that few if any of them have. If they had, they’d see as I do just how full of hyperbole (and something else that rhymes with “chit”) the “jail” metaphor is.
I find the argument that Apple products “lock you in” and so on to be silly.
I’ve used computers since the TRS-80. In fact, I’ve probably had as many computers as some people twice my age over my lifetime, and for every “open” computer I have had, I have not had a single line of computers that fit the way I work the way my Macs have. I currently use two different Windows 7 computers at work, a MacBook Pro at home, an iPad, an iPhone, and an Ubuntu laptop to keep my Linux knowledge up to snuff. While most of the computer work I do is platform agnostic, I find myself changing the way I do things often for the Ubuntu and Windows machines, trying to fit my workflow into their little boxes. When I’m on a Mac, my brain can focus on the task at hand, rather than trying to decide the best tool for that task.
I know people have different ways of doing things, but for me, a Mac is the way I prefer to go. I don’t feel like tweaking, twiddling, and fiddling with my computers, even though I’m more than capable of doing so; I just want to do stuff. I want to edit photos, edit video, write, and so on. I have no interest in changing my workflow to fit my computer, which is what I feel like I’m doing every time the computer I’m working with lacks a glowing half-eaten fruit.
That’s not to say Macs are for everyone, but I certainly don’t feel like a captive audience or like I’m sacrificing anything because I’m not using something that’s more “open” (Ubuntu) or something that 70% of the world uses (Windows). I want a computer that works for me and Macs do, and if that means I’m a “prisoner” in some respect, then so be it, but I’ve never felt freer from the mundanity of computing than since I switched to Macs in 2005.