Are computers throw-away appliances?

With each new design, Apple moves closer to a view that computers should not be repaired or upgraded. Take the latest-generation MacBook Pro Retina: RAM is soldered to the logic board, and removing the battery is even harder than the last non-Retina generation, which required a special screwdriver. While this is no worse (mostly) than the last Retina model, Apple now has no high-end notebook, other than the 13" that allows memory upgrades and relatively easy access to internal parts.

Some argue this is no problem – you should think of a computer as an appliance, and letting an untrained person (you) fiddle with the insides is asking for trouble. Do you insist on fixing your own broken fridge or car, they ask?

Apple has been claiming since the original Mac in 1984 that computers are appliances with no user-serviceable parts inside. The original Mac was held together with then-uncommon torx screws, and popping the case was a non-obvious operation. And the RAM was soldered onto the logic board. Fixing the RAM at 128KB, then later at 512KB, turned out to be rather unpopular, because RAM prices dropped rapidly and a computer short on RAM is very limiting – no less so today, when you have VM, and a shortage of RAM means swapping to disk. I had a 512K Mac that I later upgraded to 1MB with significant complications to make the upgrade work.

For a computer a few years old, the cheapest and most effective upgrade is an increase in RAM. Why? Because CPU speed does not improve nearly as fast as RAM prices drop, and an old model with enough RAM for current workloads can still run pretty well. And also, RAM speed does not improve fast, so the relative speed gain of a faster CPU is not as great as you would expect just looking at clock speed or count of cores – RAM is the biggest speed bottleneck for a bigger range of speed updates than most expect.

For the last 30 years, then, a RAM upgrade has been a great way of extending the life of a 3–4 year-old computer by another few years. And there is no change in industry trends that suggests this will be overturned any time soon. By taking away this option, Apple is losing one of the Mac’s great selling points – you can keep running a Mac several years longer than a typical Windows machine because they last longer, and Apple has less of a problem supporting legacy hardware than competition whose OS must run on anything anyone can screw together.

So what about the argument that you shouldn’t want to crack open the case for fear of breaking something? How does this compare with things like cars?

It’s certainly true that 30 years ago there was a lot more reason to fix your own car. Cars today are more reliable, have much longer service intervals, and rely increasingly on computer-controlled electronics that you can’t set without a bit of research. But that doesn’t mean they should be inherently harder to repair when repairs are needed. Just because you have long-life spark plugs that may only need to be replaced a few times in the life of a car doesn’t mean they should be welded into the cylinder head, or that the plug for connecting computerised diagnostics has to be glued closed so you can only open it at risk of breaking something.

If these examples seem ridiculous, it’s because I could only think up ridiculous examples to compare with some of Apple’s recent designs – glued-in batteries, soldered-in RAM, components that are really hard to take apart without breaking something. These design choices imply you should toss your computer when something breaks, or give up on it when you discover it needs an upgrade.

Even if you buy the argument that only trained technicians should open your Mac, why design it so it’s almost impossible to repair without damaging something?

Case in point: I replaced the hard drive in my white 17" iMac. This machine had previously had its screen replaced under warrantee. When I opened it, I found the radiation shielding torn in parts, and 2 of the highly inaccessible screws holding the whole thing together were missing.

Apple today designs computers the way the Italians used to design cars: look great, great to use, terrible to repair. The only real difference is Macs are relatively reliable. Great design does not preclude design for repairability. Apple can do better.

Where next, Microsoft?

Apple is a retail aggregator. They own client details of customers of thousands of retailers including over 500-million active credit card numbers. Google sells highly targeted advertising, and gives away stuff in the cause of crowdsourcing their target database. Amazon sells scalable infrastructure, prototyped by building an unprofitable web bookstore.

Microsoft sells software. and is trying to figure out what Apple got right in 1977, forgetting that’s not actually what made them successful. Buying Nokia doesn’t fix that.

Apple, Google and Amazon have a lot in common – highly scalable infrastructure, a market that relies on massive net outreach, and a rapidly evolving product line. But they are not really in the same business.

Microsoft needs to stop thinking of itself as a desktop software supplier, and find a new niche that works for the post-PC world. Owning Nokia’s handset business may be a step in that direction, but they need to change their thinking radically to get there.

Apple had it easy in a way: their computer business was never going to take off in a way that would make them a market leader, so inventing new niches that attacked the economics of their old market was not a show-stopper. Microsoft, on the other hand, has to worry about such things as what a $10 version of Microsoft Office on the Surface (or Android or iOS) does for the credibility of their desktop pricing. That doesn’t mean Microsoft has no options – but an option that looks like Windows on a phone isn’t a good one.

There’s a huge wide open world of opportunity out there for anyone who can operate at scale and can connect with the mass market. That’s their challenge: to find such a connection.

Black Economic Empowerment: What Went Wrong?

I’m all for black economic empowerment. What’s the alternative? A society where most are miserable and have neither prospects nor hope is not a friendly place to live. The haves live in cages. The have-nots rattle the cages, when they are not too hopeless to do anything. So why has BEE not delivered?

A huge part of the problem is the ANC’s top-down approach, strangely similar to Reagan’s trickle-down economics. Like Reaganomics, top-down BEE doesn’t work. In the US, the already rich became richer. Here, equality ended when we equalized the number of billionaires.

In a stark example of what’s wrong with BEE, I recently read an application for a gambling license for a small Eastern Cape town. The application in effect said, “This town lacks the economic base to sustain entertainment businesses, so we are filling the gap by offering the community drinking and gambling.” If you sit back and think about this, the notion is pretty obnoxious. A town that lacks the base of disposable income to support entertainment would, you’d think, not be able to support the proposed business – unless its clientele spend money on drink and gambling that’s not disposable income. In other words, they go home broke and the family doesn’t eat that week.

That though is not my main point about this proposal. One of the “key persons” listed is a car factory production line employee who is interested in getting into the gambling business.

Why would someone with no relevant experience be a “key person”? Because of a BEE requirement for earning a license. So why is this bad?

A black person who already has a job and therefore is a lot better off than the average in a poor province stands to get rich. Many other black people, should the application and similar ones for other poor towns be granted, stand to move from poor to destitute. How is that black economic empowerment?

But it gets worse. Why has the gambling company nominated someone with no relevant experience? Because their new business partner is going to sit in the background spending his new wealth and not interfere with the white baas. How can he interfere when all he knows is car parts?

Zoom out from this one example to the big picture. The faustian deal the ANC made when taking power nearly twenty years ago was that its favoured people would become instantly wealthy, and the needs of the poor would be parked indefinitely. BEE is the “fix” that hides this sorry fact. BEE that takes the form of deliberate promotion of black incompetents to prevent real transfer of control is directly related to lack of delivery. Both in government appointments and in choice of government contractors, this same game is being played. It suits both sides. The ANC can cement its base by patronage, and the old baasskap players can carry on much as before with a little camouflage.

The sad thing is this is not really in anyone’s interest. While it’s true that some people have become obscenely rich in a relatively short time, that wealth cannot really be enjoyed if you have to live in a cage. The white population, the newly empowered black population and those who have managed to rise above poverty without suckling on the BEE teat are living on borrowed time. Sooner or later, the excluded masses will demand their share. In the meantime, our cages are rattled harder and harder.

So what’s to be done?

The ANC is so steeped in the politics of patronage that it’s hard to see it changing, which is sad given the party’s history. Past the 20th anniversary of ANC rule, I expect an increasing fraction of voters who did not grow up with apartheid to be open to other options. The DA doesn’t have a narrative with mass appeal. The smaller parties show no signs of rapid growth. What of the newer players? Malema’s notion of economic freedom ends when he’s liberated wealth in his direction. Agang still needs to hit its stride. I don’t know what it stands for aside from “ANC bad”. A party that promises to do roughly what the ANC stands for but do it right could be in with a chance. On the other hand, Mamphela Ramphele was a senior executive at the World Bank, and I have not heard her repudiating its disastrous structural adjustment jihad. Agang is holding a policy workshop this weekend, so let’s see how that foes. I’d rather judge on results than history, since the ANC has amply demonstrated that history has little influence on how you behave now.

My fear is that all this will lead to another Arab Spring movement – a mass uprising driven by youth with cell phones, with a clear idea of grievance but no clear sense of what to do about it. What South Africa desperately needs now is a clear lead on what to do post-ANC. And that time is fast approaching.

WikiLeaks: Strange Bedfellows

Julian Assange’s Australian WikiLeaks Party has some strange ideas about how to pursue freedom.

In a recent story published in the US, he extolls the US Right interpretation of libertarianism as the “only hope” and representing non-violence. Reading the whole article is interesting, and worth taking the time to do so, especially if you are an Australian voter.

Where does he get that the hardcore antigovernment right is about nonviolence (including as regards abortion)? They are happy to endorse murder when it suits their agenda. To me libertarianism starts with maximising freedom of choice for the individual. The American right version of libertarianism goes off the rails when it aligns itself with extremist religion (which opposes free choice) and big business (which can undermine the individual as much as or even more than government). Ask Russians concerned about oligarchs if excessive concentration of power in big business is a problem.

Meanwhile, in Australia, parties contesting the Senate election need to rank all candidates so any votes that don’t go to elect them are reassigned according to the order the party specifies. The purpose of this exercise to create a group voting ticket is so voters who don’t want to number every candidate can just tick one box, and the order preset by the party they select is used to fill in the ballot. The WikiLeaks Party has preferenced minor parties with views in line with the US right ahead of the Greens, their ally in anti-war and transparency causes. Even more bizarrely, they have put the Nationals ahead of the Greens in Western Australia, reducing the chances of reelection for Greens senator Scott Ludlum, one of the most consistent campaigners for freedom of information. The Nationals are not libertarians by any stretch of the imagination The WikiLeaks Party claims this happened as result of an “administrative error”.

The Australian Electoral Commission’s web site right now is in meltdown so I can’t check the details, but there is enough reporting of this stuff that it seems unlikely to be wrong.

You can read more about similar strange deals here. If parties were doing this the way you’d expect a voter to, they would number candidates in the order of nearest to their position to furthest. Instead, many take the approach of numbering the candidate closest to them last to try to eliminate their most obvious competition. Just to make things more interesting, the big parties tend to use the opposite tactic, favouring each other over smaller parties who offer a real alternative. This way, the two-party duopoly is maintained. This is nothing new. In the past, the Greens were criticized for dodgy deals, and don’t do that anymore. Everyone else still does, apparently. One more reason to support the Greens.

As a consequence of this weirdness, anyone wanting to express support for WikiLeaks has to either accept that they are undermining the chances of the Greens to be elected, or number all the candidates themselves. With about 100 in NSW, that takes some commitment.

In the interests of transparency, the WikiLeaks Party should publish a full and complete record of how they arrived at their preferences for the Senate vote in New South Wales.

What was it that WikiLeaks stands for?

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Update

The WikiLeaks Party has imploded spectacularly, with one of Julian Assange’s oldest associates Daniel Mathews quitting, and providing explicit detail of how the preferences fiasco happened. In summary, “administrative error”, my arse. What is particularly disappointing about this is how Assange appears to see his voters as cattle who can be herded to the slaughter, without concern about how and where they are being led. The very notion that you can negotiate a dodgy preferences deal on the basis that no one cares about that sort of detail is contrary to the core principles of a whistleblower organization. The details do matter, and everyone is not only entitled to know, but ought to check.

Here are some articles from WLP (GVT means group voting ticket, a specification of preference flows if a voter votes only for that party’s ticket rather than number all candidates):

• The WikiLeaks Party Announces Independent Review – most notably, it mentions “ errors made in some GVTs” – an acknowledgement of more than one error
• Statement on the appointment of Binoy Kampmark as Julian Assange’s primary running-mate – this one says “… misinformation from Christine Milne, leader of the Greens, who has stated incorrectly that we made ‘administrative errors’ in ‘three states’. We did not. The ‘administrative error’ occurred only in NSW”

Possibly. But we don’t know what their preference negotiators told the Greens during negotiations, and the inconsistency between the two statements does not add to their credibility.

Much of the Assange story revolves around his personality, which is unfortunate. The ideal of real governmental transparency is a great one. If you really care about this, vote for the Greens because they not only are on the right side of this issue, but are a principled party that doesn’t revolve around personalities.