Mr. Jobs's eras

Apple and Adobe have a long history together, as Steve Jobs points out in an explanation of why iPhones and their cousins won't run Flash. Good times, good times, he says, reminiscing about their shared past, and then goes on to give, in a cool and evenhanded tone, six fairly blunt reasons for the choice.

Now clearly, supporting flash or not, and choosing HTML5 and other standards in favor of it, is all about the web, but what jumped out at me was Jobs's contrast between the "PC era" and the "Mobile era", which would seem to be more about generations of hardware. Guess which era he puts Flash in. Give up? OK, I'll tell you (or rather, I'll let Jobs tell you):

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

There are several interesting implications in that one little paragraph. In particular, it would seem that mobile devices are in some way webbier than PCs. Even before the web, people were using PCs, to write documents, play games and whatever else. Sure, the web can enhance all that, but PCs were a success before the web ever came along.

The distinguishing feature of a mobile device is not just that you can move it around, but that it (generally) stays connected when you do. A good portion of the pizzaz of an iPhone etc. comes from its webbiness. Not only is there an app for that, you can get it right now, and chances are that app interacts with the web in some essential way.

Now, you can have mobile devices without the web. The first generations of cell phone were exactly that. Nonetheless, as Jobs asserts and I tend to agree, the real potential of mobile devices comes from their fit with the Web As We Know It. The tighter the fit, the better.

This iPhone will self-destruct in five seconds

Two questions come to mind about Apple's recent iPhone update which, as Apple had warned, makes hacked iPhones inoperable:

Who's better off for this? Owners of hacked phones now have $500 paperweights. Granted, they were warned and I would think were in violation of some license or service agreement. There are reports that some owners of non-hacked phones have lost contact data and possibly the use of their phones. Apple comes off looking like The Man instead of The Rest of Us, thereby calling down the wrath of hackers everywhere, but what were they going to do? The one group clearly to gain is makers of whizzy phones that aren't locked to a single carrier and/or don't self-destruct if you try to unlock them.

Just how does the self-destruct feature work? Apple asserts that the hacked phones are now "permanently inoperable". Did the update fry some hard-to-replace chip? If not, just what claim is Apple making? Clearly the self-destruct update will have left affected phones unable to receive further updates the usual way. But is it impossible even in principle to re-load the OS, for example by copying the image from a working phone? I would expect it to be difficult -- dongle-based copy protection is a lot easier to pull off for something highly integrated like a phone -- but could not even Apple do it back at the factory? [My understanding is that they just re-flashed the firmware and that Apple could fix such a phone at the factory (but has no reason to). In some cases, such a phone might also be fixable without help from Apple.]