Mark Pilgrim's excellent exposition on the "tinkerer's sunset" (an idea Alex Payne put forth in his iPad piece I linked earlier) got me thinking about the nature of tinkerers, and whether the iPad really represents a sunset for them. The optimist in me thinks it couldn't even if it tried. First, know that I fundamentally agree with Alex and Mark: the closed nature of the iPad turns me off, and I wouldn't give one to my kid if I were encouraging her to learn about how computers work. But, Apple's rightly betting that most people don't want to know about the inner workings of a computer,* and regardless of the fact that Apple runs the App Store with an iron fist, dedicated hackers have still figured out ways to run whatever software they want on the iPhone/iPod touch. They'll do the same with the iPad, and this led me to muse that the open versus closed debate, which has geeks like me in a tizzy, may be 99% a philosophical discussion. Because while we're all ranting about how closed the iPad will be, the jailbreak community is planning competitions to see who can crack it first. The sun isn't setting on tinkerers; their desire to crack things open intensifies when faced with something that's closed by design. The challenge is part of the appeal. I wrote Mark an email about all this earlier and realized I should have just posted it publicly. Here's a quick copy and paste job, with a few edits for readability. Doesn't tinkering, by definition, connote cracking something open, voiding the warranty, and twiddling regardless of consequences?
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