Apple puts users on a need-to-have basis

Considering how bright and enthusiastic Apple’s engineers and product managers are, I know each day brings dozens of new ideas to the conference table. Ultimately, Apple turns thumbs down on 995 out of 1,000 of those ideas. Apple could easily stuff in the box with every copy of OS X four supplemental DVDs containing all the brilliant ideas its engineers have dreamed up and all the open source projects advanced by groups within the company. It could fill the unoccupied 2GB of the OS X client DVD with optional goodies. But it doesn’t. The company famous for the pretty computers and the borderline sinful Aqua GUI doesn’t actually show off. It gives users only what they absolutely need. Seriously.

In the early planning for Tiger, Release 10.4 of Apple’s OS and application framework, Apple culled what had to be an endless list of must-haves and can’t-misses and decided what Tiger would become. It happened fast. The secret? Every new feature or enhancement has to pass the necessity test.

For user-facing applications and services, “better” is only better if it applies to all users. All Mac users will use the powerful Spotlight search engine. They’ll all use Dashboard desktop applets and the Automator graphical workflow creator. You carry out your own necessity test the second you use anything new on a Mac. It passes your test if you immediately accept that you were deprived by not having that new feature all along.

OS X Server works out of the box as an app server, e-mail server, HTTP server, and on and on, but there is none of the endless menuless buffet common to open source. For each new release, Apple samples from myriad open source and internal-project choices and takes commercial the very few that pan out. At Apple that means subjecting a solution — one chosen solution for each service OS X Server’s users need — to commercial validation, fixes, tuning, QA, issue tracking, administrative and operational integration, documentation, and submission to the Software Update system. Anyone who thinks Apple’s feeding for free from the open source trough is not paying attention. OS X is tight. Tight doesn’t come cheap, and OS X’s profits are mostly indirect. The OS is packaged with clients and servers and is offered as comparatively cheap upgrades — and much of it is published as open source.

I don’t trade away my freedom of choice because Apple makes technology choices on my behalf. I can hack the OS X kernel and replace my retail kernel using instructions written by Apple. I can replace Postfix, Apple’s selected mail server, and I can get a cut of Apache and PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) later than the ones Apple put on its DVDs. But even though I have these freedoms, none of them serves business necessity.

I haven’t been brainwashed by Apple when I say I want systems — clients and servers alike — that come out of the box ready to run. I want a short list of system-managed features I can turn on and off and the freedom to reach beyond that without getting my hand slapped by the platform. These things serve necessity, or at least they serve the requirements I’d lay out for servers and clients.

User necessity is a much higher engineering standard to satisfy than going for look, feel, or functionality.

Next time you look at a Mac, appreciate where Apple’s priorities really lie.