On Hacking

I got an email from O'Reilly about the iPhone Hacks book that said "Apple's approach to the iPhone and iPod Touch is to control the software and control the hardware, but it's an open hardware world today, and we want more from these devices than Apple's willing to give."

I know I often come off as an Apple apologist but what makes the Mac different is that a single company creates both the hardware and the software. When the operating system ships, the engineers know exactly what graphics cards they need to support. They know all of the possible configurations that an end user could be running on.

The same is true about the iPhone. It's exciting to anticipate what is coming next for this platform both in hardware and in software. Whatever is coming next, the Apple engineers creating the next version of the OS X that runs on the iPhone know all of the hardware they need to support.

Even with the hardware and software working together, things go wrong. Last week during a break at JavaOne I walked over to the San Francisco Apple store with a friend whose iPhone had reclassified all of his music and video as "other" and made it inaccessible. There was no obvious way to reindex the content and so he had to restore and resync the phone. It's not clear what caused the problem. But he hadn't hacked the phone in any way.

I get the whole hacker culture, but I worry when we encourage people to hack their iPhones without understanding the risks. And then I reread my email from O'Reilly and realized that I'd missed the point.

The email was not about hacking the iPhone. The email was about hacking the distribution channels available to publishers. In a recent Radar post Tim O'Reilly warned Publishers Beware: Amazon has you in their sights. It looks to me as if this email is an experiment in responding to Amazon's control.

The email explains that for $6/month you can "Join iPhone Hacks and gain advanced access to hacks, tips, and tricks to make your iPhone experience even better. You'll learn how to do things to your iPhone that would surprise even Apple engineers! Members of this community site can make comments, participate in the forums, and help author the book by submitting their own hacks."

I'm not sure who this is targeting because the same URL appears after each of the three paragraphs in the body of the email. Not resourceful enough to click on a URL that appears once but the perfect target to be hacking on an iPhone.

Six dollars a month. I look forward to seeing how this works out. It's so hard to figure out how to get people to pay for online content. I wonder if this will be a successful model and for whom. For the readers it's at the opposite side of the spectrum from Safari Books online. With Safari you have access to a huge selection of books for a monthly subscription fee. In that case each author gets a share of some percentage of the monthly fee based on the popularity of their book. But here the website and book are built around a single title. I'm hoping the authors do well.

Nice job O'Reilly -- I think you may be on to something. The price for a year of this service is a little less than the price of one month of phone service. I am not a fan of hacking the iPhone but I do like the idea of hacking the publisher's distribution channel.