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Comment by kayamon | Hacker News Reader

I think you have very much misread it.

I'm not complaining about desire for control at all. I'm complaining about the inability for a program to treat it's code and data as the same medium.

That is very much the key tenet of a Von Neumann architecture.

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That's a consequence of the Von Neumann architecture, not a tenant of it. All a Von Neumann machine is is one where both code and data exist in the same address space and are stored in the same memory pool (plus some other details). Apple's devices still do that, all the restrictions take place in the OS - well above the computer architecture level.

You might as well argue that Linux isn't really a Von Neumann architecture because you can only execute files that have the executable bit set.

You may have meant s/tenant/tenet. I'm only pointing it out because the typo is an extant word that may be interpreted to mean something proximate (but not identical) to what I think you actually meant.

Having read "The Computer and the Brain" by von Neumann. I would argue some key aspects of the von Neuman architecture are a computer's ability to store a program in memory, and have it fetched to run on the CPU. Another important aspect is a program counter(PC), and IO devices attached to the CPU via a bus.

The concepts that I would categorize as the von Neumann architecture are incredibly basic. Equating his plan for computer design with a difference between storing program/data vs. just program misses the mark. Von Neumann wasn't at all concerned with this difference.

Take this quote from "The Computer and the Brain": "Large digital machines are made up of 'active' organs and of organs serving memory functions-I will include among the latter the 'input' and 'output' organs.."

You can see how basic his thinking is by today's standards, and why Dijkstra later criticized him, and other American computer scientists for anthropomorphizing machines. He talks about 'an organ serving a memory function', he doesn't even talk about main memory because that word isn't in use yet.

You're interpreting von Neumann from a modern context. You don't understand just how basic and fundamental his ideas were.

Although this is freedom-limiting, I strongly doubt that this thinking on iWatches will "infect" desktops in the future. The iWatch is designed to be an appliance, much like that microwave, rather than a computing platform for on-board idea creation.

Also, digital watches of all sorts have pretty much always been Harvard architecture for the past N years. From a use case perspective, the iWatch should be treated as a glorified digital watch, not a minified iPhone. Seen from this angle, I disagree that the iWatch is a "step backward". But I do agree with you that in general, Apple is annoying for deliberately limiting freedom.

Not to complain about terminology, but appliances used to be precisely the sort of stuff you could repair. I've fixed my microwave, I did not carry it to a genius bar. This is the reason why I fear this pernicious business model will spread: it promises lock-in for everybody, from John Deere to coffee machines makers.

As far as the iwatch being just a watch, the same thing could have said of the iphone. It was a phone, only cooler. Almost a decade later, ios devices are the platforms where many users do a significant fraction of their computing. And while ios devices may not require on bitcode submission, they limit the users freedom in a way that is fundamental. Image a world were every x86 computer sold post 1995 (outside of the server space) could only run Windows.

Besides, even if you own a "creation machine", you'll often be catering to the market of restricted devices (case and point: gecko on ios).

EDIT: I'll grant you may be right in the specific sector of non-computing electronics (watches, calculators, etc).

I dunno. I could see the likes of ChromeOS go down that path.

Never mind that iOS is getting more "desktop-ish" by the release.

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