This author is the founder of winrumors.

While he was running an exchange server, I was learning to program because I couldn't afford server software. I wanted to be the guy running an exchange server too. I wanted to run all sorts of stuff I couldn't afford. But I got my hands on visual studio 97 instead.

I home schooled, and worked as a tech at a sort of server junk shop in Dallas (what many may not know about Dallas is that it's city built on telecom). They would purchase computers from companies going out of business, refurbish, and resell them. I was 14, and paid in cash or store credit. My room was also full of servers and networking equipment. I bought as many of the servers that weren't selling as I could.

My friends and I watched the 1995 film "hackers" on repeat as if it were a new religion. We had LAN parties most weekends, and a lot of my equipment became "mobile". At any one time, I always had a "best" server that was stripped down for transport (which changed every time I could get my hands on something more powerful) and a bucket of switches and ethernet cables. Reminiscing is fun.

By the time the iPhone released, I was 7 years into my professional programming career writing desktop and server software. I completely ignored the iPhone. The idea was cool, it certainly looked cool, but the system itself was an appliance. I didn't believe in computing appliances. I still have little to no interest in mobile as it currently exists, and I don't regret it.

In my opinion, Apple's innovation wasn't the iPhone. It wasn't the app store. It was getting carriers to subsidize a $1,000 pocket computer and call it a phone. It makes sense, if you were building a $1k computer (that is actually worth a grand) to fit in consumer's pockets that you'd want to build in a store so you can make your money back. This business model already existed in gaming consoles (in consoles a majority of their money is made in licensing software). It was obvious it was going to sell like hotcakes. Unfortunately, this cemented the iPhone's appliance nature. They HAVE to be accessible. They HAVE to be secure. They HAVE to have long battery life. Those elements can only be maintained if they are viciously protected. I can get my windows machine to do whatever I want. The limit is physics and my imagination. I can get an iPhone to do what apple approves.

From a consumer perspective I understand that mobile is awesome. Everything is bite-sized and convenient. From a programmer's perspective, I can't help but see your phone as a toy computer, and "apps" as software appetizers. That may change, and I would welcome the change. As it stands, the walled garden, battery life, and touch inputs keep it at toy status for me.

I'm 34 now. When I started my career, the young programmers were 34. I was mentored by greybeards in their 40's and 50's. Now 34 is the beginning of being old. I don't meet many programmers over 40 anymore. I do the work the "young" guys are afraid of. I write the heavy math. I do the memory optimization. I do the complex multi-threading. I build the novel features. I write the code you can't copy and paste from stack overflow. I fix the fuck-ups. Maybe that's because the iPhone never killed my inner nerd.

When I was young I programmed because I couldn't afford the real stuff. Now when I program (outside of paid work) it's because the next real stuff doesn't exist yet.

I'll be really sad if the future truly is your phone as an interface streaming data to and from cloud processing. I can't help but feel like it's a step back.