The Steve Jobs email that outlined Apple’s strategy a year before his death | Hacker News Reader

The Steve Jobs email that outlined Apple’s strategy a year before his death

qz.com

216 pointsuptown163 comments

I keep having this fantasy that Jobs would never have stood for the erosion of the pro level products into thin clients, like the new MBP, the lack of updates to the Mac Pro line, retrograde motion on the Mini, etc.

But seeing this, and the 4-5 perfunctory lines devoted at the end to the entire Mac line, makes me realize that's probably just a fantasy after all. This is where Apple has been going for awhile apparently.

Did you miss all the "be better than Google"? He seemed intensely scared of them, to the point where he wanted Apple to focus 100% on beating them. Google doesn't do laptop/desktop computers (until this year with the pixel). We are seeing this version of Apple come to fruition; all-in on mobile and consumer software services.

Job's fear of Google is justified. He sees the dwindling PC sales and knows that they're not the future. He sees Google as a threat because they don't even bother with PCs, they're a cloud first company and Job's knows that's where Apple needs to go next to avoid losing relevance.

It seems pretty obvious today but 6 years ago that was pretty forward thinking.

I'm sure "scared of them" played some part, but "angry at them" played a larger one. This wasn't too long after Google blind-sided Apple by entering the phone market, which SJ somehow thought was a betrayal. To be fair, they did so while Schmidt was actually still sitting on the board at Apple, which might be what really ticked Steve off.

And they did so with an OS based on a technology, er, "borrowed" from SUN and now owned by his great friend Larry Ellison.

Lots of straws on that camel...

It's not like Google helped Oracle continue to fail at having their own mobile platform. Jonathan Schwartz, SUN CEO at the time, witnessed in support of Google, as he encouraged them to use it. The whole point was to open more technologies to foster creative ideas, while Apple continues to cherry pick from for their "locked users".

And don't forget that Google's Eric Schmidt was on the Apple board at the time... he would literally be asked to leave the room when they discussed the iPhone.

> Google doesn't do laptop/desktop computers

They do:

"Google Chromebooks outsell Apple Macs" (May 2016)

http://www.businessinsider.com/google-chromebooks-outsell-ap...

You could look at it in another way though. This is not a will, it's a meeting agenda; Mac didn't need to be discussed at Top100 because Jobs knew the dynamics of that market inside out, there was nothing to discuss.

The overall direction of travel and the emphasis on i-devices were pretty clear, yes, but it was uncharted territory so that's what had to be assessed. The view of the PC as home hub was still there, for example - that's now been ditched in the Apple world, considering Apple TV is an also-ran and iMac / MacMini are effectively dead. Steve might not have done that, not like this anyway.

> Mac didn't need to be discussed at Top100 because Jobs knew the dynamics of that market inside out, there was nothing to discuss.

Did we read the same email? Half of the "Strategy" bullet points relate direclty to the PC and it's role. He points out that Apple is the inventor of the Digital Hub concept with the PC being the hub. He goes on to say that the concept has since evolved to the Cloud being the hub, not the PC, but Apple hasn't evolved and is in danger of losing out if they do not transition away from the PC to cloud. He specifically says the PC is just another client.

    – Post PC era- Apple is the first company to get here
    – Post PC products now 66% of our revenues
    – iPad outsold Mac within 6 months
    – Post PC era = more mobile (smaller, thinner, lighter) + communications + apps + cloud services
    – we invented Digital Hub concept
    – PC as hub for all your digital assets
    – digital hub (center of our universe) is moving from PC to cloud
    – PC now just another client alongside iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, …
    – Apple is in danger of hanging on to old paradigm too long (innovator’s dilemma)

The bullet points and the fact that Apple dropped "Computer" from it's name to focus on Consumer Electronics should give you an understanding of Apple's strategy and how they see the PC. They're clearly moving away from the Pro Tools segment that supported them for so long and they run the risk of being the next Sony CE when someone else invents the next iPod.

I don't disagree, my remark was more shaded by the MBP debacle: there is nothing in that email saying "our pro tools should suck from now on". There is an emphasis on i-devices and cloud (and lock-in...), of course, and on new strategies, which is what has to be hashed out; but there would have been no need to hash out what a great Pro laptop is or what a great desktop is, since Steve would have seen a few in his time. He's had quite a few run-ins with his developer ecosystem throughout the years, so he knew pretty well what you can and cannot sell to that crowd.

I'm not sure suck is right word, they're just catering to a different market. The new MBPs seem to be targeted at the "prosumer" market and not actual professional market. It's almost as if Apple is abandoning the segment that kept them alive pre-iPod. It makes you wonder if they're going to introduce an actual professional line again.

I mean what do the actual Apple Developer use as their daily drivers?

There won't be a Mac in another five years, Pro or otherwise. Didn't anyone notice that they dropped "Computer" from their company name, concurrently with the release of their iOS product line? They don't want to be in the commodity appliance business, and that's what computers are.

I mean what do the actual Apple Developer use as their daily drivers?

Many people see this as a relevant question for some reason, but I'm not sure why. You don't need a Sony branded PC to develop for the PS4, or a Microsoft branded PC to develop for the Xbox. You still need a Mac to develop for iOS and OSX, but there's no technical reason for that. It's a wholly-artificial constraint imposed by Apple... one that could go away tomorrow with a stroke of Tim Cook's pen.

If that were the case then why continue trying to innovate the computer? If the Post PC Era and their embrace of consumer electronics means they plan to abandon the PC then why bother investing in innovating it? Why not make moves to push users off their hardware? Allow OSX to be virtualized or release XCode for Linux or PC?

If that were the case then why continue trying to innovate the computer?

They don't innovate that much. They just duct-tape reference designs from Intel and other vendors together, like any other PC vendor.

It doesn't take much innovation to select a headphone jack or a USB jack in Altium and hit the Delete key.

There's surely valid criticism of the new MBPs, but calling them "thin clients" is patently ridiculous.

Yes of course. But the idea that it's the direction they're headed in was lifted straight from Steve's own words in the original post: "PC now just another client alongside iPhone, iPad, iPod touch"

This is foreshadowed in section 1:

  – Post PC products now 66% of our revenues
  – iPad outsold Mac within 6 months
  – Post PC era = more mobile (smaller, thinner, lighter) + communications + apps + cloud services
  – PC now just another client alongside iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, …

Emphasis on "just another client".

Still questionable. Steve could have allowed the Mac to become "just another client," sure, but it could've been a professional-focused client. The fact that all your data was moving to the cloud for easier access isn't a negation of bringing that data back down to a more capable machine for production.

I mean, the post-PC era came, but it's not like our collective productivity went off a cliff with it, nor that the majority of our productivity moved to mobile. It's just moved to non-Apple platforms.

That section was more about the PC shifting away from being the hub through which all your devices are connected. It implies that PC sales are no longer crucial in order to "lock customers" into their ecosystem, but it's clear that he still wanted to create valuable products that would be tied together.

  – we invented Digital Hub concept
  – PC as hub for all your digital assets
  – contacts, calendars, bookmarks, photos, music, videos
  – digital hub (center of our universe) is moving from PC to cloud

This was 5 years ago. Since then, iPad sales have declined and iPhone sales are flat. iCloud did _not_ become the consumer's single hub for all devices. Amazon Echo created a new device category and Siri did not take over the world. IoT is fragmented chaos. One can imagine that Jobs would have adjusted his 2011 strategy in response to the changing market.

If Jobs faced a choice of promoting "Apple PC as digital hub" or "non-Apple cloud(s) as aggregate digital hub", which would be better? Apple has thrived by integrating hardware and software. In the "cloud", this integration advantage is lost as Microsoft aggressively ports their apps to Azure cloud + iOS devices. Jobs could have read the writing on the cloud and repositioned the Mac as IoT digital hub and cloud cache, via macOS Sierra Server ($20 in the Mac App Store, but could use some love, http://www.apple.com/macos/server/).

> iCloud did _not_ become the consumer's single hub for all devices

Are you sure? I now keep only a small portion of the music I own on my phone. The rest is in my iCloud account. I don't keep any video on my devices (other than what I record with the camera). It's all on iCloud. I use my AppleTV to watch movies, television shows, and listen to music, and it all streams from the cloud. While I don't keep my photos in the cloud because I value security, most iOS users do.

iCloud has its issues, but people using iOS are using it for most of their digital media.

That the Macs are not given as much attention doesn't surprise me. It seems 'fitting' that they would gravitate toward the current MacBook end of the spectrum considering that a huge amount of users don't really need much more than that. Cutting out the middle-ground (MacBook Air) makes a certain amount of sense.

But I expected that they'd keep a high-performance developer-focused MacBook (the Pro) for all those guys who are actually making the iOS/MacOS apps. And part of me hoped they'd show some love for that target audience.

On the other hand, who am I kidding. As I'm getting more and more into 'native' development and as my laptop is showing its age when I use Xcode, I'll probably eventually cave and get a MacBook Pro because I can't do my work without it.

It's just not nice, I guess. But then Apple isn't particularly known for being nice, so it makes business-sense. iOS/MacOS devs will still get their new machines, even if they end up feeling fleeced.

I think in the long run Apple will try to move developers over to iPad Pro. Rudimentary Xcode functionality is already in place on iOS.

Interesting. I find it hard to see how they could pull that off, but who knows...

I had a buddy who dreamed about this when the iPad first came out.

Swift Playgrounds is a first step in that direction. There's still a lot of work to do, but you can technically write Swift on an iPad right now, so why not just add an IDE that will compile directly to device (no simulator required).

Would I be surprised to see this happen for an iPad 'Pro' a few years down the line? Nope, not at all, especially given how Apple touted that the Pro cpu specs can take on tasks once reserved for "workstations and PCs".

I'm more thinking about multitasking and all that. For things like web development I usually have open:

- photoshop/illustrator/sketch - a bunch of chrome tabs for research and one with dev tools open - sometimes safari for testing - a task app to keep track of what needs doing - multiple screens so I can use one for reference/research and the other for work

I suppose much of that could work on an iPad Pro assuming it can keep that much stuff in memory and assuming that I can use a keyboard to task-switch. But the multiple screens could be an issue.

I can't fathom doing all of my web dev Photoshop work without a cursor and mouse. A pen seems fine for art projects, but for tasks requiring pixel precision?

I could certainly see them adding developer capabilities to the iPad Pro.

But I have a hard time understanding why they would bother trying to move developers, which to me implies removing dev capabilities from the Mac (how?) or killing the Mac line entirely (why?).

I wouldn't put it past them. They believe themselves to be market makers.

PC and laptop sales are in a free fall and the prices will trend toward zero profit. It's Apple planning to exit a dying form factor.

It's hardly surprising. I mean, since when has Apple done anything to show love for the developers on their platforms? Developers are locked in because Apple has the highest paying userbase, not because they provide the best tools.

Sadly it's hard to blame them when you look at Google and Microsoft. Both had much better development environments and got crushed in revenue.

Are Google's development environments better than what Apple offers?

I mean, they don't have a platform to run their development tools on. You can't really run them on Android, I mean, I guess you could, but the same issues with trying to use an iPad. Chromebook? Maybe? With some work, but not out of the box.

Microsoft certainly has good dev tools, while I don't care for Windows in general, I do appreciate the good tooling when I'm at my day job.

> Are Google's development environments better than what Apple offers?

I'd also like to hear from people who have developed for both platforms.

> Microsoft certainly has good dev tools, while I don't care for Windows in general, I do appreciate the good tooling when I'm at my day job.

Interesting. I do get that impression and it's one reason I'm open to eventually moving to a Microsoft product again for my development work. Is it currently possible to do iOS development exclusively on a Microsoft laptop/environment? Or at least could I get away with using a remotely-controlled Mac Mini for some of the Xcode stuff?

I don't do iOS development so I can't say, I've only toyed with it, and on my Mac at home.

I will say, VS2015 has options for creating iOS projects, but I haven't tried using them and don't know the limitations (irrelevant to my day job, I use VS for C# and sneaking in bits of F# when I can for internal applications targeting Windows desktop).

It most likely uses Xamarin, a C# tool for making iOS apps. It gets the job done, and I made a full commercial app for work using it years ago (and I bet it's more solid now). It's kinda cool because most of the Xamarin functions are almost direct wrappers for iOS functions, so you could look something up in Objective-C and 90% of the time know how to do it using Xamarin.

But there are some hiccups with Xamarin, and I'd rather just code native now for iOS only (there's a lot more jobs for native iOS developers than Xamarin, although React Native is a good bet nowadays too). If I was doing cross-platform with Android, I'd either do React Native or I'd consider Xamarin again.

No they don't. I'll take Xcode errors over a Gradle confit any day.

Done development for both here.

On Dev Tools / Programming:

I'd have to say Google's Tools are 100x better than they used to be. Android Studio is based on IntelliJ IDEA and they've done a decent job of getting emulator performance where it needs to be on good hardware.

That being said, I think Swift was a huge win to Apple developers who were unhappy with Objective-C. Xcode and the iOS simulator are still way ahead of Google's tools on performance.

On SDKs:

This is where Google is really blowing it and where Apple shines. Apple's SDKs tend to be well thought out and well documented.

Android's SDKs on the other hand are poorly documented and are fragmented into a mess. To expand a bit, there are new SDKs for new features on new hardware and tons of "compatibility" SDKs that have to be used to bring modern features to your app if you want to support old Android releases (you have to).

Android's SDKs show both a lack of direction and a rush to patch up the fragmentation mess. This isn't a knock at their hardware (Pixel, etc), which looks nice. There's just a general lack of coherency among their APIs and no clear path on how they're going to fix it.

TLDR; It's fair to say Google is making progress making their developer's lives better but Apple (and it's community developed SDKs) still make a better developer platform and a better software to develop with.

I develop for both iOS and Android. Its night and day difference between the two developer tools. XCode is absolute garbage and get worse year after year. Android Studio is excellent and keeps getting better. Things which were traditionally not great with Android dev are being fixed. Like faster ADB, good emulators, faster built times, Kotlin. I could go into more details, but I would rather be a full time Android developer than a full time iOS developer. The things iOS development really has going for it is, iOS users are more willing to spend money and the there are very few unique devices. Most apps even start out just targeting a single screen size, the iPhone 6. You can't do that if you are targeting the desktop or Android.

> Are Google's development environments better than what Apple offers?

They're really not that great. Android Studio is a hacked-up version of IntelliJ that doesn't feel like a unified experience. Error highlighting often gets out of sync until I rebuild the whole project. Design preview sometimes stops updating, displays an error overlay with a stack trace, and requires manual refreshing and rebuilding to fix. Updating various Google components can be a series of manual clicks and restarts. Gradle sometimes goes out of sync and requires manual rejiggering to get working again. And so on.

> Microsoft certainly has good dev tools

If any one of the Big Three really gets developer tooling, it's Microsoft. Visual Studio is an absolute joy to use, and it has the best Vim integration of any non-Vim editor I've tried. C# is getting better and better with every release; I wish I could use it everywhere.

I'd kill for Visual Studio for OSX and while I haven't used C# much, I loved TypeScript and Delphi, so I guess I'm a bit of a fan of Anders Hejlsberg.

Visual studio code is really worth giving a try these days. It ain't the full fledged thing but it is gaining features rapidly. The user base is great and extensions are exploding. It might actually become my standard editor on macs. Disclaimer: 80% of my professional time I spend on Windows having VS + resharper available. Up to this day nothing beats that combo for me if it comes to coding/development.

When I'm talking about development environments, I'm talking beyond just the IDE.

Would you rather work with Java , C#, or Objective-C?

Would you rather work with a open-source frameworks or a closed-source ones?

Would you rather have to wait a week and pass an arbitrary review of your application for every release, or be able to publish directly to customers?

Would you like to be able to distribute test builds directly to customers?

Would you like the option to architect your app as more than one process?

There's been improvement on some of these (Swift is promising, XCode is actually pretty good now, Google and Apple's review process has converged), but as an iOS dev I've constantly been jealous of my Android teammates since they can do things like "use a modern language", "inspect the framework to see if that behavior is intentional", or "send a test build directly to that customer", or "run their app in the background" or "use interprocess communication".

Java is a modern framework? i think Swift is much more modern (and faster). Also, I submitted an app yesterday at 2PM and it was in store at 10PM. Sounds fine to me if it keeps the crap out of the app store. Battery lifetime and sandboxing is important to me, as it is to many phone users, and multi-process applications make both of it harder to achieve. Why do you need it anyways?

> Sounds fine to me if it keeps the crap out of the app store.

Hahaha. Oh, were you being serious?

"Would you rather work with Java , C#, or Objective-C?"

In my particular case, Objective C, of course, because it is much better as an interface to c++ or c.

We do multimedia, audio, video and image processing. Java is not an update but going backwards in lots of things compared to c there.

We have to tolerate Google terrible tools for this as we port our software for Android.

Most of these criticisms are outdated.

I'd take Swift 3 over any of those languages in a heartbeat.

In most cases, as a consumer, I want the framework to work well and be well-documented and well-maintained, all of which are provided by Apple.

We haven't waited a week for reviews for years. I submitted an app this afternoon and it was approved this evening. Review times are faster than Kindle store by far and marginally slower than Play at this point.

TestFlight supports 2k public beta testers, and has excellent built-in distribution, tracking, and support mechanisms (and is free).

I work with Android devs every day, and to be frank, they are jealous of us.

iOS is by far the best mobile platform out there, in terms of its development environment. The problem is that everyone is using the crippled version of it.

Cydia/Theos/Cycript were developed by two people and they come together so much better than that shitty Xcode stack it blows my mind. They are so good that iOS being closed source isn't even a con anymore. They are probably the most underrated tools in existence; most people haven't heard of them (let alone regularly use them) because the industry doesn't see un-jailed iOS as an lucrative market. It's a damn shame.

while I see nothing wrong with this perspective, my question would be: "But what should developers use from now and onwards?"

To make iOS apps you still need (and you always probably will) a mac.

> pro level products into thin clients

I guess Apple is skating to where the puck is going to be. I have a MBP and any serious computation is done on either EC2 or the cluster downstairs (a fairly sizable cluster).

I do think that they optimized for thinness to much in the new MBPs. If I were buying I'd buy an older MBP for the other other ports (SD card is going away but I don't know about the rest).

Just today I was at a Apple Store to get my iPhone replaced under warranty and I saw a customer asking about the delivery time for a Mac Pro. The genius said to him point blank that they couldn't order one for him. That means two things, it's getting updated soon or it's getting axed.

> tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem

I know they've done this, and i know they've done this on purpose; but to read it bare like that is a bit too much for me, especially as I think more and more about the benefits of leaving their ecosystem, and weighing against the downsides.

Everybody tries to do this, but few companies have such a comprehensive ecosystem as Apple. Do note that what you've quoted is not in any way malicious. It's just saying "make all of our products work really great together, so that way someone who uses one of them is much more likely to buy into the rest of the ecosystem". This is a bit different than saying "make it difficult for customers to leave our ecosystem", which would be the malicious approach.

While Apple may not intentionally keep you from leaving their platform, a side effect of their tight integration is that it's harder to leave. Take the Apple Watch for example. Without an iPhone, the Apple Watch goes from a smartwatch to only being able to tell the time. Sure, you could own an Android phone and an Apple Watch, but you wouldn't get any of the benefits of the Apple Watch, which further ties customers to the iPhone.

True, but the Apple Watch is in most ways just an iPhone accessory, and you could make this same argument about any iPhone accessory (though other accessories typically aren't as expensive as the Apple Watch is).

But Apple entered the smart watch market by making an iPhone accessory. Whereas when they entered the smart phone market they made a phone for everyone, not just Mac users. On the other hand IIRC the original iPod required a Mac and they opened that up later.

AFAIK all smart watches require other devices to configure them. Even if you give them cellular connections and whatnot, the screen is just too tiny to do any real configuring on the device directly. But who knows, maybe someday we'll have Apple Watches that can be configured using icloud.com.

So you talked to him, and can now report that it was in no way malicious? Because it sure seems they make it difficult for customers to leave their ecosystem. The effort involved in leaving is usually the justification I hear for why people continue to buy Apple, even when there is other products they'd like to try. No one can deny how effective it has been for them, and a lot of people seem to have no problem with it.

In what way do they make it difficult? Leaving their ecosystem means you're giving up the hardware/software you've paid money for, so the only real question is data, right? I'm struggling to come up with ways in which Apple makes it hard to export your data. The best I can think of is you can't export your iMessages, and any TV/Movies you've purchased on the iTunes Store aren't portable outside of Apple's ecosystem since they're DRM'd (which is not a ploy by Apple to lock you in, but rather a requirement imposed by the content producer), though if you're switching to Windows you can still use iTunes there if you want. Everything else I can think of has at least some way to export it, e.g. Pages/Numbers/Keynote can all be exported into alternative formats, Contacts and Calendars can be exported, etc.

What else is there besides your data, and what you have invested in media or applications. I imagine it's gotten better than it used to be. But does iPhone even have a built-in file explorer yet, or do you still have to download one to really view your content? I haven't had one in a long time, so I could be off on this. But ask yourself why they didn't. Yes you can sync up to Windows now, and it's less buggy, but you still have to go through their iTunes gateway so they can control whats going on. It's all possible, just like deactivating Facebook is possible. But they only give as much control as people have demanded, and it definitely was a bitch at one time. And now we know that it was by design, hence this email.

And believe me, it irks me that every platform now expects me to buy the same Beatles album over and over again.

> And believe me, it irks me that every platform now expects me to buy the same Beatles album over and over again.

What are you taking about? We've had DRM-free music for a long time now.

Where's the lock-in exactly? Because I can't think of any besides "this application isn't available for linux/windows/android".

Photos -> Export unmodified originals

Calendar -> Export as iCal

E-Mail -> IMAP anyway (and most people use gmail anyway)

iTunes -> Stuff you bought is .aac without DRM. Music subscription can be cancelled every month

Personally I'm mostly using google services, some of them in parallel to Apple's (i. e. Photos, Cloud Storage) and some exclusively (Gmail, Calendar). I could switch any day. But I use computers professionally and lack the time to debug kernels to get audio or sleep or networking to work. And I lack the tastelessness to spend the majority of my working hours with a tool made from cheap plastic.

I apologize, I didn't mean to dis your choice in devices. I promised myself I wouldn't go at it with the Kook-Aid drinkers anymore. It's just seeing Jobs set 'locking users in' as part of the agenda makes me upset for Apple users, it obviously never affected me.

You can be as condescending as you want, I'm still curious to hear an example.

Wow that's quite funny that you've interpreted what is clearly about locking users in so they can't leave, as "make all our products work great together".

Let me put this to you, if he'd meant "make our products work great together" then that's what he would have said. But he didn't say that. So please don't try to change what the man said.

All these tech giants fall over themselves trying to dream up ways to lock users into their ecosystem, it's what they do. It's motivated by profit, competition, and aggressive marketing and business. Nothing to do with benefits for the end user, or open technologies or saving people money.

You seem to be missing the point. There's two different ways to lock people in to an ecosystem. The first way (the "good" way) is to make all the components of your ecosystem work so well together that it's hard for someone to find good replacements for any component (i.e. any replacements they look at won't work quite so well with the rest of the ecosystem, so they would be losing value by replacing any component). The second way (the "bad" way) is to deliberately put up roadblocks that actually prevent people from finding replacements. For example, making it impossible to export your data in a cross-platform format, or using proprietary protocols for the sole purpose of preventing others from being compatible. Apple doesn't do the latter - they use open protocols whenever appropriate, and nearly all products have some way to export your data in a cross-platform format.

Except that you can't build anything for OSX when you don't have a Mac. That's a totally artificial constraint. Not lock in, you say? Hell,_Microsoft_ is more open than this... the crowd favourite lock-in bogeyman no less...

Apple does not provide developer tools for other platforms, that's true. But that doesn't make this an artificial constraint. Apple would have to invest time and effort to support development on other platforms, and there's not really any reason for them to do so.

Also, you certainly can develop for macOS from another platform, if you're using a development environment that supports this. There's a number of cross-platform environments that will work. The latest fad is Electron. You just can't build a native Cocoa app. That said, I'm unsure if any third party has a way to codesign your macOS app or if that's limited to Apple's developer tools.

There's no such thing as a "good way" of locking someone in. Stop trying to describe a shit sandwich as a gourmet lunch. The very nature of being locked into something gives us a good idea of how to evaluate that state. The exception would be if outside of this locked in environment is pure evil trying to get in and kill us.

Your claim that Apple is all about cross-platform data formats and non-proprietary protocols "where appropriate" is not my experience at all. I can only imagine you are speaking from within the locked-in ecosystem you so love, and have no need to ever go outside?

From iOS app development (at least the submission stage); to prohibiting users from installing software not signed by Apple; to accessing files on your iPad (requires iTunes); lack of SD card on iOS devices; forget about USB; screen mirroring your iPhone to your TV (requires Apple TV, and sensible protocols such as Wi-Fi direct are not permitted); full screen web page on iOS Safari - forget about it; charging your iPad (requires Apple charger); developing a browser for iOS (no alternative render engines allowed); connecting a video-out cable to your iOS device (requires special Apple cable. The list goes on. So many times on my iPad I've wanted to retrieve a file such as an animation I made with an app, and the hassle to bring it across to my desktop PC.. it's a lock-in shit-sandwich, and it's not nice.

> There's no such thing as a "good way" of locking someone in.

You're focusing too much on the word "lock" and completely ignoring the actual meaning. "Locking someone in" by providing so much value that they don't want to go elsewhere is a great thing!

> Your claim that Apple is all about cross-platform data formats and non-proprietary protocols "where appropriate" is not my experience at all.

Please explain, then. As I mentioned in another comment, the only data I can think of from an Apple product that I can't export somehow is my iMessages, and the only purchased content (not apps, it should be obvious why those aren't portable) is TV/Movies, which is because they're DRM'd, which is a requirement from the content producer rather than something Apple chose to do.

Nothing in your last paragraph is at all relevant to being able to export your data, and it's got a lot of misinformation in it as well. I'll respond to some of the more obvious ones.

> prohibiting users from installing software not signed by Apple

This is a major security issue, and isn't even remotely relevant to the discussion about leaving the Apple ecosystem. And of course you can actually install self-signed open-source software through Xcode.

> lack of SD card on iOS devices

A cursory internet search pulls up multiple lightning-enabled SD card readers that you can plug into your iOS devices.

> Wi-Fi direct

Wi-Fi direct isn't a video streaming protocol, it's a way of connecting two wi-fi devices without a wireless access point. It's not even remotely related to the problem of streaming video from your mobile device to your TV. I'm not aware of any "standard" that replicates AirPlay, and competing devices seem to be using their own non-standardized protocols (e.g. Chromecast seems to require using Google's SDK).

> full screen web page on iOS Safari

What are you trying to say here? You're not actually describing a problem. And I'm not sure how this is supposed to be related at all to the current discussion anyway.

> charging your iPad (requires Apple charger)

No it doesn't, it just requires a 12W USB charger. A cursory internet search for "ipad charger" pulls up many third-party devices.

> developing a browser for iOS

I don't see how this is related to the discussion either.

> connecting a video-out cable to your iOS device

Assuming your implication is correct and there are no third-party solutions to doing this besides buying Apple's Lightning Digital AV Adapater, this still doesn't have anything to do with "lock-in", because you can just buy that adapter and now you have industry-standard video out.

> So many times on my iPad I've wanted to retrieve a file such as an animation I made with an app, and the hassle to bring it across to my desktop PC..

This is not a lock-in problem either. I assume you're saying that this particular app requires using iTunes to get the file (though if so that's really surprising, it's been literally years since I've seen an app that actually requires using iTunes file browsing). If there's no easy way to do that, that's a problem with the app. Most apps that let you create content also have a variety of mechanisms for getting the content off of the device. iTunes file browsing dates back from a time when almost everybody actually regularly synced their iOS devices with their computer, and so it wasn't a problem to require using iTunes to transfer files back and forth. Now that syncing with iTunes isn't something everybody is expected to do anymore, there's no reason for apps to be stuck in the past and require using iTunes file syncing to transfer files. So really, your complaint should be with the app's choice of file syncing mechanisms, and not this weird insinuation that the existence of the completely optional feature that is iTunes file syncing is some form of lock-in.

> "Don't want to go elsewhere is a great thing".

Sounds like the Stockholm syndrome of tech brand loyalty.

The world is full of devices and technology "from elsewhere". Just because you choose to only shop at Apple, doesn't mean never buying any other brand is a good thing for general users of technology in this world, for a healthy industry, for innovation. There will always be other brand. Your Apple-only view of the world is the exception, not the norm.

The whole point of ecosystem lock-in is about keeping customers buying Apple products, or LG products or whatever brand is playing the lock-in game. What you're doing is trying your best to flip the definition and motivation behind ecosystem lock-in, to make it something that users actually want. Let me guess, you're on the board of directors of a brand doing exactly that?

This discussion started with the Jobs statement: "tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem"

His choice of words is important. The primary objective in his statement is not "tie products together so they work nicely". The primary objective is "further lock customers in". He has decided that one way to achieve that objective is to tie products together, but obviously there are many other ways already in place to lock customers in, as hinted by the word "further".

>"multiple lightning-enabled SD card readers that you can plug into your iOS devices."

I realize I'm bringing lack of flexibility and openness into this, but I see them as related to lock-in.

These SD devices can only access photos. Let's say I'm browsing the web on my iDevice and want to "Save as" a PDF file, or very large hi-res JPEG, or some other file. You can't do it. There's no file system you can access to save the file, and none you can access to read/copy the file later. I'm talking about expandable storage for whatever purpose I choose, not what Apple decides is best for me. They could have locked down protected OS files while allowing a general file system, but no... it's photos and videos only. Everything else is forbidden.

Wi-Fi direct - I was talking about screen mirroring, not streaming iTunes video. Screen mirroring is useful for things like games and hi-res photo albums, the video camera in real time etc, where HD quality without the bottleneck of an access point is needed. Not possible on an iOS device. It could be, but Apple don't allow it. My Android and Windows laptop allows it but not my iPad. When I visit my nephew, we play soccer on his big screen at 1080p via wi-fi direct from my laptop.

I couldn't care less what Apple does as I will probably sell my iPad soon anyway, even though I've spent hundreds of dollars on apps over the years. What bothers my is that Google and Microsoft see what Apple is doing, and all the money Apple has and think that's what will make them more money - by taking away user control, calling it "protecting user security" and increasing lock-in. I'm not a fan of that, and nor should you be.

By what logic do you think it's a bad thing for a company to make products that complement each other so well that users don't want to leave the ecosystem? Yes, tech diversity is a good thing, but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing for one company to build a great ecosystem that attracts users. If they're the only company that builds these products, then there's no diversity, but Apple is hardly the only company making products in the various categories that make up its ecosystem (it's not even the market share leader in those products, with the sole exception of the Apple Watch).

I'll try to explain it again in more concrete terms. The way this form of lock-in works is by making products that not only have good value on their own, but have even better value when used together because they complement each other and work great together. Any given product may have competitors from other companies, and those competing products may even be objectively better when compared just against the product (and not against the ecosystem as a whole). But someone who's invested in the ecosystem may still choose to stick with their current product because, even though in isolation it's worse than the competitor, when viewed in the context of the ecosystem it's better because it makes all the other products they have better, and in turn those products make this one better.

As a concrete example, let's go with phones. Someone who has an iMac and a MacBook Pro and an AppleTV will get a lot of benefit from having an iPhone, because these products work well together and complement each other. But if they buy an Android phone instead, then they can't AirPlay to their AppleTV, they can't play their iTunes TV shows or movies on their Android, they don't get Universal Clipboard or Handoff, they don't get iCloud integration, they don't have Pages/Numbers/Keynote and so can't seamlessly switch between devices while editing their files, etc. All these features are ways the Apple devices work together that are lost if you leave the ecosystem. And that's fine, none of these things are artificial roadblocks created by Apple to prevent customers from switching.

> The primary objective is "further lock customers in". He has decided that one way to achieve that objective is to tie products together, but obviously there are many other ways already in place to lock customers in, as hinted by the word "further".

You're being incredibly nitpicky about something that you are objectively wrong about. The phrase "lock-in" does not mean what you're trying to imply it means. Yes, there are forms of lock-in that are bad for users, but to say that the usage of the phrase "lock-in" implies these bad forms is a logical fallacy. And no, the usage of the word "further" does not in any way mean that Apple is doing both bad lock-in and good lock-in together, it just means that Apple already has an ecosystem that works well together and thus provides benign lock-in, and Jobs was saying they should double-down on this approach, making their products work even better together and therefore strengthening the (benign) lock-in.

> Wi-Fi direct - I was talking about screen mirroring, not streaming iTunes video

Before I wrote that comment I read the whole wikipedia page on Wi-Fi direct, and no, it doesn't mean screen mirroring either (in fact, the page doesn't even contain the word "video"). You may be using some feature of your laptop/receiver device that uses Wi-Fi direct, but Wi-Fi direct itself does not magically let you send video from one device to another. You need some protocol built on top of Wi-Fi direct for that. BTW what device are you streaming to? Because the devices I'm familiar with that allow wireless streaming all have their own special way of doing it (e.g. Chromecast, as I mentioned before, requires using Google's SDK).

Further down he describes it as making it "sticky". This more clearly says friction to get out, no?

In the dot-com era, marketing types aspired to make their Web sites and apps "sticky" in the sense that readers and users would not just dip in for something in particular, but would be motivated to come back again and again. Frequent, small, regular updates to content is one example of this strategy.

This is where the term "sticky" comes from. I realize that's not quite as satisfying as your villain-validating interpretation.

Thanks for the explanation. Personally I'm not looking for villains, I always think it's at least in part more systemic. They stick to what works, and tight integration of their services can be done in a purely positive intention that makes everything work better together.

However they have the resources and reach to build "their ecosystem" and strengthening it will have the side effect of relieving pressure to do anything open. At most we get some legacy products like itunes on windows or a hidden ical export. Just compare it to a new player like slack with a minimal ecosystem, they build or make possible all the apis for all the services they don't offer.

Furthermore apple will use proper apis for all their services, nicely documented, but just not open to the public. (I don't know apple too much, might be wrong here)

Oh and by the way: psycho tricks that add no true benefit to the product, but make you stick are very common and widely accepted, but I sill dislike them (though maybe you have to play this game to stay in the game at all)

Customer lock-in is Apple's entire value proposition. Buy in to the ecosystem and we'll provide the best experience that gets better the deeper you go. But yes leaving it is starting to look good to customers as software quality has declined and now hardware options are misaligned and industry is reaching parity in UI and features

wow, said it better than I ever could

Personally, I think this was an insightful comment

> – Google and Microsoft are further along on the technology, but haven’t quite figured it out yet

Basically, he accepts that Apple lags behind in technology but Apple can "make things work". Technology alone is not enough - you need a healthy marriage of technology and humanities.

Nothing new with Apple, the last time they were a early adopter was with the original Mac. Since then they have been latecomer to existing markets, but made a big splash about their entry via their inside track with MSM (a track that exist as a legacy of that Mac).

I'd say that's selling Apple short. I have no particular love for them, especially at this moment, but they make a big splash because they (still?) manage to do things right in all the ways that I (and apparently others) care about.

But now it looks like Microsoft is figuring it out. Azure is doing great, the Surface Pro got more love than the MBPro, and Microsoft is actually courting developers with VS.

Google? They prob have the best AI, but I'm sorta skeptical that the Pixel is gonna work for them. They've never been able to brand and command like Apple has in this regard. For cloud though, they destroy Apple still.

I guess this is true of almost all the big companies; nevertheless, it's interesting to see it written explicitly:

"tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem"

" Apple’s year of the cloud

– tie all of our products together

– make Apple ecosystem even more sticky"

Yup, their end goal. You cant even close your account with apple, there is no facility or function to do so (removing a device and changing the email is NOT closing the account).

Did you think a major business goal would go unstated?

> tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem

Their failure to execute on this is what is wrong with the current Apple. While it may sound nefarious, it was never a secret agenda, but it was successful because of trust. There was an inherent trust that buying into the Apple walled garden of products was superior to the outside world. Like it or not, Apple delivered on that promise to an almost frustrating capacity.

Fast-forward to the present, that trust has been broken. The flailing we see from the Apple community (of which i am one) is because so many of us feel that trust has been broken. I can't plug my headphones into an iPhone 7 without a dongle. If i bought a new MacBook Pro, i can't plug an iPhone 7 into it, either. The total lack of answers on the desktop side has exceeded concerning. Those of us in the walled garden are seeing the flowers wilt and the maintainers turn a blind eye. But because many of us have built our professional careers on Apple hardware and OS, there is fear of change. What if Ubuntu isn't as good? How will i ship my iOS app, etc.

Trust is an important but delicate idea. Once broken, it can takes years to earn back.

> tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem

> > Their failure to execute on this is what is wrong with the current Apple

I respectfully disagree. I would argue that the "new" Apple tie their products together and "lock customers into [their] ecosystem" much better than the old. Handoff, Universal Clipboard, iCloud drive/documents/desktop, Maps, Music and more have all been improved a lot in the last 3 years. I'd even admit that I've knowingly (that their goal is to tie me in) chosen Apple services instead of others due to their tighter integration.

> I can't plug my headphones into an iPhone 7 without a dongle.

While I agree with you that this is annoying, and I've even made this argument to other, I have to admit that I very rarely connect my iPhone to my mac and only remember doing so to back up, which has been replaced by iCloud backups.

This is probably also what Steve was referring to as Inventor's dilemma. They could "do the right thing" and someone else would push wireless or they could do it themselves.

this also can equate to:

"lock other products out, preventing future customers from adopting our ecosystem"

> – Strategy: catch up to Android where we are behind (notifications, tethering, speech, …) and leapfrog them (Siri, …)

> – Strategy: catch up to Google cloud services and leapfrog them (Photo Stream, cloud storage)

> – way ahead of Apple in cloud services for contacts, calendars, mail

Interesting to see how critical Apple internally was (is?) about their competitiveness.

It's also interesting to see that they knew notifications were crap circa 2011 and _still_ haven't done anything to get ahead of Android.

Might have something to do with the Patent Google has[0].

[0] https://www.google.com/patents/US20090249247

That is an application, not an issued patent. Whether a patent is granted remains to be seen.

> – 2011 Strategy: ship iPad 2 with amazing hardware and software before our competitors even catch up with our current model

Typical Apple process here: Ship a base model (MVP?) to test the market, then ship the full featured one on next iteration.

Also, this is why you should always wait at least for revision 2 before buy every new Apple product. The new Macbook touchbar thing could fall under this, too.

The iPad 3 was an extreme version of that, having been superseded by the iPad 4 in only 7 months. Never used an iPad 3, but I have a feeling the silicon wasn't quite ready for a display resolution of 2048x1536.

I thought the iPad 3 (aka "The New iPad") was great. I used it for a few years before upgrading to the iPad Air 2. I thought the short 7 month cycle was to change the annual launch period of new iPads, and to get it on lightning.

I owned the iPad 3 for a few months, luckily I sold it off before the new one came out. It was pretty janky, games had a lot of problems, and I'm sure if I had it today it would be in a drawer somewhere. The iPad 4 on the other hand is still running like a champ with iOS 10 and we still use it today.

The post-PC era sure was looking like a big deal in 2009-2010 but now its clear that mobile has over-saturated the market and old fashioned laptops and desktops weren't actually being replaced, people just stopped buying replacements as frequently. Are we post-PC? If so, I'm not seeing it.

In fact, Q2 2016 PC sales are slightly up and ipad sales down in a bizarre turnaround. The year-over-year decline is still there, but mostly because a 5-6 year old desktop or laptop is perfectly usable still, while a 2-3 year old phone or tablet is ready for the garbage heap.

Can someone elaborate on the "Holy War with Google"? I think of Google as encroaching on Apple's standard turf, not the other way around, and Apple hasn't been expanding towards the places Google wants to go. What was Jobs's plan, beyond just "do better than them?" The phrasing implies something grand and specific.

EDIT: I forgot that Siri hadn't come out yet; I suppose they did jump ahead of Google, but not with a product good enough to corner the market.

Maps hadn't come out yet either; Google was their system maps provider.

Still is if you want good maps.

It's hard to believe, I know, but at least for the US, Apple Maps works very well and has won me over. Once the maps functionality became good enough on both, it became a battle of UIs, and I find Apple's iOS 10 Maps UI much easier to use while driving.

That said, it's an uneasy win. Google Maps might tempt me back when they ship a speed limit indicator; that's a great feature.

Google Maps on my Pixel shows the current speed limit. Not sure if they have that on the iOS version yet though.

My experience is the exact opposite of yours and Apple Maps still seems weak. I've only used Apple Maps a couple of times but every time it came up with some rather brain-dead routes for simple local navigation, and this is in the US.

By brain-dead I mean things like instead of simply turning left onto the street the destination was off of it went a few blocks past before turning left, which resulted in backtracking. It was bizarre. Google maps had no issues with the same route.

My GF uses Apple Maps regularly because Car Play forces her to and she complains it doesn't work that well. She will always use Google Maps instead when she's not using Car Play. Apple Maps seems to be in the "good enough" category still, rather than being actually good.

Apple maps still sucks in Australia. Wife accidentally used it for directions the other day and it took us to a dead end street telling us to continue ahead. By the looks of the tress at the end of the street it's been a dead end for at least 50 years.

It's probably linked to this quote:

> I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.

The primary strategy appears to have been to use IP courts to make Android undistributable rather than competing directly, as Apple have no interest in capturing the bottom 90% of the mobile market. The Oracle v Google case is probably part of the same campaign.

And yet the brains of Apple... the man who would take down the Android/Google juggernaut... was laid low by simple fruit.

If they really wanted holy war, they should release a cheap phone that could be easily bought worldwide. They could even take a loss (using their $40bill as Jobs said he was willing to do), and try to earn back the loss in the app store.

It's such an obvious strategy, but oh well..

It would risk Apple's position as the luxury brand.

> they should release a cheap phone that could be easily bought worldwide

That's just a war in the mobile device space. If they really wanted a "holy war" they'd have started a Search Engine and massively discount the ads in exchange for exclusivity. That would be the equivalent of Google entering the space where Apple made all their money.

What's holier than a holy war at Apple? Margins.

Nowhere is Apple's rudderlessness more apparent than their cloud "strategy."

>– Strategy: catch up to Google cloud services and leapfrog them (Photo Stream, cloud storage)

iCloud is an embarrassment. I can't tell you how many people I have met who dont understand why their phone stops backing up, and that they need to pay $1/m for more space. To absolutely ruin someones ios mobile experience over $12 is inexcusable. iCloud and iTunes backups are completely incompatible. If you attempt to use both you end up with forked independent backups. To check all of your available iCloud restore points, you either need to call Apple Support and confirm the times or wipe a device and get back to the restore screen. Let me repeat that: you need to ERASE YOUR PHONE TO CHECK __IF__ A BACKUP EXISTS. Then there is iCloud Drive, iCloud Backup, yet I cant browse through backups in the cloud, I can only do a full restore to a device.

Photos has "iCloud Photo Library" "My Photo Stream" "iCloud Photo Sharing" etc. And iCloud has Photo backup in the iCloud section of settings. How many different ways is Apple going to reinvent localstore, sync, cloudbackup, sharing of photos? It's almost starting to feel like its too late for them to catch up to Google Photos. It is a telltale sign of rottenness in Denmark that Google Photos is coming to the rescue to save Apple users FROM a lack of unified iPhoto/iCloud backup+share.

My Passbook/Wallet needs to be recreated every time I set up a device?

Apple needs three things

1) a visionary. a leader who makes arbitrary design decisions and cuts through committee banality and risk aversion. Someone a tiny bit reckless, ready to make bold decisions that dont have statistics to back them up. A person actually forging a unique strategy path through the untamed cloud wilderness. The current level of cohesiveness and interoperability IS NOT GOOD for a company trying to compete in the 2016 cloud space. Microsoft Teams is Microsoft merging Exchange/Sharepoint/Skype into one interface. Apple should be scared by how independent they have left their software silos. There has been no movement whatsoever.

2) to start spending its cash reserves on acquiring fully fleshed out software companies. Microsoft needed a mobile Mail app? They acquire the team and software and rename it Outlook. Apple needs to seriously evaluate every piece of Office/Productivity software that Google and Microsoft (and Adobe and Facebook) make, and acquire a competitor. And not roll the team into their existing product, but SCRAP their existing product and migrate the data over cleanly. They should look at the best apps in the apps store, that dont have Microsoft and Google competitors, and buy those too, thus making their Office and Productivity suite unique. Buying Adobe might be a good start. Adobe's Marketing Cloud would position Apple in a new market against Salesforce and Microsoft. Buying Hubspot could do similar. Apple could buy THOUSANDS of the companies represented in its app store, and have first party titles like Nintendo. First party development studios are a great way to attract people to your platform, while letting your other services become cross platform. They should be throwing cash at the wall of potential, nurturing unprofitable but useful/addictive products, and hoping they stumble bassackwards into the next Minecraft or Dropbox before it costs billions. Yet the Valve model of make just a platform, no games, seems to be winning out.

3) recognizing that cross platform software is a gateway drug. A lot of people got into Apple stuff because iPods worked with Windows computers. Apple is where it is because iTunes released for windows and was easier and safer than Napster/Kazaa. They need to recognize that they wont convert everyone from Android and offer Android and Windows versions of their cloud software. If they sow and nurture seeds, iOS wont feel foreign in the event a person decides to finally leave Google or Microsoft. Obviously its important that it work Better on iOS/macOS, but people need to get a taste before they convert to a new ecosystem. Gmail works good on every platform, but it works BETTER with Google Assistant. Apple has 18% mobile marketshare, if they want iMessage to become WhatsApp or Messenger, they need to release it elsewhere, otherwise it will always be second best.

and a bonus fourth thinking a bit outside the box.

4) recognize Yahoo's place in the cloud world is collapsing and offer refugees an alternative. Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Fantasy Football. Maybe buy and save Flickr, and turn Flickr into an iCloud Photos Social network for professional photographers. If only they had a good word they could use to name their nonexistant social cloud product instead of the current word salad they are serving up (hint it's iPhoto.) Apple is very poorly positioned against Instagram, Google Photos, and Adobe Cloud. They should put the effort into Photos that they have into Music and Streaming. Pinterest could be another option. Buy OpenFolio and Robinhood, merge them, and create something better than Yahoo Finance ever was. A finance driven social network could be Apple's way of finally becoming social, without being a "meetoo" like Google+ or a flop like Ping. The state of Fantasy Sports is atrocious, ESPN, NFL, and Yahoo all spend time and effort making their apps worse. CBS is a pay platform minimizing its visibility so most people dont know how good it can be. Can you imagine the cash Apple could print if it was loosely affiliated with sports betting? Apple obviously wants to get into content distribution, and after saying they dont want to acquire ATT, maybe they could look at Medium or The Atavist.

4b) There is a HUGE gap in the world in the Banking/Payment industry. Venmo and Facebook are making payment social. SplitWise could be a great foot in that door. Mint Bills (Check) and the defunct manilla were great cloud bill backups and calendars. Mint and Personal Capital are meta-bank managers that let you see across all your accounts. OpenFolio lets me see all my investments with different companies. Intuit (TurboTax and Mint) have a market cap of 4 billion, buy them.

tldr: Flickr+OpenFolio+Medium+Adobe, and suddenly Apple could be giving Facebook and Google some fair competition, albeit with a lot less AI. Probably let Adobe run the "cloud strategy" part of the company tho.

I agree with you in many ways. I want to add this: Apple has certain features locally bound that I'd like to see more often. I.e. I'd like my desktop to be capable of taking over tasks that I don't want to hand off to a cloud. Local backups are obvious. Also I'd like to see more tasks (potentially privacy related) kept local ala face recognition. They could do more of that without cutting into iCloud.

All very valid criticisms. I especially agree with the idea that Apple should start producing/publishing top tier quality game/video content (via strategic acquisitions). I would add that they need to get in on AR/VR technology and make a more elegant solution than what is currently available ASAP.

> Maybe buy and save Flickr, and turn Flickr into an iCloud Photos Social network for professional photographers. If only they had a good word they could use to name their nonexistant social cloud product product instead of the current word salad they are serving up (hint it's iPhoto.)

This is pretty spot on. I'm a heavy Flickr user who also uses Adobe CC, but I don't upload my media to CC. I'd be much more trusting of Apple running Flickr than I am of Adobe CC for storing and sharing my work. I think I'm not the only one in this boat either. Apple still has strong mind-share with creatives, but they're working on throwing it away instead of using it to accelerate themselves into the next wave.

It is true that iCloud has a large number of issues.

> Let me repeat that: you need to ERASE YOUR PHONE TO CHECK __IF__ A BACKUP EXISTS.

Maybe I don't understand what you're getting at here, but you can see if there is a backup of your device. Settings > iCloud > Storage > Manage Storage – Lists all the devices w/a backup, the last time they were backed up, the size of the backup, an estimate of the size of the next backup, etc.

> My Passbook/Wallet needs to be recreated every time I set up a device?

See "How Apple Pay uses the Secure Element" - https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf

Manage Storage doesnt show every backup time, just the last. Say for example a person 1) backups their phone to icloud 2) restores their phone from itunes (bad) 3) their phone backs itself up to icloud (overwriting the known good icloud backup with the out of date itunes backup). iCloud shows the LAST backup (a bad out of date one), but if i want to restore the known good backup from step 1, i need to erase the phone (or find a different factory reset device) before I can see all the available icloud backups. If you call Apple Support they can also see the full list of backups and tell you the time each occurred, but there is no user facing place to confirm the information except on a factory reset first boot.

As for the secure element, it's a credit card number, I hand it to a waitress every time I eat out. Its basically public information, given how many hundreds of companies have it. I dont need secure hardware to protect the 16 digit number I flash at multiple humans eyeballs every day. If it gets abused, I change the number.

Banking is a spot-on recommendation. Especially Mint + Monzo + OpenFolio + Intuit could be crazy (you mean I have a bank that files my taxes for me, with nothing more needed than a quick review and Touch ID signature, as long as I keep all my assets tracked by Apple? whaaaaat?!) and a massive game-changer.

tldr: (SplitWise + Mint) + (Monzo + Privacy) + (OpenFolio + Robinhood + Motif + Forcerank + RoboInvesting) + TurboTax ++ [ApplePay + Biometrics + NFC]

Personally, Finance is where I feel most underserved, both in high school education, snake oil sales protection (portfolio managers, stock tips, online courses), technology, and compatibility. My Robinhood account syncs with OpenFolio but not Mint or Personal Capital. My WiseBanyan account syncs with OpenFolio and Personal Capital but not Mint. My HSA syncs with Mint but not Personal Capital. I end up having NO meta-bank-manager that can show me everything. It is a mess, and its 2016 and I cant yet open my Wallet and press pay my bills for the month. Mint Bills isnt bad, but it adds a delay. If I want to buy a stock in OpenFolio it forwards me to Robinhood. If i want to send money in splitwise it sends me to venmo. If i make a payment with facebook messenger, i have to go manually record the transaction in splitwise as a cash payment, and then metatag the transaction in mint. All these things and contexts that should be automatically transferred between programs are not because everything is unixlike tiny, proprietary, and with a custom everychanging api. Manilla was a good idea that is too bad we lost, a PDF locker of every bill automatically ingested as they were generated by the provider, it would be a no brainer great addition to Wallet.

Here is my vision for a banking silo at apple (or really any incumbant bank for that matter, if they chose to become a tech platform.)

Apple Financial

Personal Banking

- social tab/debt tracking and payment transfers - Splitwise/Venmo/FBPay

- online checking account w/ applepay - Monzo/Starling/Simple

- line of credit - PayPal Credit/LocalCU

- checking account / loan management + history - Mint/Manilla/Personal Capital

- bill pay, routing from any checking account to any biler - mint bills (check), manilla, prism, doxo, moneystream

- identity abstraction - privacy/final

- investment accounts - Robinhood

- social investment research and management, knowledge transfer - OpenFolio/SparkFin/Motif

- investment gaming - forcerank.com

- automatic retirement - WiseBanyan/Bettermint/WealthFront/SigFig/FutureAdvisor

- loans - apples piles of gold coin

- taxes - turbotax

But serving home users shouldnt be enough for Apple. Apple should want to be a banking platform, for people to build on top of. Another massive API for the appstore. And what do people build on top of banks? Small Businesses.

Small Business Banking

- accounting - Quickbooks/Wave/Xero

- loans - LendingClub Small Business

- checking

- employee hsa/retirement

- hr/hiring - Lever?, im not going to list every HR startup

- payment processing - square/stripe

- crm, web building, marketing - hubspot, wave, weebly, webflow, mailchimp

Apple needs to continue to invest in services that make its customers money, so its customers continue to develop content for Apple. Developers developers developers. The Microsoft/Salesforce/Adobe/Oracle marketing clouds do not offer companies the banking side of running a company. They get as far as ERP/Accounting, and then push you to a brick and mortar incumbent. Regulatory Compliance probably makes this side of my pipedream unplausable.

Apple is focusing on Home Automation, and a Music/TV Platform. Health Care is a very interesting vertical. Had I been in charge it would have been a tough sell to get me to approve, but now I think its fairly brilliant to be the mesh between all the little health trackers in life. But what is one of the most important parts of my long term health? Retirement. Apple, why cant I hand you cash, and you be my Vanguard? Investments should be more important than superficial health graphs tracking my steps. Look at how simple motif makes one click retirement saving. https://www.motifinvesting.com/motifs/horizon-model-15-year-... https://www.motifinvesting.com/motifs/retiring-2035

The important thing about designing a fintech giant from scratch (slash from tiny acquired pieces) is recognizing that you need to both offer first class services, and be compatible with competitors offering the same or better service. Use an Apple Financial checking account, or use a Schwab one. As long as the end user is managing everything in Wallet/Mint/OpenFolio, its ok if they store their actual money in 50 other places. Focus on keeping eyeballs, and loyalty will follow. Microsoft has Enterprise Productivity on lock, Adobe on Creation, Facebook on Communication and Photography. Apple should go after a DIFFERENT market (finance. not streaming, plenty of those exist.) but with the same exhaustive squidlike reaching playbook. Everyone NEEDS banking.

Apple, doesn't want to enter into Freeimum Cloud competition. Hence They dont want to store 1 Billion Active iOS Devices's Photo for free.

But I think Apple should have packaged a better deal. Or Heck they should have worked with Carrier to allow people to sign up to iCloud Storage as option on their iPhone monthly contract.

Or the current iPhone upgrade program where you get a new iPhone every year, should be an Apple as a Services packaged with Apple music, Apple Care, iPhone etc.

And by the way, even 500M users with free 50GB storage is 25 EB. That is roughly 100 BlackBlaze.

raise the phone price $50.

i think what would make sense would be free backup, you pay if you want to offload photos from the device to cloud only. that said, google photos and amazon prime photos are much more attractive. both unlimited

It strikes me that this is a very feature oriented list. These are the main product themes and these are the features to be driven forward.
What I really would like to see the equivalent process for coming up with the themes and the discussion around customers and where they were going. Maybe such a thing exists in Apple and that would be great for them. Maybe too much relied on Steve intuiting and translating it to executable battle plans.
The proof will be in the pudding (code name for iPhone 10).

The cult of Steve Jobs is getting a resurgence on Hacker News?

It's always been popular. Every time Apple makes an announcement there's a flood of "Steve Jobs never would have let this happen".

Play the HN Steve Jobs drinking game:
Take a drink if comment claims Tim Cook is no Jobs/visionary.
Take a drink if comment mentions going nuclear on Google.
Take a drink if comment mentions his cancer would have been fine if he didn't follow Eastern/New Age quackery.
Take a drink if comment mentions he wasn't a great philanthropist, make it a double if they go straight to accusing him of being a "sociopath".

From reading that through, I guess you can't really blame Tim Cook for how low a priority Macs seem to be to Apple nowadays...

Very disappointing to see the only bullet points concerning the Mac are Mac App Store, Lion and hardware.
Fast forward to 2016, the Mac App Store is rotting, hardware gets updated maybe in 1-3 years, and the os is lagging.
Makes you wonder what's on their list for the next years, if anything...

Nothing, more of the same innovators dilemma. Sell your stock and put it elsewhere...though you should of done that end of 2015.

The emphasis in the lead on the Post PC era is telling. This confirms to me macOS platform innovation (software and hardware) is on the back burner. Jobs-Apple was not sentimental about abruptly dropping product lines, and entirely exiting markets very swiftly after a long senescence, one which high-end macOS hardware is in the midst of right now. Most recent example is the high-end display market with the Thunderbolt Display. The Apple DOS platform and MacOS (the cooperative multitasking one, not the NeXTStep-based one) more salient examples to the "whither macOS" discussion.
Cook-Apple, without a strong design lead possessing a keen technical sense, might drag out the macOS senescence, making for a miserable macOS professional customer base. While a very tiny fraction of the market, they're very vocal, and can be distracting if Apple is indeed attempting to disentangle itself from the PC era as Jobs called it. Another area of concern is the strategy note explicitly set out looking for lock-in at the design stage outset, rather than opportunistically and organically monetizing lock-in where and when it happens as a side-effect of delivering a delightful customer experience. Down that path of making lock-in an explicit design goal lies mediocre design output.
I wonder Apple is mulling over whether or not to exit the high-end PC market, because the executive team senses future profitability lays in the consumer segment, commoditizing the most common pieces of the PC market into the portable devices they make tomorrow. There still exists a high-end camera market for example, but Apple makes far more money than those camera companies with just a consumer-good-enough camera feature on their smartphones. The question they might be exploring right now is if they can expand the iPad Pro far enough to convert+capture the bulk of the macOS market into consumer segments, then ditch the rest (including the high-end macOS/PC market).
I'm not looking forward to a future transition to a Linux-with-Windows-emulation stack for my daily driver laptop, because there are a LOT of bits of polish in laptops that Linux (and Windows for that matter) still has not nailed yet that are greatly aggravating in my daily experience. Ultra-reliable sleep and wake (especially interaction with networking) tops my list, but other UI and user experience bits, gone over exhaustively in other HN discussion threads about the latest MacBook Pros. There are a lot of sharp corners in the laptop experience that macOS rounded off over the past decades, and while I would miss them, if fundamental support for a laptop form factor personal computing platform is disappearing from Apple then move I must.
This is ironic, because if fucking over Google was a key Apple strategic goal (for the record, I think that's not how a business should be aimed/run, and I see promising signs Cook is willing to truly bury the hatchet), then I thought that an Apple Home Server running macOS with services that many people tend to get from Google, decentralizing Google's key services like GMail (including calendar, contacts, etc.), Voice, etc., and portal'ing a voice-based interface to capture and refine/curate search requests (and direct them to a service like DDG instead of Google), with ultra-seamless iDevice and macOS integration and enhancement to attract customers, would have been Apple's logical direction to slice away at Google's ad revenue.

I'm mostly wondering how we'll do iOS development without beefy MacBooks or Macs. If other laptop developers up their game and provide a MacBook-equivalent I'd happily jump ship. But I need to be able to create native iOS apps.

If Apple actually exits the PC era years from now, then I expect an iPad Pro-like platform will host an iOS-based XCode (or whatever they call it when it is re-targeted to iOS). It can be a bumpy 3-5 year transition, about the time it took for OS X to stabilize the transition from the MacOS user experience. We won't know until it happens. Jobs-Apple never articulated what they see for their users going forward on a strategic scale, the vision is only laid out at the product introduction, and only tactically-constrained forward optics are shared. So far Cook-Apple seems to follow the same behavior in this regard.
I think the tail is wagging the dog if Apple goes down that road. A lot of shareholders and customers are impatiently pushing Apple for The Next Innovation, but ironically I suspect a steady-as-she-goes Cook-style CEO is exactly what they need for the next 4-6 years because I see us in a hardware technological interregnum that takes time to mature. Apple's innovations have usually come from a confluence of the right hardware maturation cycles to capitalize upon software waiting in the wings for the hardware to catch up. The innovation and revenue has been hardware-based but it can just as easily be software- and services-based, but Apple hasn't chosen to monetize yet. At the moment, the hardware-oriented tail is wagging the entire organization, as they seek out the next innovation category in another piece of hardware, when seeking hardware might be the wrong question to ask in the first place.
Battery and charging technology is an especially big obstacle right now for them. Apple Watch is the Mac 128K of Apple's smartwatch category due to that obstacle. They're making uncomfortable engineering tradeoffs in the latest MacBook Pro (if you believe Schiller's explanation, which I do) due to that obstacle.

Exactly. Apple should build the post-Cloud era instead of trying to beat Google on their home turf.
If Tim Cook really cares about privacy, bringing user's data back into their own hands is the only way to go.

For developer laptops, you might see people going to Windows with Linux running as a VM. Windows can handle the low-power, sleep, wake, etc, stuff, and development happens in a VM that thinks it's running full-out on a desktop.

This is exactly my interim solution if Apple ever gets back into the high-end laptop game again in the near future; it turns into my next solution if Apple declines that market for the foreseeable future. I'm tooling agnostic by now; this is my sixth switch between Apple and non-Apple solutions in my computing lifetime. Open Source is taking an ever-greater chunk of my applications portfolio because it is a more stable platform to format my work and skills in than other commercial choices.
While Windows' laptop user experience is not nearly as polished as macOS', it is good enough that I can grit my teeth and suffer through it. And as noted elsewhere, for lighter workloads (which still comprise a plurality of my daily work) the Mac laptops are quite sufficient to the tasks.

Feel free to switch to platform where they have a thriving app stores, update hardware with a new design twice a year and have a wonderful os.

I wonder what -[CONFIDENTIAL] stands for.

It's on a need to know basis and you don't need to know.
Apple considers it a relevant secret today, so it's redacted.

Perhaps a product still in development today.

I'm guessing Apple Watch.

Surprised nobody mentioned the "average age" comment.

Talking about the "Digital Hub concept", I heard that from a Microsoft guy in 2005(?) introducing the concept of Microsoft Home Server. We were considering anything to cooperate (actually, it is only in marketing way). However, I was afraid that web 2.0 was the true future. Home user didn't need a home server product.
I love Mac, no doubt. But I do think Microsoft create a lot of great concepts and do test it on market. Apple is not the first eveb on consumer market (remember the WinCE products and XP Tablet Edition?)
In my opinion, Microsoft is pioneer of electronic products. Although they often made their final products "unusable", I would hear about what they "are going to do". It is worth to project the future.
p.s. sorry about bad English

" Apple is in danger of hanging on to old paradigm too long (innovator’s dilemma)"
What apple is going through right now !!!

Innovating or holding on? They don't seem to be holding on in the case of "Dongle Gate". They switched to the new stuff early and are letting everyone else catch up. In a couple years USB-C will be on almost everything and we won't need dongles anymore. Seems really similar to how the early macs had only usb.

I wonder what his opinion would be on Tablet sales spectacularly crashing. Surely it's not just bad execution.

I wonder how much phablets have caused this. When I got my iPhone 6 Plus, I very quickly saw no need for my iPad Mini anymore. Fast forward a few years and I decided to pick up an iPad Air 2 (along with a keyboard) because I find it to be a superior around the office and on the airplane note taking device than my 15" MacBook Pro.

> PC as hub for all your digital assets
Whatever this means. TB of data with the PC at the center is dumb.

Depends on a user I guess, I can't fill my 500gb drive even by half

And I have 8.2 TB of data on my desktop.

But it's historically accurate. You kept your photos, videos, music on your PC and moved them to and from your devices (music/video player, phone, e-reader). 2010 (date written) was only a few years after Dropbox became popular, and before it and similar products were more heavily integrated into apps.

I think some formatting got lost. The context:
– we invented Digital Hub concept – PC as hub for all your digital assets – contacts, calendars, bookmarks, photos, music, videos – digital hub (center of our universe) is moving from PC to cloud – PC now just another client alongside iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, ...
Train of thought seems to be, "Appled invented the digital hub, with the PC at the center for all your contacts, calendars...etc - That's moving to the cloud"
Hence why its under the topic "2011: Year of the Cloud"

"further lock customers in" is so bloodcurdlingly disgusting.

Ummmmm this is business 101. Does "product-stickiness" make you feel less disgusted?

No mention of facebook.

Facebook wasnt making money then yet & people were still skeptical.

– tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem
This is why i never used Apple. At least i can use Android with pretty much everything. And don't get me started about stuff like iTunes for Windows...
Also: Apple TV 2- David Moody, Jeff Robbin – Strategy: stay in the living room game and make a great “must have” accessory for iOS devices
I think Chromecast pretty much nailed it.
On the rest, i'm pretty much impressed how simple he outlined it all.

What, pray, is ET <et@group.apple.com>?

Executive Team

ExecutiveTeam?

Seems like he ran out of ideas and was ready for a settle life milking the cash cow.

How on earth did you get that out of the email?
It is aggressively oriented towards turning Apple into a cloud-first company. That's the key consequence of reorienting your product line into connected clients.
The next logical strategic move based on this email is to move pro apps to the cloud, connected to Apple client hardware in ways only Apple can unify. Key is "Post-PC". Where does that leave content creation, a key Apple demographic and one that is ill-served by client devices? It has to move to the cloud.
I'm not an Apple fan - I don't like how they lock down their systems - but I can see how this strategy makes more sense and skates where the puck is going to be, not where it is now. The only questions are timing and execution. Apple has been lacking on the latter (for cloud), and always on the leading edge of the former.

Did you read my comment? These were good business ideas but none of them can be called revolutionary. Definitely does not match with Steve Jobs' larger than life image.

Do you think the iPod was revolutionary? Or the iPhone? Or the iPad? Or the Macbook Air? Since when has Apple ever been revolutionary post Macintosh 128K (and even that's arguable)?
They've been on the leading edge of trends, or at least were when Jobs was around. He moved computing devices away from geekery and towards fashion. He identified how intimate and personal phones were, and turned them into status symbols, with fetishized design. He saw where trends were intersecting, ran ahead and planted really solid benchmark objects at just the right time.
The clear trend that Jobs was onto next was cloud-everything, which is still happening, just slowly. And Apple is executing poorly there, even as they wind down the creative capabilities of their hardware.

its nice to see that they weren't completely delusional about being behind android
very refreshing to see - at the top - their distortion field is just marketing
unfortunately for that list, they never caught up to android in terms of notifications, something Steve Jobs explicitly called out in 2010, wow.

"Strategy: stay in the living room game and make a great “must have” accessory for iOS devices" haha

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