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Comment by DINKDINK | Hacker News Reader

>(because why would they?)

Because a company understands their product in the field and cares about what effect a change might have. Now is that cost justified? arguably no.

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It'd be pretty hard for them to know though. They'd have to reverse engineer (the irony isn't lost on me) every variation of third party screen/touchscreen controller. What happens if some feature isn't available on a third party screen? Either they don't implement the feature at all or third party screens are now worse off and we'll have a headline "Apple cripples third party repairs!".

This is precisely the kind of stuff that Microsoft is famous for, and it is entirely possible. Heck, third party hardware is what made PCs great. I think, however, that there is a difference in customer base; Microsoft caters to businesses, Apple to consumers.

When Microsoft breaks a third party app/device with a Windows Service Pack, Microsoft needs to fix this otherwise their customers get angry. When Apple breaks a third party app, they require the customer or third party app provider to fix it, because Apple is inherently a company that wants to control the whole stack and doesn’t embrace an open ecosystem.

There's a major difference here: a 3rd party computer part drawing 5% more current than expected probably won't cause issues (There are however many of cases where they do...) whereas a component drawing 5% more current on a phone may cause a shutdown.

It's amazing that I find myself thinking that Microsoft of the 90's and early 2000's as actually being a more open and accommodating company and windows being a more open and accommodating environment than Apple and iOS today.

Whether Microsoft had no choice and would have been worse if they could in this respect, the fact they they weren't and I think Apple is, and Microsoft was widely lambasted as money driven (e.g. M$) and evil at the time, and Apple largely gets a pass now, is interesting. That could be because Apple is better at managing image, or because people's perceptions and what they expect has shifted, or because there's a lot more bad (and worse) actors out there now that make Apple look better in comparison. It's hard to tell exactly why it's looked upon more favorably now, but I do believe my thoughts on Apple to be accurate, and I'm not sure how to feel about that.

Fruit company pulls the plug on anyone who writes anything bad about them. No more marketing money, no more freebies, so publishers think twice about it.

When Microsoft broke third-party stuff, the end result didn't cause fires. It was also done very deliberately to damage competitors, according to information revealed at trial.

Software companies can do things a bit differently from hardware companies.

Can you imagine the maintenance nightmare in having special case hacks just to support bugs by one program? I read some of the MS blogs where they detailed all of the workarounds they've had to do. It has to make Windows less stable and harder to maintain.

OR provide third parties with API info, maybe even the third party implementation. It doesn’t even have to be official. Apple knows very well how to leak controlled information. But it would greatly improve the quality of third party repairs, and lower the load on official support workflows.

Slippery slope here. If they start testing with 3rd party hardware, that market will grow for third party parts whereas if they constantly tell people they don't support it and casually break those devices by accident, then they curb the issue while it's a small segment of the market.

I see a company like Tesla taking the same approach.

If we keep going down this slippery slope, next thing you know there'll be stores called Phonezone or Advanced Phone Parts on every street corner selling repair parts for every popular brand of phone at reasonable prices enabling consumers to do their own repairs at home.

Or you know they could build according to standards for interfaces and cables and provide excellent documentation making it easy to repair.

I’ve worked with many LCD panels: while they all support one of a few signaling standards, there is no standard for the cables and connectors. (Or if there is, nobody follows them.) For each LCD panel, you need to make a custom cable.

So that part is not something that’s specific to Apple.

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