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soperj

It's interesting to think that if Apple had won the PC wars how closed everything would be.

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It's actually /why/ they never had a chance of winning.

Well they are winning with iPhones aren’t they?

Nope. Android has more market share despite apple having the head start.

It's somehow easier to be a follower here, Apple set the trends for years, Android only had to replicate and sell cheaper.

I don't think apple is looking to beat android in marketshare, but instead in profits. They are mostly not interested in selling cheaper commodities, and instead work hard for premium differentiation (and maximal value capture of the whole ecosystem around premium smartphones with services and peripherals).

Besides, if they did win smartphone marketshare too hard, they risk regulation on the amount of control they enjoy of their platforms, which might harm their profits.

Possibly yes, and Apple has historically never been into that. Macs were not the biggest share either.

As alluded to elsewhere, Google doesn’t care about Android being profitable. They only care that it is widely used so they can continue to deliver ads and harvest data.

Are they? Last time I've heard Android still runs in the vast majority of phones, worldwide.

Apple is winning in terms of making virtually all the profit available to those selling phones, and Android's market share advantage is not nearly as big as you think, at least not in areas where people have a lot of disposable income, like in the US, where it's basically 50/50 between Android and iOS.

Why is that the more important metric given the subject?

It's not. Google had android users using Google Software, and seeing Google Ads. Having more users on android gives you more value when it comes to data collection and selling things to people.

But aren't apple customers some of the best targets for ads because of their higher spending power?

It's an important metric because it makes post writers favorite company win.

Worldwide stats are a lot less important than addressable market stats.

It's a question of what winning means I think. In terms of profits, they might be winning. If it's market share though, they are not winning, and that means there is still an opening for open standards.

If it was your company, would you rather have 99% market share and 1% of profits, or 1% market share and 99% of profits?

99% of profits, obviously, but you've forgotten what thread we're in. This is a thread about Linux and software freedom. For that, market share is way more important than profit share.

If I was making 99% of the profit off of 1% the market, I’d be terrified someone could just undercut me and take either my 1% or a big portion of the remaining market, that I’m trying to also get.

Owning the profit is great, but owning the market means longevity.

Apple opened up to third party licensees for some time. It only hurt the their profitability while gaining Mac OS very little market share.

Apple "lost" the PC war because they were trying to sell slow computers for more money than the fastest available PCs. People bitch about the Apple tax now, but the premium for modern Macs is nowhere near as bad as it used to be. (And from the early signs, bang for the buck the M1 Macs are ahead of the PC industry)

This is spot on - pre-G3 & G4 PowerPC macs (think 601, 603/e, 604/e/v), were dogshit-slow and ran a legitimately inferior OS and 68k macs were possibly worse. I do admire how experimental Apple was with their hardware back in those days, though: built in TV tuners, NUBUS, audio interfaces, not to mention the very progressive laptop designs (Duo, 2400c) and Newton!

Part of me really misses how fun an inventive hardware was between the 90s and mid-2000s. Things feel very stale these days and maybe M1 is the push that this industry needs to get innovating on new platforms again?

edit: if Dell or Lenovo would do an ARM variant of the XPS13 or X1C that was capable of running Linux, I'd buy the hell out of it.

PC clones only happened to the reverse engineering success from Compaq and IBM being unable to prevent it in court.

All other 16 bit platforms were just like the Macs back then.

Virtually every desktop computer today uses a bitmapped display and a pointing device... like the Macintosh.

Virtually every mobile device today uses a touch-sensitive display (and a Unix-derived OS)... like the iPhone.

Apple Inc. is the most valuable company in human history.

Tell me again how Apple lost the PC wars? ;-)

First capacitive touch screen phone was LG Prada [1]

There were many valuable companies in the past but they are not anymore. Apple must not push its customers limits too much or it may backfire.

[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-prada-1080646/

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