It flies and stops halfway in the face. Apple’s developer tool chains (at least, for iOS and the world of mobile apps and games, Metal notwithstanding) are decent, their codebase is at least a cleaner implementation than what Google have with the combined GPL & refactoring nightmare of the Linux kernel & Android (to be solved by my beloved Fuchsia in time, surely) — but it’s not as if Apple are really a shining light on software overall. To be honest, they absolutely suck. C+ tier stuff. iOS background management, iOS & MacOS UI since iOS 7 & Big Chu—Sur respectively, woefully inadequate security defense on all systems, an AWFUL file manager on MacOS dubbed “Finder”, garbage implementation of Bluetooth and WiFi antennae status on control panel, no iOS option for reasonable DPI scaling (zoomed doesn’t count), excessive font smoothing only modifiable via Terminal as of MacOS Big Sur — excessive use of advanced animation and sickening transparency leading to poor performance on hardware that makes Android or Windows fly. Oh, no option to delete all messages at any given time via a simple “select all” button in the edit bar for Messages, nor an ability to export all messages to a fricking plaintext file or HTML.

The list continues, and is a long one worthy of a short documentary. Apple excels at a few interface consistencies and at selling premium hardware with high margins in part due to an admittedly deserved proficiency with supply chain consistency & scale, and with convincing customers to pay with their kidneys for marginal upgrades e.g. 400% up charges on RAM and Storage.

The M1 is impressive, certainly agree, but it won’t be too long before others catch-up. Still, let’s not get ahead of ourselves about Apple and software prowess. It’s been a long time since I preferred Cupertino’s code to Redmond’s or Mountain View’s.

> Apple seems to fly in the face of this however

I don't think I agree.

Apple is not really a great software company.

Especially if you consider how closed their ecosystem generally is: a large part of their stack is basically completely opaque, closed-source and worst of all, prone to change at the whim of the company.

I've always had a hard time understanding why anyone in the business of building technical infrastructure (other than user-facing retail stuff) would ever consider using their products.

Apple bought all high end fab time which means that they can build higher end CPU's than the rest. They can outbid everyone else since they know they can sell those CPU's at high markup in their phones/laptops. Not sure what is interesting about this.