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Comment by p0pcult | Hacker News Reader

"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.

So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."

-Steve Jobs

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Apple still makes great products. Nothing can beat a MacBook (especially the new ones), AirPods work pretty well. Many (most?) people that use iPhones or Apple Watches love them.

They are getting worse particularly in the software department. Two that really grind my gears (there are others):

MacOS on Apple Silicon for an extremely long time (maybe it's solved now? 2 years later?) which caused incredibly glitchy, almost unusable cursor movement if you let your battery drain to 0%, then plugged it back in and woke it from hibernate.

Screen Time in macOS is unbelievably, ludicrously, fully broken. Nothing about it works almost at all. Metrics for children don't show up. Web filtering falls open after a few hours at random (presumably because the background services crash). The "site not allowed" page predates HTML5 and randomly doesn't work. You can't block built-in apps like Apple News, the best you can do is set a 1-minute time limit. Tons of IP Addresses and Apple phone-home addresses get blocked on the "allowed sites only" mode resulting in constant popups. I had to pay for Qustodio because it's just useless. Also, it has elementary bugs that are horrifying. For example, the pane where you add allowed websites doesn't remember websites you just added when you dismiss it - so if you open the pane again without a reboot, and add another site, it forgets the one you added last time you opened the pane.

However janky other things might be on macOS, Screen Time with "Allowed Sites Only" is by far the most broken thing on macOS, bar none. Try using it with your younger children and rage in frustration as it crashes-open silently and allows Private Browsing with no filtering after a few hours.

My M1 Pro still randomly loses internet requiring a restart.

My asus wifi card in my pc does that too

Have you tried flushing the DNS cache?

This has almost become a meme at this point. Anyone in the office who has a problem with their internet on the Macbook, I just send them this:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache;sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

yep, been a part of my bash aliases for about a decade now?

Likely that it is related to Bluetooth as well. Especially if you have AirPods connected. I noticed the wireless connection quality degrades significantly when the device is connected to an AirPod.

I haven't seen mine lose Internet entirely, but I have seen it randomly switch between the two Wi-Fi networks I have set up where I live. I eventually got frustrated with this and then told it it can't automatically connect to one of them anymore.

> almost unusable cursor movement if you let your battery drain to 0%, then plugged it back in and woke it from hibernate.

Argh. I hate it when this happens. It's infuriating that this hasn't been fixed yet.

> They are getting worse particularly in the software department.

I actually just found one that has me scratching my head...

If I plug a USB-C -> Ethernet adapter in to my M1 MBP on OSX Ventura...it brings down the entire network.

Just ethernet + adapter + power is fine, plug it into the laptop, entire network dies.

Do they run their own DHCP server on a laptop maybe?

That's a weird one. When you say it brings it down, what do you mean is actually occurring? I have a USB ethernet adapter in use on my M1 MBP running Ventura as I write this, and it's been completely fine. But if there's a gotcha out there lurking, I'd be interested to know what triggers it.

> When you say it brings it down, what do you mean is actually occurring?

All wired devices on the network (except for an AP strangely enough) drop all connections and can't get DNS responses.

I haven't had the time to dig in further than that yet though.

Someone did reply with this link[0], which may be the same or similar to what I'm experiencing just a different scenario.

[0]: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/05/11/usb-c-hubs-breaking-ether...

We actually had a very similar issue in the office but maybe a bit different. From time to time an entire part of the office would start having slow internet or almost no internet. Took us a few months to fix (it wasn't really on the priority list and was super random when it happened).

Turned out that it happened when one specific USB-C dongle with ethernet and PD was left powered on but not connected to the computer (I think there were other preconditions as well like it was powered-off and you connect power to it but not a computer to it). The device will then decide to go into DHCP server mode and start sending advertisement packets and the switch would start broadcasting them, the internal firewall would see this and start blocking the switch and in turn turn off the AP that was connected to it so 26 ports would be offline essentially. Most of us were on wifi and everyone who was on an ethernet (3 ppl) would go "FFS internet is unstable again. Stupid switch is probably buggy", disconnect their cable and go on wifi. Plus they never really reported it as they had work to do and Wifi kinda worked so not a big issue.

It was just a really cool moment when we found out what caused it and we fired up Wireshark and looked at the traffic and we were right. I haven't had a moment of so much joy in a really long time.

That is fascinating, thanks for the link! Hopefully I'll remember that if either of my USB/Ethernet adapters seems to be related to a network problem. Sometimes I think USB-C hubs are simultaneously the best thing ever, and the bane of my existence. I'm finally happy with the CalDigit one I use now, but it took a couple attempts to find something that didn't have some glaring problem. One of my MacBooks just uses a plan USB->Ethernet adapter successfully, but that's because I don't need it to do anything more complicated.

Which USB-C -> Ethernet adapter is that?

It's a Insignia one from BB[0], so probably not the best QA on it.

Still trying to determine why and when though, as this adapter used to be fine.

[0]: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/insignia-7-port-type-c-hub-with...

It’s probably a bug in your network switch: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/05/11/usb-c-hubs-breaking-ether...

I don't think it would be since that mentions the bug is when it's connected to everything but a computer and mine's the opposite. Everything is fine except when it's connected to the laptop, could still be the same bug though.

> They are getting worse particularly in the software department.

I would argue the opposite.

Their software has historically been terrible.

OG iTunes ranks at the top of the worst pieces of software I've ever used - rendered the iPod almost useless for me.

Their software is still unimpressive, but I'd argue it's trending in the right direction.

The App Store is functional. Safari is not terrible. Their email client is fine. The Apple TV UI is pretty snazzy, etc.

Yea I don't get this either. I find while maybe lacking some features, a lot of their applications work either just fine or great. Apple Maps for example, the Podcasts app, many others.

You have to be kidding, right? The Apple Podcasts app is widely considered one of Apple's worst - and before Apple started playing "rating pop up" shenanigans, it was rated only 1.8 stars on the App Store.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/11/19/apple-podcasts-app-store-rati...

I use it every day and it works just fine for me. What's wrong with it?

The Apple TV is a multi-user device with extremely poor multi-user support. Considering how long it has been used by B&Bs it amazes me that Apple has never allowed guest access.

Music App sometimes breaks. It just doesn't play certain sections of some songs, even on replay, closing the app doesn't help; a device reboot is required to play songs in their entirety. And this happens on both devices that are connected via hardwire as well as wifi/LTE.

Considering Apple's revenue it is ridiculous how long bugs persist in their applications.

I can't speak for the original iTunes (I used it but not heavily and too long ago to remember), but I've been a consistent user of iTunes between Snow Leopard and Monterey and my experience is that it's gotten worse with every release. With Music being the worst iteration yet, and significantly worse than the last version of iTunes I used (on High Sierra).

I actually have a whole laundry list of things I consider regressions in the Music app, but I'll just regale you with the most frustrating one for my use case:

If you use Home Sharing with wired headphones, it works. If you use wireless headphones with a local music library, it works. If you use wireless headphones and Home Sharing, it does not work. The program refuses to play anything. This was a nice surprise when I first tried to use Music after getting this laptop.

(I'm actually really curious if anybody else experiences this behavior -- anybody reading please chime in if so!)

Before iTunes, I think the OS was great. I think iTunes was the catalyst that pushed OSX down the priority list.

Once they saw they could make money selling music, they started focusing on that and pushing that POS down your throat. Then when they finally realized they could sell apps on iPhones, that's where the focus went. The OS has stagnated since then, IMO. Their bread and butter has been selling apps, music and cloud storage, and it's clear (IMO) that's where all the actual development focus has gone.

Also the e-mail client is trash. It is supposed to support MS Exchange, and my co-workers and I used to use it at work just fine with OS 10.14. It was an awesome replacement for shitty Outlook. Once 10.15 came out, it would quit syncing, freeze up, stop sending email, etc. This was not just once in a while, it would literally quit working almost immediately. I was forced back into Outlook again. It felt like they never tested it with Office 365 even once. But of course, their own e-mail services work fine with it.

> I think iTunes was the catalyst that pushed OSX down the priority list.

...iTunes was originally released with MacOS 9. It predates the public release of Mac OS X.

Wow. Well, I guess my memory was way wrong on that. I thought the iPod came after OSX. Didn't realize it was that old.

>Safari is not terrible

It abso-fucking-lutely is terrible

The first example is oddly specific. I think you can find flaws like that with almost any software or hardware manufacturer, regardless of monopoly status.

The second example is, I think, a perfect example of what most large companies do, which is to neglect specific features in favor of others. People want to work on the "new hotness" rather than maintain something written 10 years ago by a team that no longer exists.

I don't think either suggests that Apple software is getting worse as a whole. The simple fact that they rolled out an entirely new architecture and it's worked pretty flawlessly (except for some fraction of people when the battery drains to 0 and it hibernates and needs a restart) suggests to me that they aren't just resting and pulling in money based on their monopoly status (which they don't even have in any industry).

> The first example is oddly specific. I think you can find flaws like that with almost any software or hardware manufacturer, regardless of monopoly status.

True... but this one has caught me, over and over, and it makes me paranoid of a low battery. Before I just had a lazy habit of not getting off the couch until the battery actually died from 0%. Now I panic the moment it turns red, because the cursor bug quickly makes working miserable and requires a restart for my sanity.

> I don't think either suggests that Apple software is getting worse as a whole.

To me, it suggests they are letting more surface-level bugs get a pass than previously. Before, they might have had poorly designed software once in a while, but not things this basic and easily discoverable.

Gawd... a restart... unthinkable.

You should try windows...

Seems to have been finally fixed on MacOS Venture 13.0.

But 2 years of this bug was embarrassing.

There was a time when Apple would release a new version that was basically a maintenance release. And they would squash a bunch of bugs. I think a lot of people still remember this. Perhaps through some objective measure, it’s still ok. But I agree it all feels worse.

Old macOS versions were usually extremely buggy. People have just forgotten this

I don't know man. I used to work on tons of PPC and early Intel Macs that ran OSX (before iPhone and all that). Those were pretty great machines, and the OS basically just was an OS. No shit software preinstalled on top of it.

The first real shit app was iTunes. And ever since then, the OS has just stagnated while they put more software in to sell music, apps, and cloud storage.

There were plenty of bugs. But there were at least a few releases that addressed these. Snow Leopard is probably the most notable which shipped with no new features. I think I first started on Panther and there was at least 1 upgrade during the PowerPC times that really cleaned things up and improved performance quite a bit.

Which is why I speculate that overall, it might not be better. You had to wait a couple years to get the fixes. Now they probably ship the fixes and new features on a more regular basis.

Can you name one Intel Mac release that didn't ship with iTunes?

You're right. I didn't realize that iTunes even pre-dated OSX.

A lot of folks are disagreeing with you in the replies but I actually agree with you to be honest. I recently got a new Macbook Pro after my old one unexpectedly died and there are a lot of things in Monterey that I find highly annoying relative to the last version I was on (High Sierra). I complained about Music in another reply.

One thing that really annoys me that I don't remember from High Sierra is this weird "overbounce"/"overscroll" functionality. This drives me absolutely nuts! Preview does this for example, and actually so does Firefox (but you can disable it there).

If you open up a PDF in Preview, set the zoom so that a full page width is entirely within view (i.e. no scrolling needed), then scroll a bit to the side anyway, you'll see what I'm talking about. The viewport moves even though the full page width is in view. I've found that this triggers even when I'm trying to scroll down, resulting in a weird, glitchy scroll feel.

I feel like I should temper the bad with the good a bit though. For example I have not had Bluetooth fail randomly with this new computer, whereas it failed quite a lot on my last one -- often requiring a reboot to fix.

All the children comments to this post are amusing... Some things get worse, some get better, some things depend on the use case.

They all miss the point. The problem with Apple in it's relentless mission of maximising vertical integration, is that you are forced to align with their decisions at every single level, whether it's technical, social or political. "Cult" doesn't do it justice, Apple is has gone far beyond this.

Most other proprietary tech is not like this because the pieces are smaller with some reasonable degree of either interchangeability or combinability. Apple isn't neutral technology it's some kind of political entity. When you sign up, you are handing over all control, which is fine until they do something you don't like at which point your only choice is abandon the entire thing or accept it - I don't give a crap about NFTs, but I give a crap about some things, and I don't want to be part of an ecosystem where I can be pushed around. I don't blame the people who are stuck in it, it's hard to exit something that can define a lot about how you work with technology, they are essentially the victim of a big bully with a very difficult to stomach exit strategy.

tomxor, you may survive us yet. Unfortunately, many of the hackers on this site aren't willing to see the forest for the trees. We're too busy fighting over myopic identity politics to imagine a future without the problems we face today.

Similar frustration and mind boggling for me when I found that the "custom focus" feature on iOS just does... nothing. It's a feature where you're supposed to be able to select which specific apps can send notifications to you, so I made one which allows Slack to come through (for work) and blocks everything else. Instead, it just allows everything through as if the "custom focus" wasn't enabled at all.

No seriously, I'm baffled. How was this released?

...according to some.

Nothing like the trifecta of ipod/itunes/iphone under Steve.

Especially now that they’ve abandoned the race to be ever thinner and eliminate keys for a touch bar

Happiest I've been about a computer in a while was when they backtracked on the things they'd removed from the MBP and put them back. Combined with the M1, it finally became the first MBP since 2015 that I thought was an actual improvement over all previous versions.

Now if they can just put a fucking headphone jack back in the iPhone, kthx. Batteries are getting denser, mainboards are getting smaller, phones are bigger than ever... but no room for a headphone jack! I guess they just want to sell more AirPods.

The interesting thing that I have found happening is that I just don't listen to music/podcasts on my iPhone much anymore. I don't at all when I am out anymore, and I only do at home when I can have it on speaker. I guess Bluetooth'd to my car once in a while. That's about it. I wonder if/assume that the profits from Air Pods bought by everyone else makes up for the loss in music purchase from people like me? I dunno...

> Nothing can beat a MacBook

At what? Price? Performance? Gaming? I/O?

I'm a Linux guy, not an Apple fan. But the hardware is always top notch. If you look at the MacBook: the trackpad, the sound, the battery life, the overall quality, ... I haven't found any laptop hardware that comes even close to it.

If you know a product that does, please let me know so I can buy one and run Linux on it :).

I have a Dell XPS from around 2018 that I run arch on. Only issue I've had is needing to replace the battery once due to swelling (very easy to swap), but otherwise the hardware and specs are on par with my work assigned Macbook.

But how does it feel to use? On my MacBook Pro, the trackpad and keyboard feel like I am manipulating text and windows at the speed of thought. On my work-assigned Dell, with specs ~matching my MacBook, it feels like there's a hidden friction to everything I do. Like going from skating on ice to jogging on sand.

Had a 2019 16" XPS and I'd describe the keyboard as borderline unusable. It was weirdly squeaky and if you hit a key on the edge a bit it just wouldn't register so I had so many typing mistakes.

I have never noticed any friction when performing any task on my XPS. I will admit I'm not a Mac/Apple guy myself, so for me it's the opposite (I'm much slower on my work Mac than doing the same thing on my personal Dell)

I have had a few dell XPSs, newest one was a 2019 one and they work, but they were not even close to the quality of the full macbook package. The keyboard was dogshit, the webcam didn't work on linux, the mic picked up huge amounts of fan noise, finger print scanner didn't work on linux and the maintainers of the open source drivers believed the hardware to be critically insecure so there is no reason you'd want it supported anyway.

You could upgrade the ram on the 16" versions though which is nice. Although this is still not something I have ever done on a laptop. The new Macbooks now have easily replaceable batteries which is a welcome change.

Nothing beats the keyboard on Thinkpads. You can also get insanely good warranties on them. X1 Carbons match Apple on build quality, displays and price. Apple probably wins on performance, sound and battery life.

Apple hardware is only top notch when you limit yourself to apple's walled garden of software and peripherals. The hardware (and software) is over-fit and has proprietary processes that make otherwise simple hardware tasks on most platforms impossible in an apple latop. The M1/M2 processors are great, but don't try to change the SSD or run an external monitor in an apple laptop.

> but don't try to change the SSD or run an external monitor in an apple laptop.

I run two monitors off my M1 mbp - works for me

> I run two monitors off my M1 mbp - works for me

Lucky you. It works horribly for me - any time the screen is locked (corporate policy locks it after a certain period of inactivity) the OS forgets all about the external screens.

When I unlock the machine, all my windows are on the internal screen.

There's a setting somewhere along the lines of "each display is an individual workspace" that "fixes" the issue by making each screen an independent workspace, which still won't remember where the windows are.

Record your preferred screen config using displayplacer [1] and then run that via a shortcut.

[1]: https://github.com/jakehilborn/displayplacer

> or run an external monitor in an apple laptop.

I have a Dell monitor with a mouse connected to it. I can connect my Linux laptop with a single USB3 for monitor, mouse and power. The MacBook does the same.

Agree. I have so many problems with my Mac Mini it is by far the worst device I ever owned.

- It randomly disconnects bluetooth for 30-40s. Especially annoying during calls. When your headset & keyboard stop working and you don't have a way of make anyone know.

- The processor goes full throttle out of blue. Makes my fan go 100% for good 5-10 minutes.

- From time to time it refuses to wake up my monitor and I need to force shut down it.

To me it’s the same conundrum as for the iPad: the hardware is really well made, but it stays very conservative on the form factor, and the software doesn’t take full advantage of it.

For the iPad it’s obvious, for the mac:

- third party OS support non existent (Asahi linux is good, but nowhere near completion), no dual-boot for windows anymore

- unix compatibily has fallen behind with the Apple Silicon move

- GPU capabilities unavailable for existing windows/Linux frameworks (gaming and ML impacted)

- kernel extensions getting deprecated impacts many hacks that were QOL improvements

- no touchscreen (you may want it or not, but arguably it has potential for use)

- no flip screen (goes hand in hand with the touchscreen)

They could solve these in the near future, and none of these are individually deal breakers, but cumulatively these are enough limitations that a worse hardware platform coming with better software becomes a viable choice in many cases.

Personally I’m planning moving away to probably a Chromebook + linux or windows laptop when my current setup finally dies.

Doesn’t randomly (physically) break in the first 5 years of ownership. Good tradeoffs between battery and performance. Best monitors.

I didn’t believe the hype until I got one at work and it just had… zero jankiness. And it is as good as the day I got it

Who has a better trackpad than a Macbook ?

* Price/performance as of the M series * Battery life * Resale value * Build quality

Apple is incredibly profitable, but Lenovo, dell, hp combined ship 60% of the laptops worldwide. Customers overwhelmingly choose non-Apple laptops.

Apple routinely has 90%+ of the laptop marketshare for computers that cost $1,000 or more. Seems weird to compare their marketshare to markets they're not competing in.

How does that say anything except that Apple laptops are so expensive that for anything they don't need Apple for they don't have to spend $1k?

Apple laptops are not invisible or unknown to buyers, and customers overwhelmingly choose non-Apple laptops, as shown by the sales numbers. I don't get what we're disagreeing over. Or is it the case that secretly everyone wants to purchase Apple products but they just don't have the money?

My iPhone hostname is Capitulation because I reluctantly switched back because Graphene is worse.

I miss ssh clients that don't Philip K Dick me. I miss syncthing. I miss being able to use non-Apple services to sync my photos. I miss being able to run any apps I want from the web without identifying myself to a vendor. I miss NewPipe and I miss background apps and I miss basic local mp3 players that don't report what I play to remote parties against my will.

Hilariously (at least to me), that was the hostname for my first iPhone when I gave up on the HTC I was using and got a 1st-gen iPhone.

WinMo was SO AWFUL, man.

re: SSH clients, what does "PKD me" mean? Have you tried Blink?

Blink is the one in question. Never before have I ever been enraged by an ssh client.

Wow! I love it. What's not working for you?

Wondering why you found Graphene to be worse?

Did no one here get utterly destroyed when updating to Ventura deleted your git, requiring you to either:

1. install xcode, which requires apple id, which your company might not support

2. Side load git, which your company's security policy might prohibit?

That sounds unpleasant. Hasn't been a problem for me, however, my work laptop is managed 100% through our corporate IT folks, including the Apple OS updates and packages. I've never needed a personal Apple ID to get Xcode.

I doubt that many people here would stick with companies who had both of those policies.

99% of the time it's not a problem, but yes, I am leaving the company for other reasons

Sounds like a crappy company.

The root cause is the apple update deleting git. I mean wtf

I'm curious about that. Git has been part of xcode CLI tools for years, I can't recall the last time it came by default with the OS.

Same as every major release? Accept the xcode bojo and continue?

Run `xcode-select —-install` on your terminal. It’ll install the Xcode command line tools only, no apple account required. I’ve used multiple macs at work and never sign in with an Apple ID on them.

Aha, thanks!

Just install git with Homebrew.

See, this is your problem. Abhorrent business practices can exist alongside great products, just look at Nestle. Nothing will excuse them for pumping freshwater out of inland lakes, or paying for paramilitary organizations to oppress their slave labor camps. It just means that people are fine eating Hershey Bars without thinking about the child labor that made their chocolate.

Hershey bars are made by Hershey, not by Nestle.

There is the oddity of KitKat in the US being made by Hershey but Nestle internationally.

I was expecting a Nestle product in your last sentence.

Also, pretty sure effectively all chocolate benefits from child labor because of where cocoa trees are located.

FWIW Hershey was also accused of child labor/slavery alongside Nestle, but you're right and I fumbled that one at the 95-yard-line.

Right. And that would be fumbling at the "5" yard line but the opponent touched and miraculously tipped the ball back to you, and you recovered and still made your points (puns intended).

there's no "the" 5 yard line, there's your 5 yard line and their 5 yard line, and there's 90 yard lines in between them.

oh gosh! I use to purchase hershey because i thought nestle bad others good :(

Is there any list of ethically sourced chocolate brands? The world is becoming stupid place to live with all these monopolies :(

When you dig deep enough into how manufacturing really works, there are few products, especially consumables, that are ethically sourced.

There has to be outliers worth avoiding.

Not when the countries that all the cocoa trees are in are known to have not so accountable governments.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263855/cocoa-bean-produc...

Same with mining for materials for electronics, as well as refining and manufacturing of them effectively happening in one country.

The show The Good Place explores this idea; it's impossible to live a good life because everything in the supply chain eventually has some bad aspect to it.

Is it really their problem? Blaming the consumer has consistently proven the least effective way to effect change.

Exactly, so we need to stop blaming the consumer and start making systemic change with regulation. If the largest player doesn't agree to play nice, then it's time that we change the rules.

What products do Nestle make that you consider "great"?

When I'm hacking? Coffee-mate and Perrier.

When nobody's looking I've been known to enjoy a Hot Pocket or two, though... I can feel my dignity slipping through my fingers as I type this.

Is blocking Coinbase Wallet an abhorrent business practice?

They didn't block it, they just wanted a 30% cut. Yes it is abhorrent to rent seek 30% of every transaction when you literally contributed nothing whatsoever to that product.

> contributed nothing whatsoever

The hardware it's running on?

I don't see an issue. If users have a concern, they can use another platform.

ETA: it does seem to be the kind of thing that the market will sort out... If apple is going to build a reputation for being hostile to use as a crypto transaction platform, then Android is just a quick trip to the nearest Best Buy away.

They didn't contribute that, the user already payed for it (and Apple pocketed ~40% of the MSRP). The hardware is paid for, same as the software it comes pre-installed with.

> If users have a concern, they can use another platform.

They can't. Apple locks the bootloader even after purchasing/unlocking the device. It would be nice if we could though!

> it does seem to be the kind of thing that the market will sort out...

No, I think the arbitrary limitation of what you can execute on hardware you purchased will be a bit more of a sticking point than that. At least when we're addressing the single largest corporation in modern American history, Europe seems to agree with me.

Another hardware platform, these days Apple functionally sells computing appliances, not general purpose computers. It's why I recommend Apple to all my relatives who don't want to think about the guts of the machine and I recommend windows or Linux to everyone I know who wants to write their own software.

That's great! Giving me bootloader access has nothing to do with how your grandma uses her iPhone though, at least if I'm understanding your grandma right.

It requires more than zero engineering effort on their part so they won't. It is also, technically, an attack vector... A sufficiently sophisticated phisher might be able to convince somebody to replace their bootloader, but we both know that's not why Apple does it.

They do it because it allows them to capture the revenue for use of their computing appliances and it saves them every headache of having to provide customer support for hardware they sell that isn't running an operating system they wrote.

Serving your use case isn't what they make computers for. Google does though. I recommend switching platforms.

Serving my use case is what computers are. If Apple doesn't make those devices, then why are their devices capable of doing everything I described? They already wrote the bootloader. They already wrote the sideloading code, app sandboxing model, filesystem isolation APIs and even the packaging standard needed to distribute iOS applications. What's the major engineering hurdle they're struggling with, relative to everything they've already done?

I don't follow. They don't let you replace the bootloader; I thought that was your concern. So they can't do everything you want them to.

I can run Doom on a refrigerator but it's still a refrigerator. Apple makes computing appliances.

I don't follow either. If this refrigerator got an update that started showing you advertisements, you'd want the manufacturer to have some form of accountability that they don't further degrade the experience. Having multiple choices benefits everyone and forces the OEM to not make bone-headed moves. You're arguing that Apple shouldn't do good things because... Apple doesn't care? I already know that. I own many of their devices and experience it first-hand.

> If this refrigerator got an update that started showing you advertisements, you'd want the manufacturer to have some form of accountability that they don't further degrade the experience.

Me personally? I might just let it happen (especially if it goes hand-in-glove with some other benefit, like lower cost). Or if it's too annoying I'll switch refrigerators.

> Having multiple choices benefits everyone and forces the OEM to not make bone-headed moves

That's the business model of the alternatives to Apple. Apple's business model is value delivered through vertical integration. For their end-users, they're building a better product because they own and control the hardware, OS, and software ecosystem.

It's Nintendo-Seal-of-Approval thinking, and it's not inherently wrong so long as there are alternatives (and there are many, just none that have a supported path to using Apple's hardware).

> You're arguing that Apple shouldn't do good things because... Apple doesn't care?

I don't think Apple sees opening the bootloader as a good thing. It increases the ways the machine can be in a broken state with the only benefit to people tech-savvy enough to just use other hardware. And, of course, from a pure-business standpoint, it might kick a leg out from under the money-made-through-vertical-integration stool, which is of concern to them.

> Or if it's too annoying I'll switch refrigerators.

You think that having to switch a working major appliance for another because of a post-purchase update by the manufacturer is an acceptable cost for consumers to have to take on? I assume this is because you think the free market forces always end up optimal in the end somehow, and that regulation will cause more harm than good?

Just the second part in this case. Specifically because the customers for Apple products are those who want Apple making these decisions for them.

People buy into Apple for a certain security that the company does its best to vet the store contents. Stepping on their ability to do that diminishes the product value for the intended consumer.

Do you have the authority to speak for all Apple customers? Aren't the people complaining also Apple customers?

Definitely, but they seem misinformed about the goals of the product they bought.

I specifically buy Apple phones for this reason. I have read the T&C and have agreed that I don't get access to specific things - I don't want to ever think about it. I don't want there to be an option to unlock the bootloader, or change the store. I buy an iPhone for a family member and I'm sure there is no way they get scammed like they used to on Android by installing "the new OS update from their computer but they need this downloader or their photos will get deleted - just go in settings and enable this setting".

I want this lock-in because THAT is what I want. THAT is what I bought and THAT is why I went Apple and not Android.

If someone asks me what phone to get I say iPhone most of the time because I know their needs and that they don't want to deal with headaches. If they need more stuff I'd recommend either G Pixel or Fairphone but they I tell them to do the research.

> I recommend switching platforms.

Well, there are other options.

Other options, such as how the EU is going to force Apple under threat of government force to make changes.

Anti trust laws have existed for a century now. We can make new ones, or use those existing uncontroversial laws to apply to the newer tech monopolies.

If Apple doesn't like it's then they can stop selling their product in every country where this is the law. (So that includes the entire EU, and hopefully the USA soon, as there are laws in Congress being considered right now).

EU antitrust differs from American antitrust, IIUC, because American is couched in harm to consumers while Europe is couched in harm to merchants.

So I can see how the EU might see a way towards saying "Your ownership of the vertical stack makes you a market-maker and market-caller on a very lucrative app market; you bear some responsibility to making that market fair and competitive." This is the same kind of thinking that caused France to crack down on Amazon offering discounts on books that undercut local booksellers because they could collapse the booksellers' guild (even though Amazon's shipping integration means they actually can afford to charge so little).

But in the US, the first hurdle such a case has to cross[1] is "Why doesn't the user and app maker just go to Android if Apple's so bad?" Which, indeed, is the question I'm asking myself here; Coinbase could just jump ship and offer their app only on Android, and then, hey, the Android ecosystem is slightly better than their competition.

[1] ... unless the law changes, of course, as you've observed. I can imagine something coming out of the John Deere tractor "right to repair" angle, though I haven't been following this space.

> They can't. Apple locks the bootloader...

There are other hardware manufacturers than Apple?

Nope. Choosing your software platform on iPhone isn't an option though, if it was then we wouldn't be having this conversation right now.

I mean yes they are - there are so many manufacturers.

With the same argument you can say - open access to every device which will diminish a lot of the security by increasing the attack vector.

Why isn't my TV open or my Xbox or my PS? Why can't I edit the code of Windows is not such a stretch based on your arguments?

Also why should companies be forced to open stuff? They market it as a closed system - maybe respect the consumers who like closed systems. There are options for you - it's other vendors. So you have a choice. But even if you didn't there is no reason or expectation you should have a choice if the market doesn't want to cater.

One possible solution is for apple and other manufacturers to be forced to sell developer devices where the restrictions are minimal or non-existent. That I think will solve your quarrel.

I get why people have a negative reaction and it makes sense. Then I look at retail where there are several wholeseller adding a %, stores adding a %, drop ship sellers adding a percent

There was a documentary that showed the price of a chicken sold in a store and how much the chicken farmer makes vs the retail price and I can’t say the situation is wildly out of tune with retail or the big SAP/ERP consulting

This might be a relevant comparison if the App Store had any businesses it competes with, like the ones grocery stores contend with.

I know we've debated this to death, but Android's market share is bigger than iPhone's.

The consumer owns one phone or the other, and the switching costs are ridiculously high (in no small part because of other properties of these anti-competitive store licensing models). The average consumer happily can shop at multiple grocery stores, even on the same day as part of the same trip... if isn't even uncommon. The segmentation of users into the ones that own an iPhone vs. the ones that own an Android device should be looked at as creating two separate markets, similar to how if you have a monopoly on groceries only in Wisconsin you somehow aren't considered a monopoly just because your national marketshare is small.

Yes, Android's share is much bigger, but the statement is too generalized to make a relative comparison. While Android has 70+% of global market share, it's important to understand how the users LTV of any consumer business varies based on geo dispersion, hardware price tier, user sophistication and sales distribution model. Apple delivers users that are quantifiably more valuable in every geo.

That said, Apple's monopolistic practices create a ripe oppty for Android to own web3's watershed moment

The equivalent situation would be if the world had two landlords which together owned essentially every single bit of commercial property on the planet (or at least most of the countries) and if you wanted to sell chicken, you'd have to agree to whatever terms those landlords set, which are mostly identical between them.

But it's ok because you have the option of building your own store on your own island and convincing enough people to relocate to your island to buy chicken direct.

If it actually mattered to enough people, they would sail over to that island. The fact that most don't is extremely telling about what people actually want, I think.

(F-Droid is right there. It's relatively trivial to install on an Android device. As is, last I checked, replacing the whole Android OS).

In the US a large portion of phones are via carrier contract and hardware locked. So no.

The law mandated phone number portability in 2003. Everything else is buyer beware. Why is the answer not just "Don't get in a contract with Apple hardware if you don't want to be stuck playing Apple's ballgame?"

That's the responsibility of the consumer to read the contract. You also can leave with a penalty.

Libertarianism is like the tide on hackernews, it's quite confusing

In the US I can just buy an iPhone from Apple with no hardware lock. So no.

Idk A chicken farmer doesn’t even dream of keeping 70% the retail price of a chicken

I think we are both pushing the metaphor beyond usefulness

They want 30% of the Network Fees which are paid to Validators (Ethereum nodes that staked 32ETH to help secure the network). Coinbase never get any of that, it's not their commission etc.

It's more like Apple demanding a cut of your call charges.

The was a study in Denmark that from the money people pay in a supermarked 25% goes to advertising industry while the farmers receive less.

That’s not what rent seeking is. Apple has a very strong distribution channel, in part because of how trustworthy it is, that costs money to run, so it’s fair they take a cut of sales.

Would you be ok to paying 30% more rent to use a bank app from an iphone to pay the rent?

How is this an argument for whether it's abhorrent. I would love to pay zero for all products and services.

No. That's why I don't use iPhone.

But it's just capitalism. I'm not going to take the phone out of the hands of those for whom the answer is "Yes."

But most people don't even know.

Didn't apple ban that game company because of showing an itemised bill to customers, showing how much apple was getting at every purchase?

Which company? I'm very curious actually?

But devil's advocate - It's agains apple's Dev ToS and I don't get an itemised bill showing me a breakdown of how much Visa or MS charge me when making other payments.

I want to know the name of the company to see if they do the same when I make a purchase with a debit card.

The problem is either you go with iPhone or android. And, android is rife with so much ads, we can't even use phone properly.

We need something to break this duopoly mobile market otherwise it is always gonna be problematic.

I've seen exactly zero apps on Android in the last 5 years. I understand there's a lot of apps infested with ads out there, but why would you install those?

Agreed on breaking duopoly though. I'm pretty hopeful about Linux on mobile these days, there's some pretty big developments lately.

> exactly zero ads

Fixed :')

This analogy doesn’t make sense to me. This isn’t a bank transfer, it’s a purchase of a digital artifact. Is Apple wrong to ask for 30% of IAPs in Candy Crush? Because this seems pretty much the same to me.

30% seems a lot though. Credit card processors take somewhere around 2-3%.

Then don't use Apple - who is forcing you to build for their OSes? Your customers are there? Well maybe they have made a choice to be there for some reason. Respect that or don't go after those customers.

I have made a choice to use apple because I know all purchases for digital products go through iAP so my card details are never passed to the developer in any way. It makes me sleep better at night. I don't want other options.

I don't want to be offered the choice with 28-27% discount because it will make me share my creds (we know most ppl will choose the cheeper option and I admit I will do so as well from time to time).

I don't need the additional cognitive overhead because some developers are unhappy they have signed up to terms they don't like.

Honestly everyone that complains about the 30% so far hasn't given me a good reason other than greed. It's not a better UX, it's not a more secure option, it's not in my best interest (except the argument it will be cheaper but we all know that if possible most if not all companies will just pocket the 28-27%), it's not respectful of my choice of OS (again my reason is that I WANT the iAP as the only option).

So what makes digital artifacts (especially those that don't have anything to do with Apple's platforms) different from physical products. Would Apple be wrong to ask for 30% of purchased made through the eBay or Amazon apps?

It seems like it's their product and their right to draw the line wherever they see fit. They risked investing a lot of time and money into a platform that apparently now counts as best user experience. There is no ethical challenge, software developer gets access to wealthy customers thanks to Apple's decades of work.

So, p0pcult cited with a Steve Jobs quote which, in this context, can only be understood to mean, "Apple is becoming/has become a company where sales and marketing people are running the companies, and the product quality is suffering for it". shepherdjerred points out that the product quality is still extremely high, so the quote doesn't seem apt.

"Apple makes some good products but is evil" is valid criticism of Apple, which shepherdjerred hasn't disagreed with. "Apple is making bad products these days because they are lead by marketing and sales people" isn't valid criticism of Apple (in shepherdjerred's, and my, opinion).

There is certainly proof of Apple's software quality declining in recent years (iTunes, MacOS, Xcode, APFS, Time Machine, oh god the list never ends) but there's a larger point to be made about how regulation can be a salve for our ills. Apple wouldn't need to be fighting this war if they played nice, but much like Nestle they refuse to heed our warning until it's too late.

Apple is at a scale where pithy Steve Jobs quotes don't aptly describe their relationship with the economy or world governments. We cannot trust them to do the right thing, so our best hope for turning them around is holding them accountable for the things we want.

What’s wrong with APFS?

It was a buggy rollout, but they managed to ship an entirely new file system to billions of devices while largely preserving user data. It should be heralded as a software achievement.

That was impressive, the less-impressive part was watching them completely fail to document the filesystem and (still) have yet to release the open source spec they promised. Par for the course with Apple, but still bothersome enough to mention.

> There is certainly proof of Apple's software quality declining in recent years (iTunes, MacOS, Xcode, APFS, Time Machine, oh god the list never ends)

Can you be more specific of the proofs you are talking about? I've been using Mac for 20 years and haven't noticed issues that indicate a declining trend.

As the GP mentioned there have been great products that Apple introduced in the last few years. So your evidence is wrong, or at most inconclusive, to show that marketing and sales people have taken over at Apple, resulting in worsening products and services.

> but much like Nestle they refuse to heed our warning until it's too late.

The fact is Apple has continued to grow phenomenally in the last decade. They may indeed head to a decline, but I can't see evidence of that. Can you? Are you confident that you can see the future where others can't?

Unless the defence for iTunes is "it was always crap" then I'd love to see the apologetic claiming it hasn't declined in quality. The last time it updated its UI was certainly a huge step backwards but if I could point at one thing it'd the persistent sign in pop ups any time I open it. I don't even use it as my main player anymore because of how crap it is.

I disagree. While they may make decent products, the quality and attention to detail has gone down. Especially the UX has gone downhill entirely. Look at how bad the wallpaper changing UX is on iOS 16 for example.

their hardware is good and the ecosystem is good, but their software is god awful. macos has essentially zero window management to speak of and it's refusal to adopt vulkan has siloed it off from the rest of the industry. if they would just stop being stupid and adopt vulkan they would pick up support for a large number of games for free. it also has really bad multimonitor support.

Crumbs beat a MacBook

Nothing can beat a macbook at what? I literally can't think of one thing. Maybe battery life? Maybe? It's surely not compatibility, long term support, reparability, or performance per $1.

They dropped support for every graphics APIs except their own. They launched a greenwashing campaign that is always out of stock of parts, updates are mandatory regularly regress performance on old hardware, and we all know you're paying an apple premium for the same performance as something 60-70% the price.

They used to define good build quality, but most laptops are pretty sturdy these days.

You're not evaluating laptops holistically. You can always find something that is lighter, runs faster,or has a longer battery, but right now it's tough to find any laptop that can compete with the current crop of MacBooks in all these metrics at once. The only place Apple really falls behind some of the competition is repairability.

If you ignore price, sure

Laptops comparable to Apple laptops in performance metrics AND build quality are usually priced pretty similarly.

While I haven't used every laptop out there, the Macbook track pad is the only one that I have used that has not made my fingertip skin hurt after a short time of use.

I know this is a little weird, and I have never talked to another person with this problem, but all of the cheap plastic ones, strangely textured ones, smooth-yet-somehow-massively-friction ones all make my skin hurt. The Apple one doesn't for whatever reason.

I think I had a Gateway laptop a long time ago that also didn't heat my fingers to temperatures comparable to the surface of the sun or cause me pain to use. Like a really long time ago.

I go to the local store and try out track pads every so often (like once per year maybe?), and they are all just shit. That's enough to keep me buying Macbooks for now.

Like I said, this is a weird issue that I have never known anyone else to have, but it is a pretty critical one for me.

Also, I just want to point out, that I only mean the materials of the track pad itself, not the drivers or anything. I have no complaints about e.g. Linux track pad drivers. I put Fedora on my wife's Surface Pro 8, and the track pad drivers there are fine, for example.

> Nothing can beat a MacBook You can't upgrade the RAM, it has a weird processor that tons of code won't run on, and it starts at $2K. I have the latest one sitting on my desk right now from my work and it is a useless brick that I can't do any actual work on because so much code we use simply won't compile on it. I use a mini from 2018 for actual work and the macbook runs teams and zoom. Complete joke of a computer.

Hmm apple still makes great hardware but I think software wise quality has suffered and this quote applies…

For example on you phone you will get a red alert in settings … when you click it … says Try apple music for 3 months .. or will say setup apple pay … or sometimes say sign in with icloud. (even after declining multiple times)

These are just ads disguised as systems alerts … hurts the experience and comes off as cheap.

Also on Apple Computers and Phones alike it keeps asking to sign in and use icloud. But then gives you only 5gigs of space … not enough to even backup your phone and then tries to upsell a monthly fee for expanded storage.

The software is designed to confuse users into purchasing when simply taking photos. New iphone with 64 gigs of storage 40 gigs free …. user gets message they are out of space in icloud and can purchase more space. They are quite aware that many users are not savy enough to know they don’t need to use icloud at all with photos or anything. Every time you update the phone it prompts you to “sign in” or “create and account”. Again comes off as cheap and pushy.

I can go on and on but money crunchers are definitely at the table with software these days.

I’m surprised that Apple, as a company that had been carbon neutral since 2020 and had pledged to protect the environment hadn’t banned any use of Bitcoins from their platform altogether.

Crypto carbon footprint is mind-boggling, estimates are 200 million tonnes of CO2 since the launch, not including the CO2 emitted to manufacture the hardware.

Coinbase, that popularised all that mining to the general public should be considered as evil as other large CO2 emitters. And worse, all of these carbon emissions are for nothing, crypto seem only to be contributing to more exchanges crashes, fraud, money laundering and crime. With nothing to show on the positive side.

You are confusing Bitcoin with crypto. Ethereum uses drastically less energy after it transitioned to proof of stake. Many other cryptocurrencies are similar.

https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption

Nor do I agree with your assessment of banning Bitcoin because its power usage doesn’t match what we would like. I assume we all somewhat believe in the free market and the free market is solving this problem. Bitcoin price appreciation has been anemic at best and is only about 2% over the SP500 (+54%) in the past five years. Ethereum is quite a different story. +177%. Innovation is working.

How much power and materials are wasted when Apple releases incremental changes with a new number each year to resell the same thing to materialistic buyers annually? Should they ban themselves for the greater good of the planet? I’d say so.

https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/apples-colossal-e-w...

>Assuming the ecosystem was made up entirely of iPhones, an iPhone, on average, weighs 150g and are 130mm long. This means that you're looking at a pile of iPhones weighing 250,000 metric tons (the Empire State Building weighs in at roughly 330,000 metric tons), and if laid end-to-end would circle the Earth more than five times.

And that’s just the e-waste. How much energy went into making them, how many dollars were wasted paying salaries and gas etc.?

Crypto is bound to bitcoin. There is nothing that is holding that house of cards besides the bitcoins. As Ethereum and other coins do not have the cap. And near any investment into crypto contributes to the environmental damage from bitcoins.

You can read Apple’s environmental report. And read the recent publications that analyse the environmental impact of crypto. And one of the biggest moves that Apple and Google can do as companies, to lessen the environmental impact is actually banning bitcoins and crypto.

As someone who cares about the environment, I advocate for it. I don’t have any investments to Apple or Google or Bitcoins. Please, disclose any crypto investments, should you advocate for these.

I would recommend banning Netflix first while you are at it:

    data centers providing Netflix streaming services would consume around 370 TWh per year (Kamiya 2020) [1]

That's not counting all the client devices power consumption while watching it.

While BTC uses 87 TWh. [2]

1. https://blogs.salleurl.edu/en/energy-consumption-data-center....

2. https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index

Link 1 only references that claim to debunk it, mentioning that estimated energy usage from all datacenters in the world is less than 370 TWh.

True, it says "this value is 1.8 times larger than the 205 TWh estimated for all of the world’s data centers combined, which provide society with myriad other information services beyond just streaming Netflix videos."

If you are going down this route, you can also consider the environmental impact of electronics and aluminum production, which takes a lot of energy (and pollutes too).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting#Environment...

True. Apple has at least been making efforts to use recycled aluminum - 59% last year.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/04/apple-expands-the-use...

What are the actual positives from crypto? Had any been demonstrated? I see a lot of positives in having an iPhone. Say, my children can video-call their mom when she is travelling. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that worth the environmental impact, especially considering that Apple is carbon-neutral?

What are the positives of crypto? I haven’t noticed any for 10 years it had been around. Only exchange crashes and hacks like MtGox, Fed investigators having to fight Silk Road and the crazy near-fraud exuberance of FTX and alike.

I mean maybe the software is less quality than it used to be but so is it everywhere else. Software is more complex than it was.

In OSes.. Windows, Android, Linux GUI are all jankier. Apple Music’s closest competitors are all electron-based resource hogs? Safari is still the best mobile browser

> Safari is still the best mobile browser

Ha. https://caniuse.com/?compare=ios_saf+16.1&compareCats=all#re...

This might sound odd, but there is an entirely different axis by which to evaluate the quality of a browser than the web developer axis. If you look at the omissions, while there are some things I would prefer Apple to support (e.g. AV1 decoding), there’s also plenty in there whose omission of I consider a feature (basically anything on there that can be used for fingerprinting).

There is also two completely different axis for 'feature support' and 'security', neither of which need to be mutually exclusive. WebKit is really not the 'best mobile browser' any more than Microsoft Edge is the best Xbox browser.

It's not only about features, there's a lot of bugs on Safari mobile you don't really see because basically web devs takes enough time to solve them. I've experienced SVG bugs, z-index bugs, form bugs and even a few dom events bugs to name a few.

Fortunately nowadays I don't need to support this browser anymore on my new company.

>Safari is still the best mobile browser

I think it only appears that way on an iPhone. I've long believed that there are extremely subtle problems with Chrome and Firefox on iPhone devices that somehow magically don't appear on their Safari browser. Slow scrolling, strange micro lag... somehow on Safari it's better. Yet on my Android phones Chrome and Firefox work smoothly with no issues whatsoever. Also Safari objectively lacks browser features.

This is likely because Apple makes all browsers use Safari under the hood, so Firefox is a skinned Safari on iOS. They do a great job of making it behave similarly to 'real' firefox on other platforms, but where there are holes and weirdness, it's likely down to this.

Is the Apple Music app honestly much better? The web interface was pretty garbage last time I tried too, constantly stopping for no reason.

And I'd say Firefox for Android has Safari for iOS beat by mile. I can use add-ons like Ublock Origin and no script, plus stuff like background video fixer to play YouTube videos in the background. And I can't think of a single thing it lacks over Safari.

Honestly the only thing it lacks for me is iCloud Keychain but even on macOS. I'd love to have that support + shared history so I can use it properly on desktop and mobile. I know about FF Sync but still I do prefer the iCloud sync.

That being said FF has made some stupid decisions - like the lack of homepage on Android. Like... WAT?!?!

> Software is more complex than it was.

In some cases software quality suffers not because of the inherent complexity but because it's changed for the sake of change.

One example is the Books app that was updated in iOS 16. The update brought some new features but also changed the UI/UX for no reason, making it unpleasant to use. There's no dearth of similar examples with Google's apps too.

> Safari is still the best mobile browser

I don't really mind having switched to an iPhone when I got one provided because for all the discussion, ios and Android are nearly identical but I miss both Chrome and especially Firefox. Android Firefox has actual uBlock. The experience is miles better than Safari.

I haven't use iOS in a while. What is better about Safari than other browsers?

I hated upvoting this but you’re right. I don’t use the App Store much anymore, nor Apple News that much even with an Apple One subscription and I just keep coming back to the fact that the only adware installed on my phone—and I’ve checked—is basically the system software itself.

This is a premium phone at a premium price paired up with a range of premium-priced accessories. I know I get more than the value out of these devices than I’m putting in but damn does it feel like Apple isn’t just double-dipping, they’re like quadruple-dipping at least.

There’s the money I paid, there’s the money I pay to Apple for services that I do actually want, which, fair, some things have an upkeep cost, there’s the money I pay to 3rd party developers which Apple takes a cut of, and then there’s the money they’re charging developers to put ads in my face when I do open the App Store. There is such a thing as a value-add, and your example of the 5GB iCloud storage? The fact that this is the base level no matter what model phone you purchase just feels downright cheap, and that’s theoretically shared with a Mac or an iPad or both. Actually gutter-dwelling penny-pinching coupon-clipping lentil-dieting cheap.

The total addressable market is saturated now. Gains from Android are slow and difficult. So continued growth depends on more money from existing customers.

No. That’s the line, that’s the word on Wall Street, but it’s also complete crap. Apple spent a decade and a half as the iPhone company and for a long time that was exactly the right call.

They have other product lines with more than enough room to grow in the market, but they have to hunger for it, like they did from 1998 to 2008 with the Mac, and 2007 through the current day with the iPhone. Almost anything Apple puts out will sell in quantity as long as it doesn’t have exactly a voice-controlled UI, and while Microsoft and Intel are busy shitting the Wintel bed Apple is putting out top-tier high margin computer hardware with obvious gaps on the low-end, the middle and the ultra high-end and the thing keeping Apple from fully capitalizing on that is they’re shitting the bed with their own OS and tunneled in on nickel-and-diming their existing install base.

The global music industry was $26B in 2021: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-60837880

The global movie industry in 2021 was $90.2B: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/movies-e...

The global TV industry in 2021 was $259.16B: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/televisi...

Grand total: $375.36B

Apple’s revenue in 2021 was $394.3B, and some portion of that is already accounted for in the Music, Movies and Television revenue for 2021 but if they really want to grow, then they need to go back to their roots: hardware running software of quality. Services will only be a segment and most of their “services” revenue depends substantially on the size of their hardware’s install base. They can still offer those, but if you build good products, the profit will follow. Apple was the one that built their business on that philosophy.

Either that or become a bank.

I have been saying for quite some time now that apple could probably just buy greece or some other indebted frist world state.

Appleonia and Facebookistan. Even though the latter may turn out to be just a parking lot with a MCDondalds

Market share is the wrong thing to look at, yes Apple has a small desktop/laptop market share, but they utterly dominate the profit share.

This is the real question: How is Apple going to fill the gaps you see in the low end PC market, where there are very small profits to be found, without cannibalising it's own high end profit margins?

For the wintel PC makers market share is all that matters because they are all trapped in the commodity sector, so volume is the only way to grow profits. Apple isn't, it's a premium brand, so the economics it lives by are completely different. Analysts have been getting this wrong about Apple for decades, in fact pretty much my entire adult life, and I'm in my 50s.

Commodity companies can afford to stagnate their products, Cocacola makes the same sugar water they did before I was born. Premium product companies cannot afford to do that, they have to constantly invest in renewing and updating their products. Apple has been doing that for almost their entire existence (modulo a period of stagnation in the 90s when the execs didn't understand their own business).

On the software side I don't really agree, yes they have quality issues, but so does all software and they have incredibly complex stacks these days. They're constantly pushing forward with new software features, that's part of the problem, new features means new bugs.

> They're constantly pushing forward with new software features, that's part of the problem, new features means new bugs.

Only if you don't invest in testing - and Apple sadly has fallen to the trap of "bananaware" (ripens at the customer) as well as everyone else. "We ship it once it is good quality" has been replaced by "we ship it as soon as it can survive the presentation at WWDC and fix the bugs later on". For commodity manufacturers this can be excused by low profit margins (even though I don't like it), but Apple could literally double their developer headcount and they wouldn't feel it in their bottom line.

Am I the only one who keeps having problems with iPhones backround music/video play and resume? It's linux level bad. I play something I stop it and I never know what might be playing.

For PiP videos I have to play, lock the phone then press on play and then it might either continue the background video or play music from my library which I never really use.

The other day my iPhone would just reload and I still have no idea why? Did it run out of memory? Screen would freeze and it would stop on a black screen and then reload.

I don't remember these bugs from when I used to use an iPhone, but maybe I just didn't pay attention to them. When I travel and use a travel SIM it keeps asking me to switch everything to the new SIM. Default calls, iCloud, default messages. I say no to all of them but it still switches some of them.

Using apps from two different countries is a nightmare as well.

I do appreciate the speed of this device but ALL of these things are non-issues on Android. Something is off IMHO

Ha, I have that exact problem with Android, and I've been considering switching to an iPhone. It's crazy that it's also happening in Apple's ecosystem.

Weird. I had Android until Android 10, but I don't remember it being an issue. Who triages these bugs? Why are not considered worth fixing?

Interestingly, I started getting them after turning on Digital Wellness. The web browser will play audio in the background and even about 10 seconds after closing. It's crazy and drives me nuts.

On my last Android excursion I left because I was continuously plagued by audio issues. I’d cycle 11km to work every day and listen to podcast. With Android I had to stop at least once every day to fix audio issues. I switched back to an iPhone and it has been smooth sailing since then?

I think your phone might be defective. The only time I've experienced random restarts was when my battery on an old 6S was dying. Battery got replaced and all was fine.

Not sure what's going on with the music. I sometimes have it play random Apple Music when first connecting to CarPlay. Outside of that itt fairly reliably removes music when paused from the lock screen after a few minutes which honestly can be annoying, but keeping it on there forever isn't great either.

I have random issues with music too so can confirm the GPs experiences there.

Their point about restarts does feel like a defect though.

Are they still using a battery that's too small, just to keep the phone thin, and prevent you from replacing the battery yourself, then when the battery wears out prematurely they throttle the CPU to stretch battery life, which makes the phone slow, making you think the phone is dying, so you just buy a whole new $1000 phone instead, when all you really needed was a $30 battery?

I literally never understood this problem. Yes the battery isn't easily replacable by the user, but literally just pop into any nearby apple store, it's £69 and you get a new battery fitted in about 30 minutes. Are people who say that the only option is to buy a brand new phone just......uninformed? Unable to do this for some reason? I just don't get it. I wouldn't be able to swap the battery in my car either, but I don't go around saying that the only option is to buy a brand new car when the battery dies - I go to a workshop and they replace it. How is a phone any different?

Before they got caught Geniuses weren't recommending $100 battery replacements. They were recommending new phones because the old one was "too slow". And that "nearby" Apple store can literally be hours away.

And the problem is that Apple was considerably undersizing the battery compared to rivals and then compensating by throttling the CPU once it aged.

I've never not had an extremely disappointing experience with Apple Geniuses. Absolutely horrendous support. Completely incompetent people running down a script.

That said, I've had two trusted Apple Premium Partners that I would go to when I was still an Apple user and they were an absolute delight. Unfortunately back then I was living in a major city in Germany with tons of Premium partners, so nowadays that I don't really have a homebase and only have an iPhone I don't really know where to go for competent support.

Not everyone has the privilege of having an apple store at walking distance.

Sure, in which case at least here in UK Apple will send you a prepaid shipment label and you get the phone back within few days. It still doesn't sound to me like "buy a new iphone" is the better and/or only choice.

Hmm, are you using BT headphones or speakers? AirPods are the biggest annoyance for me with auto-switching as I'll usually have a mac, iPad and iPhone at my desk, be listening via iPad to something then opening a random app on my iPhone will request audio and stop the iPad from playing as the airpods swap devices. I know - it can be switched off, but it has to be done on every Apple device they connect to.

My new problem is with Apple TV and the Dynamic Island. Now by default when I walk into a room where my wife is watching TV, the phone will pick up the proximity and show me the remote as a live activity (Which is great, usually.) Then I use my phone for something and have no sound as my volume is down and the buttons aren't responding at all (seemingly.) It turns out if ATV is in the dynamic island, your hardware volume buttons now exclusively control the TV volume, and the only way to change the phone volume is to go into control center and swipe around.

Apple news is also very quietly very politically biased. When you watch CNN or Fox News, you know what side you're getting at least.

How? They are just links to original work in other places. Now if you look over all media there is a bias in the US Republicans will see all non Fox as left wing in the UK all the papers are right wing.

I think News looks at what you choose and offers more of the same.

They are biased in the work that they choose to present. Curation is a way to introduce bias as well. Doubly so when you consider that they post the headline as a notification, and most people stop there.

I don't have specific examples, I'm just going off the several times in the past year where I've seen a news story covered in five different ways, then I see an incredibly slanted headline notification from apple news that is woefully inaccurate.

Also, Fox is just the other side of the same coin- left or right wing, when it matters, Fox is no different from CNN. It's all fake garbage. Just wait until you're belief systems or personal experiences don't exist within the mainstream collection of proffered views, and you'll see how fake all of it is.

I think App Store Search Ads were really the start of this trend. Think from a benefit perspective - do these ad placements help users? No, they lead them to apps they weren't looking for. Do these placements help good developers? No, they cost them money to ensure their own top placement isn't stolen in search. Does this benefit Apple? Of course - now every large developer on the platform is spending boatloads of cash to ensure they get the top result wherever possible. Essentially taxing developers to buy their own app name slot so that some other random company doesn't do it first. And it has the follow on problem of now allowing spam apps to have a voice on the platform - get your garbage ad-ridden, weekly subscription app approved, then just boost it up with search ads. The real problem is Apple still makes a boatload of cash from those scenarios, so they aren't incentivized to stop them.

iAd came before that - but it had a goal of benefiting everyone - users, developers and advertisers. "High quality" ads, privacy focused targeting, developers get a cut and as a result they remove other more invasive ad networks. Unfortunately it didn't work out, and with Tim Cook now at the helm the numbers for search ads spoke a little more loudly than before.

I hate upvoting this too but it's pretty clear that:

1) advertising does not belong in Settings

2) notifications - especially system notifications - should not be abused for pushing ads

With regard to iCloud - 5 gigs is stingy compared to Google drive etc., but it's more than enough for the most essential parts: iCloud keychain, continuity, and storage for non-media apps like contacts/calendar/reminders (if you use them). The part I object to is using the OS for advertising.

Would it belong as a separate app to configure if it wasn't in settings? Or maybe opt out when you setup the phone?

The issue is that a large number of their users have had iPhones for close to a decade now. 5GB worth of photos is absolutely nothing.

I pay the $0.99/mo for extra storage but every time I do it, I wince a little and it costs them literally pennies to avoid giving me a bad taste in my mouth. I wish there was a way to self-host iCloud backups.

The problem is each photo is 5MB. It’s insane. We should have different levels of compression depending on the album it’s in; My meme folder should only contain 200KB images, my parents souvenirs should be 5MB each indeed.

iCloud backups of photos is possible without using iCloud. I use a photo syncing app on my phone that is paired with a SMB server in my home. It just dumps new photos whenever I’m on my home network. But I don’t get iCloud syncing photos to my Mac instantly.

iCloud backups of device backups requires a Mac, then setting to sync via Wi-Fi.

does this work in the background or do you need to run the backup task? I'm setting up a home server atm and curious about this for iCloud

Mine runs in the background when I get home. It uses an iBeacon device to determine when it is home. It starts the photo sync in the background. If I take photos and want to sync immediately I do that by starting the sync in the app. Remotely is a two part process —- enable vpn, then sync.

Google Photos will also backup your iPhone photos.

And the back ups regularly lose data, a good percentage of the images are simply not to be found. Must me my fault, certainly.

No more macs and iphones for me, that and the app "numbers" have been the very last straws.

I think it's definitely a you problem. I don't know of anyone who has had this issue with missing photos.

Yeah, I can’t say that I’ve run into your issue.

I have the same problem. When I contacted support I didn't get anywhere and nothing seemed wrong on their side.

>Hmm apple still makes great hardware but I think software wise quality has suffered and this quote applies…

I'm of the opinion that nobody makes a really nice user experience. My #1 complaint on every platform, website, device, OS, and software can be summed up as "Stop doing what you're doing, and do what I want." Computers and software should be tools that serve the user. They need to know their place!

>These are just ads disguised as systems alerts … hurts the experience and comes off as cheap.

Devil's advocate: I think a lot of users are idiots. Anyone who's been in software for a while will discover this: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*zffZ0ysfR4BokVvSxo...

I think you're not wrong that they're disguising these ads as alerts. But if it helps the user who doesn't care, or more importantly - doesn't understand - backup their photos for when they drop their phone in the lake will be better off, and overall happier with the whole experience. Save someone's irreplaceable photos one single time and you'll likely have a customer for life. Apple is very good at this kind of thing. People make fun of apple fans as idiots, but... it's hard to argue apple doesn't know their customers.

It's true, but Windows is worse in these adware respects (I have both systems).

We don't usually carry Windows everywhere we go, though and look at it at 3am.

Apple makes me sad these days.

The ads are super irritating, I can't believe a phone by the company that supposedly cares about user experience is pushing a fucking credit card offer. But that really shouldn't be surprising, considering...

After the casino ads took over the App Store, it became apparent that they're just bullshitting about safety and trustworthy computing. Because why not, if you care about those things, where are you going to go, Android?

Today's Apple is a mercenary bucket of quarterly-reporting driven MBAs. Any brand loyalty or trust I used to feel is gone. I stay logged out of Icloud, because if I don't, things keep uploading... stuff... to them, which absolutely should not happen, but does.

So, Apple is qualitatively no better than MSFT at this point, worse in some ways. At least Redmond does't affect a smirky superior shithead attitude in their software.

> After the casino ads took over the App Store, it became apparent that they're just bullshitting about safety and trustworthy computing. Because why not, if you care about those things, where are you going to go, Android? Ha-ha.

Hopefully they’re at least vetting the casino apps. The only thing worse than shady casino ads are ads for shady casinos.

> software wise quality has suffered and this quote applies…

I agree but Apple had lot of software issues when Jobs was CEO. Software can get incredibly complex and subjective to the user using it.

It’s also a different epoch. 1990 was all the rage about C. But now that a ReactJS dev can get paid 6 figures and move jobs easily in every big city, it’s much harder to find people who are passionate to build APFS or desktop apps for one vendor based in Cupertino.

I would be surprised if there was much overlap between those type of programmers.

The ReactJS type is doing fancy thin gs on screens and does it for the money and for all sorts of places. The APFS builders are more likely to be passionate and look for specific work. But 30 years ago the ReactJS types would be working for corporations using VB but the system programmers would be doing similar to now.

System programmers have always been rare and I suspectr less motivated by money more by having interesting work that affects many people.

Apple music is so obnoxious on mac that you can't delete it and it would popup by itself a lot

I agree on the software. I used to love using iTunes and used it for playing all my music. Then they released the "Music" app on the desktop that just removed almost all the features I loved about iTunes and made the user interface drastically worse.

Not just the upsells, the software is declining in quality in terms of features as well. Both of these features used to work and now don't.

- They removed iPhone sync from Music (nee iTunes), which makes sense, but the replacement in Finder doesn't support directories in file transfer. It shows them, you cannot expand them, placing files in a directory is possible and results in the files becoming inaccessible. Doubly stupid that the working file sync was in the Music app and not in the file management app.

- AirDrop on macOS just hangs all the time. I am completely unable to send files from my laptop and the interface is just a beach ball.

It really gives me hope that Apple is letting Linux play catch-up; I'd love to see a Linux experience that targeted the low-level usability of macOS 10! I'm talking OS-wide support for bundles, proxy icons, unified notifications interface... The target isn't moving any more, so it's reachable.

this.

Also, apple tries to lock with hardware so might, I find it too much frustrating. For example copy paste feature from iphone and mac os won't work if we don't login. And, 2fa is compulsory

Apple hardware is top notch but software is ewwww...

Apple software isn't perfect, but so are alternatives. IMO it's just better.

They are really good compared to whats out there but they are far from excellent in many details. They are still quite far from Microsoft where almost every detail is atrocious and only the whole is making the cut because the sum of the parts is quite terrible.

The cellular Apple watch has a terrible flaw. The networks only support it on the premium feature post paid contract plans and not on any prepaid plan. There’s no way to have a prepaid cell plan and add a watch for yourself. It’s an awful user experience. This limitation has no logical reason other than short sighted cell company greed and lack of Apple pushback

Unfortunately, none of that is true. Apple hasn't made a product worth owning in a long long time.

Macbooks no longer can run Windows and don't quite run Linux yet (the two largest OSes in the world, and Linux On The Desktop(tm) is a bigger market share than OSX), iPhones still can't run Android after all these years (the majority phone OS), and Apple Watches suffer the issues all the smart watches have (no real good use case, battery lives of a day or less, violates "zero distraction" ethical concerns, sensors are fulltime uploaded to the cloud and there are no good Federal controls on personal data in the US, etc).

I see no reason to ever buy Apple until they actually catch up to the rest of the world. Apple is a cult, and a very expensive one to buy into.

Defining a phone as worth owning as "being able to run android" is very arbitrary. I believe that nothing but the iphone is worth owning because the other's can't run iOS yet. Android just isn't suitable for real world usage yet.

Hand me an iPhone, and I have zero clue what to do beyond the superficial launcher similarities; I'd have to Google anything that's not immediately obvious. Android is simple to use because it already uses the semi-universal UI language that all other OSes (Windows, Linux's gaggle of DEs, ChromeOS, etc) and apps use.

The only people I know that own iPhones IRL are older people who aren't tech savvy (and all of them admit they don't know how to use their phone, and only make phone calls, text messages, and Facebook shit with it); I don't know a single Gen X, Millennial, or Gen Z (in or outside of the tech industry, in or outside of the US) with one.

If Android is "not suitable for real world usage", then no phone is.

They’re both targeted for dumb consumers. There’s no reason to pretend that either OS is somehow incomprehensibly difficult for the end user

> The only people I know that own iPhones IRL are older people who aren't tech savvy

Where do you live? Overwhelming majority of tech people I know in the US and UK use MacBooks and iPhones. That’s academia, systems programming, web services. Very very rarely see anyone using anything but macOS.

Probably a developing country. In the US iPhones have almost 100% market share among young people. I'm in Australia and almost everywhere I have worked has been a Mac place. Schools also all use Macbooks unless they can't afford them.

US.

Most of the tech people I know have long since dropped Apple because of death by a thousand cuts. If you would have asked me even 5 years ago, I would have said half of them still belong to the cult of Mac, but not anymore; the only ones remaining are non-tech older folk.

A lot of HN's userbase lives in the silicon valley and the SF area, so maybe this is just a rather narrow focused regional thing? I only ever hear of cult members living in either the valley or SF, or alternatively, in Seattle, hardly anywhere else.

The proportion nationally is literally over 50%. They can't all be older people - that just doesn't factually add up, does it? You must be living in a very strange bubble, completely unrepresentative of the rest of the country.

The reality is most people with a phone use an iPhone. Any tech or academic conference I go to, most people are using MacBooks.

The people I know who used to only buy Macbooks have switched to Surfaces or those Dells and HPs that have milled aluminum bodies like Macs; and now, recently, I know several that recently bought Frameworks (and love them).

Are you sure you aren't just confusing all the milled aluminum laptops with Macs, and all the black glass slabs with iPhones? I've even had someone confuse my OnePlus as an iPhone (until I showed them that I didn't have that giant ugly notch that iPhones have; apparently running Android wasn't a big enough hint to them).

> Are you sure you aren't just confusing all the milled aluminum laptops with Macs, and all the black glass slabs with iPhones?

No it’s literally over 50% iPhone.

https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/us-smartphone-market-share

https://hypebeast.com/2022/9/apple-iphone-overtakes-androids...

https://www.engadget.com/iphone-overtakes-android-us-market-...

See?

Yeah, I've seen those.

I don't know how they qualify those results; they don't publish anything resembling scientific work. Like, how do they counter-balance that Android users need to replace their phones less often? Apple users usually buy the new phone every gen, instead of every 3rd or 4th gen (Apple screens and batteries tend to die quickly); so, it seems active Apple users should be 1/3rd or 1/4th of active devices, not half.

Sales in of themselves don't mean much if you're comparing Apples to oranges (ahem) with a disposable phone vs one that isn't.

> Apple users usually buy the new phone every gen, instead of every 3rd or 4th gen (Apple screens and batteries tend to die quickly);

This is unsubstantiated nonsense. The resale values of iPhones are indisputable evidence that you are full of it.

Your comments in this thread are beyond stupid. Everything you’ve said is the opposite of true.

> that Android users need to replace their phones less often

That is not true. In fact the opposite is true. The average iPhone will last longer than the average Android phone.

https://valorvortech.com/how-long-can-a-smartphone-last/

You are also saying on one hand that most iPhones are purchased by older non tech-savvy people while at the same time claiming that those same people buy a new phone every generation. That is hard to believe.

> I don't know a single Gen X, Millennial, or Gen Z (in or outside of the tech industry, in or outside of the US) with one.

*what?*

Majority of people in US who use a phone use an iPhone, that’s just a fact. Their comment isn’t credible.

it's a pretty slim majority 55%

If like 50% of people use iPhones, which they do, how can it be possible to not know anyone young who uses one? Just doesn’t pass a common sense test to be true.

How does that change if the majority is small or large? Like 1% or 10% what difference do you think that makes?

It can be vacuously true if GGP doesn't know any millenials!

Honestly, the Pixel Buds are better than the AirPods. So it's not a guarantee that Apple makes the best products. However, I do like their phones and laptops better.

Do games even work on a MacBook?

Does it have Excel with macros?

> Do games even work on a MacBook?

Windows games and Steam games? Some. See https://applesilicongames.com

App Store games, including iPad games? Lots of them.

Apple Arcade? Check, some 200+ curated games including some interesting exclusives like Fantasian.

Game streaming services? Yep.

Remote play from Steam/Xbox/PlayStation/etc.? Yep.

> Does it have Excel with macros?

Yes, it does. You might be surprised to learn that the first release of Excel was for the Macintosh in 1985. A Windows version was released in 1987.

the most popular results on that website, require emulating windows or game streaming.

from personal experiance the mouse movement in almost any game on my m1-pro before i sold it was borked, and even 'native' games that were supposed to work didn't feel good at all

tabbing out of counter-strike go usually froze my macbook requiring a restart

the ergonomics of the laptops are generally also poor (keyboard is flat, glossy screen, limited angle on the screen hinge so it requires serious hunching )

While you responded factually, it feels disingenuous to portray an Apple computer as a capable gaming device. It is not. Not for the newest, not for the best. Not for the classics, not for the indies. Streaming has failed to impress the market, and the Apple Arcade remains an unfulfilling curiosity for those who think of gamers as a bit stinky and unproductive.

On the other hand, having both Windows and Mac, I probably use my Mac more often when it comes to gaming. At the very least 1:1. Or 1:1:1 if I include my iPad.

Some of the games I play on Mac: Slay the Spire, Civ 6, Through the Ages, Nova Drift, Wizard of Legend and quite a few visual novels/text based games.

Hmmm, I would call most of them indies.

Last time I checked Excel macros / VBA didnt work on Macs at all, so I wonder if they added them?

Can you confirm this change? It must have been in last few years.

Macs had Excel for a long time, but in the past it was a simplified, toy version of the program not suitable for real work.

Yup!

I mostly play strategy games like Civilization and Stellaris. Sometimes Factorio and League of Legends.

I replaced my gaming desktop with the $700 entry-level Mac Mini that came out in 2020; it had the same hardware as a MacBook, just a different form factor. It worked well. I wasn't playing at high graphics, but games worked well. I went back to my full desktop after a few months because I wanted better graphics.

My Mac Mini only had 8 graphics cores on the base M1 with 8GB of RAM. If you bought one of the newer M series devices I think you'd have a pretty good experience if gaming isn't your top priority.

> Does it have Excel with macros?

Didn't Microsoft do a full port of Excel in the last year or two?

Nothing can beat a MacBook except for all of the computers that can.

How many computers come with a USB baseball bat?

If they ever lock up MacOS the way they do iOS, I'll be on Ubuntu or Windows by the end of the week. I'm sure I'll miss the UX. Oh well.

I just switched to iPhone from Android after 10+ years on Android.

iPhone is everything that I expected Android to be, but has failed to become. As the smartphone market has matured, iPhone and Android are essentially at parity in functionality.

Android is completely fragmented and isolated. Every brand is pushing their slightly broken version of their integration. Everything is buried behind clicks/apps/configurations. I've been amazed at how well my various Apple devices integrate and how well they optimize for the flows that I care about most.

For example, using the AndroidTV remote requires closing your current app, pulling up the app launcher, scrolling to AndroidTV, waiting for the app to load, waiting for the app to find devices, pick a target device, wait for the device to load, try to use a half-assed AndroidTV app. Switch back to whatever app you were using before.

By contrast, iPhone places it in the command center. Pull down from anywhere, click the remote-icon, boom, control your TV. Doesn't even mess with your current app.

> By contrast, iPhone places it in the command center. Pull down from anywhere, click the remote-icon, boom, control your TV. Doesn't even mess with your current app.

It's exactly the same on Android - pull down the notifications shade and click on the TV remote icon.

Perhaps this works correctly with some combination of Android devices, but it has not ever worked on the devices I've owned.

Give me consumer choice over great products any time.

Well, if you ignore the price

Depends on what you need vs how much money you have.

Outside the US it's far more common to see Android phones and PCs. If you make 1k per month, buying a 1500$ phone makes less sense.

Don't get me wrong, I love my Air, but my big Windows laptop can do different thing. For music Logic alone is worth buying a cheaper Mac. But good luck gaming on a MacBook air vs a gaming laptop. Both cost the same price after all

But that gaming laptop will have your back in serious pain if you carry it every day around a college campus.

When I was younger I had the most fantastic time installing Ubuntu on a Chromebook

MacBook is twice the price of comparable hardware in a Dell or Lenovo. I mean it varies based on models being compared, but when I bought my laptop last year, that was the price difference. I like Macs, but not enough to justify that.

Honestly, the current status of iOS is sh*t. I left macOS and am doing my own Linux config because I found it's actually a better experience even if I suffer config hell from time to time.

I need my phone, however. Some stuff like having a Google maps with GPS are very valuable. Being able to join a meeting call while still going out is also another advantage. Then you have a bunch of apps that now I can live without but don't want to (like Apple Pay, Banking Apps, Taking a photo...)

Point is: If there is an alternative, I'd switch immediately. And please don't suggest Android as that is Apple with extra-messy-steps.

> Apple still makes great products. Nothing can beat a MacBook

I have quite a few computers on my desk these days.

* Late model Windows laptop

* M1 MAcOS laptop

* iPad

* Android phone

* Raspberry Pi

The point of telling this story is the computer with, by a long distance, best development environment/tools is the Raspberry Pi.

As for user experience, the Windows machine is not too bad, the iPad and Android phone are horrid limited little things. I prefer the Pi, but I can recognise the quality of the MacOS environment. My taste is with the Raspberry Pi. Especially because I can turn of the (fucking) GUI and use it in true text mode.

I learnt programming on the then magical Macintosh computers 1989-1992. They were really something technologically. So far ahead of anything else within ten times the cost.

Those days are gone for Apple. Thank you for the memories.

> best development environment/tools is the Raspberry Pi

The best development environment for _you_ is the Raspberry Pi.

Most people are going to want a GUI. Most users (even the vast majority of developers!) are not comfortable using a terminal 24/7. Most are going to be using whatever IDE they learned on, or whatever their team uses. That's certainly going to be a full GUI IDE that is resource-hungry. Even not considering those aspects, just compiling code takes forever.

I've tried using a Raspberry Pi before as a day-to-day device. It works okay, but you're going to miss speed quickly

I will vehemently disagree. I've owned multiple iterations of MacBook Pro laptops over the last decade. At least 6 different, top tier, variations including Intel and M series. They all have had glaring flaws. From garbage keyboards to excessive CPU utilization. My current 16" M1, with 32GB of RAM's keyboard is still a joke for as premium as Apple claims it to be and external video, even with Thunderbolt, is still riddled with quirks.

Is it good hardware? Yes. It's pretty. It's manufactured well. But to me it's basically akin to a Porsche skinned car with a motor & transmission from a US manufacturer circa 2001. It just isn't as great as everyone makes them out to be. The M series is a huge improvement, but if I'm spending my personal money I'm not plunking it down on any Apple laptop. I get far more bang for my buck with shopping out a top tier Lenovo quite honestly. They're not perfect either but I've recently invested in a new T series and handed down a T470 to a family member. Over the course of that time I've replaced one of the two batteries (in less than 20 minutes) with common tools, I've upgraded the RAM, I've upgraded the NVME and I've upgraded the wireless. All making the laptop faster and more relevant. Sure, Apple wins hands down on the convenience ecosystem. But to get things done and build things the Lenovo is my choice all day long. I don't need a Retina screen and I could care less if a pair of Airpods connects to it.

If paying the premium is worth it for those frivolous things then great. But I'm sick of the hardcore shilling of Apple as a serious work machine. Sure if you're doing A/V - I get that. But besides being better on power consumption (I still get ~7 hours out of the T470) there's no draw anymore for me. The software ecosystem has taken a huge hit over the years in quality on OS X and Apple has made too many breaking transitions for me to trust their hardware with my dollars anymore.

Finally, privacy. It's clear at this point Apple's position on privacy is a marketing effort and little else. They do just as little as they really need to make it feel "better". But Apple doesn't much care about privacy but would rather control the walled (with dollars) garden.

To clarify I'm not running Windows on my personal hardware.

I think there's something to be said about the general appreciation on Hacker News for the ARM MacBook. It's sounds like you've had a bad experience.

Some of those things (e.g. 'garbage keyboard') are subjective. Others, like high CPU usage and external video issues, are things that most don't seem to run into. I'm not saying that excuses the problems or invalidates your experience, but I hope that you can acknowledge that most people don't have that problem with their MacBooks.

I agree that the software side of Apple products in general aren't great. There are so many issues.

Companies that get complacent and lazy tend to get eaten by competitors, even if they are fat-cat monopolists, eventually. Apple knows this, I think, which may be why they keep on making pretty good products. Although, to be fair, they are not monopolists but part of a duopoly.

HP zbook can surely beat a MacBook?

I think the sweet spot is a $600 lenovo (or other brand). They have a reasonably good screen, 16GB of RAM, a good gfx card (gtx3050), if you need one. I find it really difficult to fork out an additional $1500 for something marginally better (and in certain ways more limiting).

Apple is still one of the best, but it is not immune to this (others are worse). Just tonight my phone updated, and the time now looks completely different.

Small rant ahead.

In the last updates they changed how alarms are set (rotatory dial to enter the numbers one by one and back to rotatory dial next update). Why did they change that? I believe just for change sake. Also I could see if I had an alarm set at a quick glance (next to wifi indicator top right); now it only shows on the lock screen. I wish they would let it be or hid it under a configuration option, but that goes against Apple minimalism.

While all of these changes were happening there were small bugs on the alarms, like the one with different timezones documented on a short video here https://twitter.com/mejutoco/status/1526100127668224002

Don't get me wrong, Apple is so ahead of other companies. I think until more companies rise to their standards they won't polish these issues, since they face no competition. But they are not perfect.

My mother also can't use the redesigned alarm easily and is now forced to ask Siri (which always works great!). She's legally blind and can't see red and black contrast. What a stupid design from Apple that can't be changed. I'm convinced Apple's accessibility team is either for optics or is full of people that have never met someone with a disability.

Macbooks and iPhones really aren't that great. There's some sort of mass delusion going on.

Macbooks are just overpriced basic laptops. A lot of people just use them to run Linux software but it's way worse than running it on Linux. Performance is great if all you're doing is video editing, which is what youtube reviewers love to focus on. For the rest of us, it's bleh.

I've used android for a few yesrs and ios for an year. I can confidently say that iphone has much much worse ux than a stock android. Every standard action 5 additional clicks, devices have much less battery size and life, doing anything in general is a pain in the a*.

My experience is that ios feels a lot like Niagara if you use the app library. Applications are pretty much the same. Notifications are marginally more annoying on ios but only marginally. I miss some intents, Firefox and Android clients are better on Android. The Apple watch is a lot better than the Android offering however.

All things considered, it wasn't much of a change. Ios and Android are not particularly different.

I think that nothing today can beat the M1/M2 CPU/GPU, but a ThinkPad, in my humble opinion, is much better than any MacBook (again, not counting CPU/GPU): - mate screen - trackpoint (if you haven't used it you don't know what you are missing) - keyboard - carbon body (much more warm than the metal unibody).

I would love for apple to license the M1/M2 to Lenovo.

iPads are also the class leader in tablets, there really isn't anything close.

The problem is all of these product lines were likely already in R&D during the Jobs era (With the exception of maybe AirPods.) Not the current designs of course, but the ideas. I think the real test will be this upcoming year and the supposed launch of the Apple headset, as I don't think there will be any greater test of Apple's current design/marketing/hardware/software prowess. People are already sour on the idea of the "metaverse" so it'll be interesting if Apple can sell something new/different/useful in the space.

Dunno, maybe? I personally am reasonably happy with my new ryzen-based thinkpad. If nothing else, the macbook has so little ports and everything needs an adapter.

However this is not Apple products. This is other peoples' products. For example, other peoples' software. Following the "tech" company playbook, Apple is simply acting as a middleman. And in this case a 30% tax man.

Is the volume of crypto transactions rising. Coinbase announced something about increased volume back in September. Perhaps those sales and marketing people at Apple see an opportunity to profit as crypto investors lose their shirts.

> However this is not Apple products.

The App Store is a product and it’s a bad product for developers and users when Apple is using their market position to take 30% of revenue.

Where can I purchase an App Store. Not sold separately.

Why would I want one, if I am not in control of it. I just want to run a program on a computer I bought.

Maybe one can argue a consumer will buy a computer in order to get the "App Store product", although it seems to me more like a product feature than a product itself. Personally, I would intentionally choose a computer without an App Store, where I can install whatever I want, and without reporting all the software I use to Apple.

After all, I know what software I want to install. As a NetBSD user I prefer to compile programs myself. The only "curation" I want is small source code size so I can read through the program before deciding whether to compile and test. Thus I have to do the "curation" myself. It cannot be delegated or outsourced. I do not need Apple to recommend software to me. Especially software they did not write. But who cares about me, if I am in a minority, because to the "tech" company proponents, only the majority matters. To the "tech" worker what is not popular is irrelevant. No surprise given the "tech" racket depends on selling adevertising services.

"Discovery" of unpopular software in an App Store is exceedingly difficult. The search capabilities are crude. The design appears to be display "Top 10" type lists and funnel computer owners toward popular programs, creating a lottery for whomever makes the "Top 10" and larger audiences for advertising.

So, you think you don't need curation but actually you do. There is some malware filtering that goes on, and some minimum (and I do mean minimum) quality control. There are content restrictions and such, that make the platform widely appealing. You might not want them, but the reason more and more and more apps are written for the platform is because of market power that comes from being content friendly. So the app you think doesn't need gatekeeping might not have ever even been written had it not been for this gatekeeping.

Kind of like saying, what has a cop ever done for me?

That said, yes, everything about it could be better. I very much detest app discovery in the app store, and it's almost as difficult via web or other means. At least in amazon you can filter out under 4-star products. And if you apply at least one category filter then you can also filter out marketplace sellers. The app store should have at a minimum some kind of stars filter.

There's no transparency or real studies if there's some effective malware filtering by forcing the app store model so at this point it's difficult to take it seriously.

> You might not want them, but the reason more and more and more apps are written for the platform is because of market power that comes from being content friendly

[Citations needed] again basically, there's only two platforms on mobile, it's not like developers can get the luxury to chose a platform.

> There's no transparency or real studies if there's some effective malware filtering by forcing the app store model so at this point it's difficult to take it seriously.

Maybe look at the Android situation: Malware is at least two orders of magnitude more prevalent, and it's mostly because you can type "free fortnite vbucks android" into the search bar, get on a YT video that links to a shady site, that shady site tells the user how to enable sideloading and install spyware apps masquerading as coin generators.

You don't need to go that far to get spyware, they are already available on the play store if you look enough

At this point iPhone isn't a product. It's control, manipulation, and extortion of the free market well beyond any notion of fair competition.

Apple won 51+% of American consumers. Now it taxes all of the computing and commerce workloads they engage in.

Imagine if Tesla charged Starbucks money to drive you to coffee. Because that's exactly what Apple has been doing for the last decade. They've buttoned up every single industry and put them all under thumb.

Apple is taxing the internet, basically. (And Google's scary and hidden side loading isn't much better.)

> At this point iPhone isn't a product.

What? This is a weird statement. iPhone is 100% a product. There are many alternatives.

> Imagine if Tesla charged Starbucks money to drive you to coffee. Because that's exactly what Apple has been doing for the last decade.

This is not the current scenario. Using your example, it would be like if Tesla owned a building, a coffee shipping company, and coffee making equipment and Starbucks sold coffee using Tesla resources. In this example, it would be expected for Tesla to charge Starbucks a premium for this full service coffee company being white labeled by Starbucks.

>Apple is taxing the internet, basically.

No. Apple is charging a fee to list products for sale on their store. Similar to every other store in existence.

The iPhone isn't a product. The Apple ecosystem is. I purchased it to ensure (A) nobody can take my phone, punch in my passcode and Apple ID and install malware that hides itself or otherwise flash the software to look like iOS but with malware on top, and (B) when I use native apps, the chance of having malware distributed to me there is almost 0.

Pegasus says hi.

Apple IS a product and the world isn't America. There is not a monopoly of Apple products all over the world. The people and specially in America can vote with their money and buy an Android if you disagree with Apple. Apple is not taxing the Internet when you have other options.

> And in this case a 30% tax man.

Do you mean that in a good way or a bad way? Taxes pay for roads, bridges, military and so on. Healthcare, in most of the developed world.

Taxation without representation. Those paying the tax have generally no control over how Apple spends the corresponding revenue.

With respect to those in the US who pay the "30% tax", most of Apple's income is kept offshore so Apple pays minimal if any taxes on it. Compared this to the majority of people in the US who buy Apple computers who keep their income in the US and do pay significant US taxes on it.

> Those paying the tax have generally no control over how Apple spends the corresponding revenue.

Sure you do. The consumer has a voice. If AirPods Pro 2 sucked, you vote by not purchasing them, and if enough other people do the same they'll can Airpods Pro 2 and create a third version in hopes it's good enough to "win back" your vote/money. This is the basis of free market capitalism and allows Apple to make a "product" (the Apple ecosystem) that people don't have to buy into, but they do because of the R&D Apple has invested into their product for over a decade.

This is why there’s no longer a HomePod, but there are HomePod minis.

If Apple is collecting a "30% tax" and, without any input from the "taxpayer", they choose to spend the tax revenue on producing rechargeable Bluetooth earbuds, how was the taxpayer given a vote on the decision to spend the tax revenue on producing rechargeable Bluetooth earbuds (versus something else). By the time they go to market with the overpriced earbuds, the money has already been spent. More "planned obsolescence" electronics waste in the landfills.

Going back to the original comment to which I responded, where the commenter compared Apple's "30% tax" to government-levied taxes for public services, this is like giving residents a vote on a new public services project after only it has been completed. At that point, the money has been spent. It's too late to for voters stop the government from spending their money on the project.

Apple has already gone through this of course, and I wonder if it’s going to happen again. And I wonder if a company can survive it. It certainly almost killed Apple the first time, and required Jobs’ return to steer it away from the cliff (I suspect that only someone charismatic like Jobs, in a strongly loyal-customer-base company like Apple could pull it off)

I think we’re probably still a good 5 years away from something like that.

they've certainly become the very thing they've set out to disrupt

Apple doesn't have any monopolistic positions. None. At all. And they also manifestly have not "driven out" their product people. They're still making genius products.

Submitting this without comment is the smartest thing to do - because if one truly implies what I think parent intends, they’re about as bone headed as they come.

The product is making insanely powerful api’s so that you go from thought to code and from code to customer base at the speed of ideas while still maintaining amazing performance for the end user.

That is still happening - whether or not we agree on SwiftUI - it’s obvious they still care. These ideas BUNDLED with the AppStore is the product for developers and end users. Either enjoy it - or enjoy life on the web, the cross browser compatibilities, the crazy header vulnerabilities, the css not shaping right, the js everywhere… you name it. Just try other fields for a real commercial app - then you’ll see the iOS native app is valuable for a reason.

People can agree to disagree on the value of the walled garden. The problem is that "Just try other fields for a real commercial app" isn't really an option; not for a commercial app that wants to make money. Clearly this is not because the App Store offers a better developer ecosystem than other platforms. It just enjoys entrenched market share.

Why do you think Apple has so much market share? Because people hate their products?

Good marketing. Sticky ecosystem. For a while, they were extremely innovative (facetime/ipod/itunes/iphone). Network effects (facetime/imessage).

Most users do not know they are facilitating Apple's extortion racket, nor have they thought about what that implies for them. They just see a shiny iphone and think "oooh I want that"

The real genius is in why these customers want it. And that is, to paraphrase John Mulaney, “the everything about it”.

It's because they have some great marketing. But people aren't choosing the app store. They choose a phone, and then they are forced to use the app store if they want to add any apps.

I’ll take me a good Steve Jobs quote any day. Thank you

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