Comment by danaris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danaris | Hacker News Reader

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And these days, every Mac comes with a full Unix terminal built-in. Xcode is a free download (remember, if you wanted to develop Macintosh applications back in the day, you had to buy something like CodeWarrior!), and, as you say, they've developed Swift Playgrounds specifically to make a nicer onramp for people interested in developing their own stuff.

It's never been trivial to configure the Mac in terms of things like skinning, but third-party tools to do so have always existed for those who cared enough to look, and today, if you want to install Linux on your Mac, you can. If you want to install Windows on your Intel Mac, you can even do that. Those options were, at best, incredibly niche back in the pre-Intel days (though I remember toying with SuSE Linux for PowerPC in the early 2000s), and nearly nonexistent in the pre-MacOS X days.

So it's definitely not a simple case of "Apple in the '90s was in favor of customization; when Jobs came back, he locked them all down and made them toasters."

Even though its now probably 20+ years old, the CodeWarrior experience was vastly superior to XCode.

For a company with Apple's budget, XCode is a disgrace.

Oh maaaaaahn, do I remember Metrowerks CodeWarrior[1] fondly! Thank you for bringing it up. I also remember using Lightspeed C, which later became Think C.[2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THINK_C

Still got my Code Warrior tee shirt, showing a chunky dude holding a floppy disc...

Oh my god, I’ve been using Xcode to make something recently and holy moly it’s where energy and ambition goes to die. The sheer number of bugs in both Xcode and in apple’s APIs is astounding.

Constant crashes, unreliable and underdocumented apis. Urgh.

I’ve been doing web programming for the last decade or so. When I started web programming, it was a mess of browser incompatibilities and jquery. But now I’d take modern web development over apple’s hellscape any day. MDN, caniuse, flexbox & grid CSS, modern bundlers, svelte and solidjs - this stuff is a delight in comparison.

The ironic thing is that today, Codewarrior is just a crappy reskin of Eclipse for developing for NXP chips.

I’m fleshing out these thoughts more in a longer form - but I think Jobs was heading the company into the abyss with the appliance model.

If it weren’t for the AppStore, it would’ve been the end of Apple. The iPhone wasn’t released with it at the outset - because this “make your own” wasn’t a part of the ethos. The Mac also suffered tremendously with no love to Final Cut, snipping Aperture, and leaving the hardware to bit rot for the longest.

iPod was a hugely profitable windfall and iPhone was too - somehow the AppStore slipped in there and became the lone remaining ember that reignited the hacker mindset - Swift I believe is that true rekindling; everything else follows M series, OSX continuities, etc

I’m starting to rethink everything I thought I knew.

It’s difficult to square creating both the most successful product and the most successful company in history with the idea Jobs heading the company into the abyss with the appliance model.

I'm fine with saying "the abyss of rent-seeking" even when rent-seeking behavior by corporations makes them a lot of money.

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