The Cult of Mac

Reeks of projection that he thinks anyone who disagrees with him is a cultist, and not that maybe they just have a nuanced opinion.

Yes I understand the benefits of having more app stores, but there are benefits to the current setup too. Having all apps installed from a single place means I don't have to worry about sourcing different apps from different places. If my grandma wants to install an app I tell her to go to the App Store, not to install Facebook's app store so she can then install Instagram. It's simple.

This applies to almost every locked-down feature of Apple platforms. Having more browser rendering engines means more user freedom, but the current situation where every iPhone can only render web pages with Safari means web developers have to make sure their page works in something other than Chrome, and if something works on one browser on the iPhone it'll work on every browser on the iPhone.

I've just accepted that I don't really want to use my smartphone as a powerful computing machine, it's a convenient secondary device that does enough to get me by without using a real computer, so I'm fine with these tradeoffs. It doesn't mean I'm a "cultist"

Count me in as someone who thinks the cult was a lot more significant back in the days when Apples products really kind of sucked (late 90s especially). If the iPhone is a cult it's bigger than Catholicism and almost as big as Islam. Most definitions of cult include that it's a relatively small group with a charismatic leader. Maybe in computer terms they were small and led by a charismatic leader (Jobs) back in the day, but when it's more like 1.5B people small doesn't really fit, and does Cook or anyone else really count as charismatic in the way Jobs was?

Also funny from Doctorow, he always seems so into himself that you'd think he'd have been one of the mac cultists back in the day.

While I think this "cult" phenomenon has been significant, it seems it's not as prevalent as it has been.

Many Macs today are corporate workstations. Individual users still adopt it for the integration of phone/tablet/PC, but the cult persona seems to be a somewhat dated analysis...

If we are talking about cults. What about the weird orientalism in software engineering? The fetishisation of asian culture particularly Japanese. And the romanticisation of using archaic mechanisms to interface with systems - terminal interfaces.

"Iron Sky 2" featured "Jobsians," a strict religion based on Steve Jobs, that detonates the devices of the Faithful for the Sin of Jailbreaking.

The Modern Mac cultists aren't quite that strict. Yet. Some of the zealots would like to go that way, I'm sure.

Is the cult as strong as it has been? I feel like this "cult" is absolutely what Apple leveraged to get where they are and they not doubt played into it. But it doesn't seem like that is really the case anymore. Or is it?

Flagging an article that is critical of Apple seems... cult like?

I get annoyed by the use of "religious" as a synonym for baseless or irrational.

What I notice about Mac users is that they are convinced all kinds of functionality is unique to Macs. Lots of them have told me "if you had a Mac and an iPhone you could do X" or "this app will make you want to switch" and it ALWAYS turns out to be something I have an equivalent to on the platforms I use (Linux desktop + Android). Copy and paste between machines (OK, I have to install an app and pair, big deal), decent terminal apps, third party services syncing.....

I think Cory often has interesting ideas but he is such a godawful boring prose-ist that I have trouble making it through his writing.

For me, the reason I'd call myself an Apple fan (despite agreeing Apple is in the wrong on many of the points the linked post makes) is the entire rest of all consumer products cater to "non-Apple fan" taste. Most products are differentiated purely on price, not experience, and then if you truly want to pay for a different experience, in most categories you're thrust into super niche and fiddly.

My $2000+ Ableton Push 3 and ~$1500 in ergonomic Egrodox EZ keyboards. Those feel overpriced to me (but worth every penny for my personally).

But the fact that I can do my work everyday on a computer designed with the values Apple values, that it's a product so good that my company even buys it for me, and encourages me to use it for my work? I'm going to be a fan of this company for life! If you don't understand, really don't worry about it, the entire rest of all consumer products caters to your taste, so just enjoy that.

As a non-cult dumb Apple end user, I'm slightly fed up of people talking on behalf of me and telling me what is good for me.

The only app I ever paid for through the store was Pixelmator (desktop) and that was when it was $10 a number of years ago. I don't have any paid iPhone apps at all. The impact of the store on me as an end user is mostly zero.

I haven't had to repair anything yet. I've got phones going back to 2015 which have had new batteries and that's it. I took them to Apple and they sorted it within a couple of hours each time. I had one display issue on a 6s back in 2016 and they just gave me a new phone there and then in the store that day. Also you can buy official parts and equipment to repair your stuff from them as well.

I barely use iMessage. It's not a controversy. Everyone here (UK) uses WhatsApp. Half the people out there, even on iPhones don't even know or care what iMessage is.

My mac just sort of works mostly. I have a PC too because I have two bits of software I can't get rid of yet. I'd rather use the Mac because it doesn't kick me in the balls every 30 minutes like the PC does. The PC is a dire experience from hell (Windows 11). And I've got a lot of experience with Linux running back over 25 years and then a decade of commercial unix before thaet. I don't want to take the day job home thanks.

As for privacy, what other options do I have? It's not perfect but it's the least bad. I either use an android infested with microsoft stuff which is full of Telemetry as well as Google stuff which is infested with advertising and tracking or I use just Google stuff which is infested with advertising and tracking or I get a defanged Android which adds a thousand layers of friction to every day of my life.

My position is distinctly "meh" at this point when I hear people telling me what is good for me because they're not telling me that. They're telling me what I am doing is bad for me then going silent when they're asked to cough up a better solution.

Apple makes legitimately awesome products. That's why this lengthy response.

> Apple's most valuable intangible asset isn't its patents or copyrights – it's an army of people who believe that using products from a $2.89 trillion multinational makes them members of an oppressed religious minority whose identity is coterminal with the interests of Apple's shareholders.

To a large extent, the future of computing hardware and software from Apple in the Mac and in MacOS does coincide with the interests of the shareholders as well. This is not always 1:1, sometimes shareholders want more profit so they can sell some shares, but the company's growth and making the shareholders happy does, at least in Apple's case, translate into better products and services.

> Take the App Store. Apple blocks third parties from offering rival app stores for its iOS platform, which means you can only install apps that have been blessed by Apple. That blessing is contingent on the software authors involved giving $0.30 out of every dollar you spend in their apps to Apple.

You can install any app you want as long as it's installable on the hardware. It's true that the Apple App Store is the only sanctioned curated App Store. I'm not sure who would produce an App Store that they'd like installed on an Apple machine? Are you considering a world where Android apps are installable on Mac and people can install the Android Store on their Mac? Or the Samsung Store? Or etc. I'll be open and say I don't want that. What I want is installers available directly from the company or from an App Store that is really close to the hardware and can curate things. I only need one App Store. If there were more, I'd likely stick with 1 or just get software I want directly from the company or person selling it via their website and installers off the open internet.

> That's why non-Apple audiobook stores like Libro.fm and Downpour require you to buy your books in a browser, which hamstrings them and gives Apple an unbeatable advantage

I don't see selling via a browser as a limitation. Payments in browsers have improved a lot, from the point of view of how seamlessly you can enter payment details to how secure the flow is. If you sell via just a website link, that's less friction than installing an entire app. So unless your app is really heavyweight, the web and links are nice and should not be considered a limitation. If your purchase funnel is for obtaining access rights or licensing rights, the web is more than sufficient.

If Apple's Store in particular results in more sales, that may just be because people prefer Apple's curation over the open web. It's not necessarily going to be true or a given that additional App Stores would have the same commercial success on Apple hardware.

> But that's not the only bad outcome. Some lucky service providers are able to pay the Apple Tax by gouging Apple's customers, raising prices to pay the danegeld. That's the second effect.

They do this already on other platforms, like on Kindle where digital copies are very expensive despite the marginal costs per copy being very low. I think because of LLMs we're going to get to a world where digital books become very cheap by comparison and physical books ship with a key to have a digital copy as well. This is the ideal world for books. But in any case, when it comes to digital copies of books or audiobooks the prices are high everywhere because consumers have not yet realized that marginal costs per digital copy are effectively $0, and that if they're paying full price they should be getting a physical copy with a key to the audio book and the digital book. Consumers will catch on and then this aspect will go away because it's not a factor anymore.

> But Big Tech most assuredly steals from the news: it steals money. The ad-tech duopoly takes 51% out of every ad dollar. Social media holds news subscribers to ransom and requires "boosting" payment to reach the people who've asked to see their articles. And the mobile duopoly takes 30% out of every in-app subscription dollar:

Exactly to my point that other companies charge a lot for digital goods. Granted, they build and maintain the infrastructure and the IP that makes all of these capabilities possible. But more and more free and open capabilities exist for this. Bring back RSS feeds. (Although I think they never really went away...I'm going to set up an RSS feed and reader for the first time in a long time this weekend)

> The real beneficiaries of an open app world is Apple customers. After all, it's Apple customers who bear the 30% app tax when it's priced into the apps they buy and the things they buy in those apps. It's Apple customers who lose access to apps that can't be viably offered because the app tax makes them money-losing propositions. It's Apple customers who lose out on the ability to get apps that Apple decides are unsuitable for inclusion in its App Store.

It is an open app world. I can install any app I want from the open web on my MBP, like I would on a Linux or Windows machine. I don't care if I can't replace the App Store as I only rarely use it, and when I use it it's for the trusted curation by the experts of the hardware and the software or the convenience of its integration into the MBP.

I do think Apple needs to do better for supporting modern web standards for their browser, though, particularly to ensure that browser-based payments and support for payments from the device through other major browsers remains reasonable. And so far it has.

> The minority of Apple customers for whom their brand loyalty is a form of religious devotion insist that "no Apple customer wants these things."

I've been an Apple customer for a few years only. They make really awesome products. I use a Windows machine for Microsoft-stack work as well. There are great Windows machines. I also really enjoyed ElementaryOS and Ubuntu the last time I used them and can see myself using them some more.

I don't actually care if the Apple App Store is the only one present on Apple devices, particularly because of the security benefits if less technically inclined people want to trust the curation there. If the web browsers maintain good modern standards, then it'll be easy and friendly to buy and/or install other software downloaded from the web, and that's what matters. The App Store stuff comes across more like competitors trying to impose a regulatory burden that doesn't actually matter to try to slow down Apple's huge strides in producing the best software and hardware integration that exists on the market.

> If rival app stores – ones that had different editorial standards and different payment policies – existed, the only people who could possibly use them are Apple customers. Android users won't be using an alternative iOS store. Symbian users aren't going to be installing apps from an iOS store offered by someone other than Apple.

Give me a practical example of a different editorial standard or different payment policy that translates into an actual different and desired user flow than what is possible on an Apple device today. Right now it seems like this move is just an unfair attempt by other large corporations to try to crack open Apple's tight integration, which could compromise the quality of the products and services Apple already provides. So what is the fabled additional experience that someone could get if they followed your path?

> If it's true that "Apple customers don't want non-Apple app stores," then Apple wouldn't need to use technological countermeasures and legal threats to prevent them from coming into existence. These non-Apple app stores would fail on their own terms.

This assumes that anyone was polled. It also assumes that there are no technological constraints and deep IP secrets behind the Apple integrations that need protection. It also assumes good intentions on the part of the other companies, and that they actually care about the users rather than just trying to get a look at Apple from much closer up at the hardware/software level.