Comment by Apreche | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Apreche | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Here are the ideas Tim.

Stop egregiously upcharging on RAM and storage.

Allow full sideloading. Hide it away in deep place with warnings so normal people don’t use it, but let us nerds have it.

Stop charging $100 for developer accounts.

Release your dev tools so people can build apps for iOS using computers that aren’t Macs. Also, full XCode on iOS itself so you can make iOS apps on iOS.

A Mac Pro with an M4 Ultra AND NVidia GPUs. All other consumer computers will bow down.

Get the Rosetta team to make something similar to Valve’s Proton to actually get the games running on Mac once and for all.

Repairability and upgradability, for real. No ridiculous tools. Stop with the parts pairing. etc.

MacOS and iOS have lots of bugs that are weird edge cases and are not getting fixed. They don’t affect many users, but they strongly impact the users that experience them. Those many bugs add up to a lot of users.

Real intelligent human support for advanced support issues. The real genius bar for us nerds who need it.

Fix the documentation. You like to brag about being best in the world at so many things. Why isn’t your documentation best in the world?

Let Apple Watches work without iPhones. Better yet, let them work with Android phones. Better yet, let iPhones work well with smart watches that aren’t Apple Watches.

I could go on, but I think that’s enough.

These ideas demonstrate a lack of understanding of the platform and technology. Apple integrating nvidia GPUs is just one example. On a standard bus? That would make Apple Silicons core benefits redundant and put Mac users in the same rat race for products as PC users. Some custom integration? Tried that. It means lagging by years. On top of that why? Apple Silicon means upgrades to performance faster than thenPC market. Apple has little to gain in trying to capture the high end gaming market.

Similarly developing Mac software on PCs makes no sense logistically or practically. Why would Apple want software in the market which had never been run on real Apple hardware? Why would a developer want to write for a platform they aren’t on.

This “make Macs into PCs” thing never dies. Mac diehards stay with the platform, even when they are slower or more expensive, because they aren’t PCs.

I think it is perfectly valid to be able to develop iOS apps on Windows or Linux. Android studio runs on both these platforms. There is no reason to restrict it other than Apple wants to sell more hardware. Every developer and CI machine has to be bought from Apple.

> Similarly developing Mac software on PCs makes no sense logistically or practically. Why would Apple want software in the market which had never been run on real Apple hardware? Why would a developer want to write for a platform they aren’t on.

Have you never heard of cross platform development before? It's bizarre how far behind the times Apple users are, but I guess if you never leave the bubble...

Make the Weather App work offline. It's okay to show the forecast that you downloaded 2 hours ago.

Make the Apple Watch weather compilations update more often. Especially UV which could be the difference between being outside with our without sunscreen (and thus potential skin cancer).

Apple Watch Audiobooks should support the audiobooks I bought DRM-free.

Exactly, this is kinda the Innovator's Dilemma in action. Apple's focus on services and control is hurting end-user innovation and choice. They need to unwall their garden and empower users to spark the next big thing. I think more end-user malleable software, local first approaches would help, and the cost points you mention too, especially.

None of those are "the next big thing", most of those ideas would reduce Apple profitability rather than increasing it.

You're thinking too short term. If Apple does all these things, what reason is there to get a PC anymore? If they do these things, Microsoft will panic and Windows will take a devastating blow as even gamers see the Mac as just better than any PC they could build themselves.

I refuse to buy any apple hardware for my personal usage. If they changed (some of) the things GP mentioned, I would gladly convert. Their hardware is pretty slick, their software is draconian.

None of those are good ideas from a ceo perspective because they all erode the competitive moat and make it less profitable. They are great ideas for consumers and society as a whole though. Society as a whole is not the ceos problem though, ceos pr(blem is make vsluation go up at a fast enough rate; your ideas would make valuation go down.

What is the issue of charging $100 for the developer accounts?

It's just ridiculous. The fee is too low to actually matter too apple, and it's ridiculous to have to pay a yearly fee so you can add value to Apple's ecosystem for them. You even have to pay it to publish free/open source apps. Then if you dare to think about charging for your app, they take 30% on top of that.

It also means hobby programmers are much less likely to get started with developing for iPhones because for most of them it'll be a (at least) $100/year loss.

Framing this expense to hobby programmers as a “$100/year loss” seems opposed to the entire concept of a hobby.

Everything will be a loss; it’s a hobby. If you are doing it to profit then it’s a side gig or an actual job.

What kind of hobby can you pick up for less than $100? You can’t even take up hiking or walking without spending that much on shoes and socks.

I was 13 when I started developing for my android phone. I did not have $100 to spend, or if I did, I was not willing to spend it on this. Developing for my android phone was 100% free with no restrictions. Putting my app on the play store was a one-time fee of $20.

So, android development, for one. Also Windows development. And Linux development. Web development, too. Pretty much any platform other than Apple.

And I suppose we should just ignore those who live in poorer countries, right?

Not willing to pay the $100 is a choice you can make, absolutely

But to frame this, again, as some steep expense that prices out young talent is very weird.

Developing for android or Linux is not free. You need to have a lot of resources already to get started here, too. In fact there is an argument here that if you want to test on any variety of supported android or Linux hardware you can easily spend a ton of money here too, far more than the limited number of apple configurations

I started coding on the Commodore 64 and that was a massive expense for my family. I suspect at 13 years old you had a lot of resources at your disposal also.

Again, it’s fine to say that a developer account is not worth $100 for you personally. But let be real about it. Nothing is free.

You might be the weird & privileged one if you think that $100/year is not a lot of money for some people, certainly those who are not chasing profit (i.e. 13 year olds who later grow up to be valuable developers).

> Developing for android or Linux is not free. You need to have a lot of resources already to get started here, too

It absolutely is, if you already have the device, which can be a hand-me-down from a parent or sibling like it was in my case.

> But let be real about it. Nothing is free

It's an objective fact that other platforms do not have this barrier in place. It is a fact that Apple is the special one here, demanding a repeated payment that is significantly higher than the one-off payment of their direct competitor ($100/year vs $20 one time, and that $20 is only necessary if you want to use their store).

You can stick your head in the sand all you want, but that doesn't change the facts.

By the way, that app of mine? Wound up making me $5k which was huge for a young child, and Google made $800. Easy money for them. Apple, of course, got nothing because of their barriers. And I never would've gotten the chance at all if Google had had similar policies in place.

> What kind of hobby can you pick up for less than $100?

You can publish an extension to the Chrome Web Store for a one time fee of 5$ (and you don't need XCode or a Mac to do it). You can build a website behind a login wall using social sign in via oAuth for free without building a homegrown authentication system (rather than paying 100$ a year for Sign in with Apple which doesn't even adhere to the oAuth spec properly).

You can’t take up app development for only $100 either. Especially when you can only develop on a Mac.

I believe the fee is a simple first-order throttling mechanism to tamp down on the easy creation of thousands of developer accounts, as a way for actors to evade developer bans. But also to help with scaling issues.

It’s low-effort for Apple and has some hassle reducing benefits for them.

Sure, Google does that with a one-time fee of $20. You don't need to gouge the people who add value to your platform repeatedly. Apple is already doing that with their 30% which is more than enough to pay for all of their expenses. Their app store is an absolute cash cow, they're fine.

No one thinking about the $100 fee is paying more than 15%, if they are paying anything at all.

Not sure what you're on about? You're talking about apple, so anyone wanting to develop for their platform is paying $100/year, and 30% of all revenue made via their app. You don't really have a choice. Apple forces you to use apple pay, takes their cut, and you get the remaining money if you're lucky.

They have recently been forced by the EU to offer some, supposedly, more amicable programs. I haven't looked into the details of those, because fuck em.

Make AirPods fully configurable on MacOS seems like low hanging fruit.

You forgot, stop changing the chargers.

I just upgraded my phone and I have to buy a whole new set of chargers.

They've had three charging sockets (30 pin, Lightning, USB-C) in 17 years. I don't think that's particularly onerous?

Yeah, that’s just a bad meme at this point

Already done, and you can thank the EU for that.

> Here are the ideas Tim.

> I could go on, but I think that’s enough.

All of those are "bad" ideas. Capitalism isn't actually about building better products for the customers, it's about making more money for the owners. Sometimes an extremely competitive environment can bring those things into alignment, but that requires a strong, active government to maintain.

However, cutthroat competition reduces the resources available to each competitor, so it's not all good.

Personally, I wonder if the best model would be: extreme cutthroat competition to get the initial product evolved, then once a winner arises, then have highly regulated monopoly maintaining a standardize platform (and then forced to implement the kinds of requirements you outlined)

That's basically the thinking behind some of the flavor of market socialism. Allow private companies, and allow or even encourage market competition in many areas, but have some mechanism by which large, established companies move to be increasingly publically controlled over time such that the purely profit seeking behavior can be overridden.

Of course, the devil is very much in the details.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com