It also costs them my trust, though.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433
It's clearly a win for Apple.
In no way am I suggesting that Apple are on the way out, but they have definitely started to turn the same corner that IBM and Microsoft have in the past. They are becoming seen as 'big business' instead of 'challenging underdog'.
That early built up reputation has got them far, and I would say has continued on for about another decade or so after the iPhone launch. Since that, their coninued lawsuits and anti competitive practices have been more and more prevalent in mainstream media, and that previous reputation is now begining to tarnish amonst normal consumers. When the standard user sees them as big business and not the challenging underdog anymore, it paves the way for a new cooler small tech company to come and steal their bacon.
I believe that tipping point has come.
The decline takes a long time to set in though. MS had lost the plot by 2012 (the release of Windows 8), but they’ve been shambling on for more than a decade since then.
Since then their reputation has been slowly eroding with the average consumer with the combined stagnation of product design, and the string of high profile anti consumer and anti competitive moves highlighted in the media. We have seen this before in big tech, and I look forward to the next cool disruptor taking their place.
They were also doing visits to universities showing how great it was the BSD / NeXTSTEP foundations of OS X, for doing UNIX related stuff.
Similar to how NeXT used to position itself against Sun, and other UNIX workstation vendors.
During my CERN stay at 2003 - 2004, they did visits to our IT telling more or less the same.
Had the coloured Macs with OS X Aqua or the iPod failed the market, that was it, yet another footnote of remarkable computing history company now gone.
We techies always saw it, but the average consumers are only just begining to catch up.
Apple isn't in the position it is just because they make factually good hardware or because of their business practices - they are where they are because the competition constantly shoots itself with a sawn off shotgun.
Tech savy windows users that are trying out Apple are finding that it very much doesnt 'Just Work' anymore, and that sentiment is starting to creep out more and more.
Take a look at Linuses recent evaluation of macOS by using only a Mac for a solid 2 months. His conclusion is that it is no better or worse than windows, and definitely doesnt 'Just Work'.
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075
Even with all the faults and degrading quality, it's still above any of proprietary alternatives, particularly Windows. I'm running the Tahoe developer beta, and in comparison to my Arm surface laptop 7, it's still light years better. I have no problems with Bluetooth, which is an endless struggle on Windows. I don't deal with windows update failures, windows installer service crashing and requiring a PC restart to install an MSI (happens constantly on the Arm devices), I don't have copilot being shoved down my throat, I'm not nagged to start an Office trial, or redirect my folders to OneDrive, or have ads in my app menu, etc.
Even Apple at its lowest is still a better experience than the alternatives because the alternatives just suck worse, and have chosen the path of data harvesting and monetizing the hell out of its user base over anything else.
Thats your subjective opinion based on what you do on a computer and how you like it to work. Thats absolutely fine, just dont state the like its a fact. The only real fact you can say is they both have pros and cons, and its up to each user to decide what their personal preference is.
His metric for "just works", like many users, is "works like Windows". Such a metric is inherently flawed because any piece of software will always come up second-best to Windows.
When he did his Linux experiment stuff, he approached everything with a Windows context. And, when things didn't work the same, he didn't sit back and say "hmm, is this new way of doing things better, or worse?". No, he immediately rejected it because it's not like Windows.
And look, I get it, it takes on the order of decades to learn an operating system inside and out. I still find Windows GUIs I've never seen before in my life. But the way he approaches software reviews is incredibly frustrating. He takes the most closed-minded mentality and then acts surprised when it doesn't work.
And I must admit, this phone has already had a good run. If it lasts that long, I’ll be impressed for sure.
I'm nearly there myself. The problem is, and what the EU in theory is trying to solve, is there's no real competition. My choice is Apple, which while an anti-competitive PITA, provides some real nice quality of life features and some privacy protections, or Android which can be a mixed bag from needing to connect every new phone to my computer and use ADB to get rid of crapware, or Pixels where Google is increasingly expanding Gemini's tentacles into every aspect of your life to harvest data all while taking actions to slow down Graphene OS by limiting access to device trees.
Linux is fine enough on the desktop, but for everything else? (Phone, watch, etc.) I can either live within the walled garden and just accept it, or take my pick of crapware loaded devices, or sketchy vendors that don't patch their stuff, and have all my data sold to the highest bidder.
We desperately need more competition in the mobile & wearables space, and I don't mean many different flavors of Android, I mean more competitors that care about user experience, preserve your privacy to an extent, and aren't using the platform as just yet another way to serve ads and harvest data.
TANSTAAFL. User experience costs money. Privacy costs money. Not serving ads is an opportunity cost for more money.
Take away the app store royalties, and the obvious path forward for Apple is to compromise on the other legs of the stool.
Linux will never have the UX of macOS simply because a lot of what makes macOS great is boring and tedious work, and nobody does that for free.
Siri being bad is a huge flashpoint on this issue, and I think its causing far more negative sentiment than Apple will admit or even knows about. If they had any intelligence left in their leadership, they would have just paid ChatGPT $10B/year, wrote a nice system prompt, and that's Siri v3. They could have done that in literally 2023, keep investing in their own models, maybe come 2027 or 2028 flip the switch. Instead they went so far down the rabbithole of personal context that they built nothing, meanwhile there's intermittent reports on reddit and elsewhere that Siri has begun to lose the ability to even set timers for some people [1] (I have not ran into this issue).
My take is that we're going to see this sentiment get worse in Q3/Q4 this year when iOS 26 drops. Liquid glass is actually wildly divisive among the people I've shown it to and who are using the betas. Some people like it, but some people really dislike it. When you add that on to their other issues; I think overall the next two years are going to be pretty good for Samsung and Google.
[1] https://ethanbholland.com/2025/07/11/apple-has-lost-its-mind...