There’s trade-offs, but in most cases the Apple call has tended to err on the side of ease of use and ease of access to the mass market at the expense of flexibility and versatility for tinkerers. It’s good for a market to have companies willing to make different sets of trade-offs to please different segments of the market rather than all herding around the preferences of a cluster of nerds.
The real problem is that the rest of the industry has “Apple envy” and just copies everything they think they can get away with instead of making their own sets of trade-offs.
For the majority of apples history their products were incredibly niche mostly used by designers because certain admittedly superior software for these professionals only shipped with MacOS.
The ipod and iphone were the first true mass market products.
And even to this day PCs and Android(outside the US) dominate the market share by user count.
PC and android are not for tinkerers and nerd, they are the default, apple positions itself as the premium.
Apple chose an internal connector that worked with their CPUs. They couldn't even offer the connection styles on PCs; they worked differently.
Apple built its own mouse and keyboard cabling because they wanted to allow their users to connect their mouse to their keyboard, and to start the computer from the keyboard. No common cable offered them that.
Apple was literally first to the common rigid diskette. That they came up with file systems of their own is a measure of their early investments, and their need to maintain compatibility. They couldn't move to FAT, they had already made their own stack.
From my side of the fence, PC makers were laggards trying to save pennies who couldn't be bothered to invest in better technologies. Apple's success in cornering the majority of profits in the computer sector is a measure of their continued failures.
But that's often the right route. Sometimes what the others are doing is not enough to deliver a good result. Micro-USB sucked, so they made Lightning. Flash ran slow, so they helped kill it.
The lenient contract with Microsoft and the unexpected to them ruling on reverse engineering the BIOS sealed their fate.
But no company wants to compete in a commodity, they all want to be monopolies. All the Unix vendors tried to be common enough to be a selling point but idiosyncratic enough to lock in their clients.
Apple isn’t nefarious… they are the default.
Now, if we want to support their ambitions with our wallets is another question
However it was too late to regain control and PS/2 alongside MCA was largely ignored.
That's not true, well the second part is not true. it's not the default, it's a choice they made, there is no default.
They could have opted for maximum interoperability and openess.
Sk Hynix does not work with only sk hynix motherboards(I don't know if they even make motherboards), Intel cpus do not only work with Intel NICs. AMD GPUs do not only work with AMD CPUs. Nvidia GPUs do not require an imaginary Nvidia OS.
Hell windows is happy to work with whatever hardware you throw at it, but Macs nowadays have soldered ram and storage. And you can't install MacOS on any hardware you might like.
Getting files in or out of an iPhone without a Mac was a nightmare just a few years ago and I am confident it still is.
That is, it appears to tacitly agree with, and chide IBM for failing to defended, closed, walled-garden ecosystems.
That's certainly not what it seems they meant. It's just how one might initially read it and downvote.
https://www.ntari.org/post/how-clean-room-reverse-engineerin...
In my bubble, the world was about ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga, Atari ST, before PC clones became relevant.
All equally vertically integrated as Apple.
Careful... overspecialize (overintegrate), and you breed in weakness.
My personal computing life began much later, in the early 90s, in a very strange place filled with people whose very personal philosophies, and computer experiences, were a much better fit for x86 land. But this is something you rarely see explored in the thinkpieces that often make the rounds here.
I'm kind of struck my this because it reminds me of the some contrast between the two platforms during the mid-90s.
While no PC manufacturer controlled their HW stack like Apple did, making Macs more expensive than PCs by almost double, Windows was the only viable OS option as Linux distros had trouble supporting print functionality. Windows was never not hot garbage.
What Mac users got for their money in 1996 was out-of-the-box media production capacity in the form of CD quality (if not DAT on some models) audio and video (though not full-size broadcast quality yet), TTS and -- I _believe_ -- voice rec and of course a superior UX that turned mere users into babbling near-cultish apostles. PCs had superiority in 3D modeling and animation as well as gaming likely helped along by industry adoption (even Steve Jobs' Pixar went PC) but I don't remember any independent PC-based 3D animation folks like I recall independent Mac based visual designers, sound designers/musicians and video producers.
Mac users got their money's worth especially if they were creatives IMHO
The clones happened with cleanroom engineering which is legal.
And an okaish tv show where the first season is very loosely based on Compaqs clean room engineering effort. [2]
Basically what Apple News is, they don’t have a web or Android client.
There are news+ articles available to Apple subscribers. This is hardly “the internet”. This is analogous to premium memberships on websites.
Nor is it required that an app developer make an app for every platform. Microsoft doesn’t make office for Linux.
Wrong. Steve would have charged you for everything he thought they deserved, but he'd never allow ads in Apple Maps.
["We like our own stickers better."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COAOknlfMgI)
Handing the CEO reigns over to a supply chain or financial person is almost always a bad move.
They're the critical engine to every physical business, but don't confuse an engine with a steering wheel.
(And yes, I know Apple may be a more valuable company today from Cook's tenure, but I don't think anyone would say it's as cool of one)
Cook joined apple in 1998. They were not a behemoth. His first year, their net income was 300 million for the entire year.
There's a bit of power difference between SVP for worldwide operations (read: component supply and international manufacturing) and CEO.
Well Microsoft tried to do the exact same thing with that dreadful Microsoft Network in the early days of the web. So it's not inherit to Apple only, all large corporations would like their users locked up in their ecosystems.
Apple/OS X also contributed some nice things, by way of funding, hiring main devs, and/or heavily supporting certain FOSS projects: LLVM and Clang, CUPS printer drivers, WebDAV, WebKit, libc++, and Swift.
Also designed some widely used interface standards: FireWire (started by Apple), Thunderbolt (co-designed with Intel driven by Apple) which eventually turned into USB 4, Mini DisplayPort (later incorporated to the official DisplayPort standard, and even the design re-used for Thunderbolt).
There was nothing to "maximize rents" as there were no rents for the most part of OS X's journey until later Cook. They put out good products and people bought them, getting them out of near certain bankruptcy.
I think it's important to remind ourselves that the responsibility doesn't lie with the one individual. Even the visit to the WH dinner - it is the company, Apple, via various structures committed to doing those things with various VPs and staff onboard brainstorming and supporting along the way.
So "John" may bring some nuances but let's not be under the illusion that a huge corporation like Apple would suddenly bounce off to a different track.
No, the responsibility lies with the culture of growth at all costs. Margins and revenues must continue to increase, whatever else happens.
If you want to blame someone, blame whoever decided it was a great idea to pay executives in stock/stock options. That's what incentivises this kind of behaviour.
As an aside, it's amusing to me that Apple ran so hard on privacy with (apparently) the explicit intention of creating a market for their ad products.
Yes, I do agree that extreme forms of capitalism are responsible for ruining practically every aspect of modern tech.
> Apple ran so hard on privacy with (apparently) the explicit intention of creating a market for their ad products
Indeed. It wasn't obvious at the time, but with hindsight we can see that the push for privacy was only in areas where Apple wanted to counter Meta/competitors or gain advantage in specific verticals. It was never "user focused".
In the economics textbook sense of the word. You will own nothing and rent forever. You will not have control over your own data or devices. Having that control is a threat to someone's revenue model for getting you to pay for monthly subscriptions to things and services.
Microsoft's new user out of box experience for Windows 11 is also a fine example of this.
Imagine where we would be at right now if the Windows Phone had been a wild success and the Microsoft App Store on the Windows Phone was also a wild success. You think the fees and commissions charged and terms/conditions for app publishers would be much different?
The first sentence from the wikipedia article seems good to me: "R-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth."
"Rent-seeking middlemen: These actors insert themselves into a transaction by force, law, or monopoly control. They do not make the trade easier or better. They just demand a toll or fee because they control access."
Monopoly app store enforced on devices by firmware/operating system lockout inserting yourself as the only middleman to distribute things meets the definition.
google "economics rent seeking app store"
I wouldn't care about the rents if they weren't in the form of ads being shoved in everywhere. The "2 ads in the first 3 results" of the App Store is a horror show.
I think it sucks too.
> For example, just recently, Apple deployed its formidable multi-billion-user global cloud infrastructure in service of… promoting the Brad Pitt Formula 1 movie. People were, understandably, a bit disconcerted to see their wallet payment app sending them promotional messages about a film, and Apple undoubtedly screwed up in polluting a functional messaging channel about transactions with a commercial message, but hey — this is a clear sign Apple knows it’s got the power to drop a note directly into millions of people’s pockets.
Judge the man on what he was. And he was those things brilliantly.
What the tech companies have been doing to the internet since about the early aughts has been no different, they've been using the same kind of enclosure strategy to limit and parcel out and divide up the internet among the ruling psychopaths.
This starts with a wrong assumption. Like if there was a "Linux community" company driven by a CEO.