The openness of PC clones was a mistake IBM failed to regain control from, everyone was like Apple.
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]
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.
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.
Careful... overspecialize (overintegrate), and you breed in weakness.
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
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.
https://www.ntari.org/post/how-clean-room-reverse-engineerin...
However it was too late to regain control and PS/2 alongside MCA was largely ignored.
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.
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