Only Apple
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Whether open (Google) or closed (Microsoft), platforms that run on multiple OEM devices are the right way forward. I don't know about others, but I don't want to live in a world where my only option to control my house, car, and life is to go to an Apple store. At least Google and Microsoft give us some choices.
So far, there's been no mention here of the developer experience. Gruber only mentioned developers, but not the 'developer experience.' It's like it doesn't matter anymore. Apple is finally doing interesting things in the developer area with Swift. However, here, they're playing catch up with Microsoft and, to a lesser degree, Google. Their language at 1.0 is similar to Windows Phone 7--very late to the game. In addition, you're still left with much of the less than desirable developer toolset. Microsoft developed C# and Visual Studio more than 10 years ago now. They're way ahead here. They also open source much of their developer stack now (the new C# compiler, TypeScript, web stack, etc.). Gruber doesn't even mention this aspect. I guess it's not important to end users, but it does make a difference with the people building for their platforms, devices, and services.
I feel like we're living in a constant world of incompatible systems whose (nearly) sole purpose is to "own the market": VHS vs. Beta, GSM vs. CDMA, Canon vs. Nikon lenses, and so on. This world makes the Internet and the Web seem like a rare anomaly. Tesla's opening of the patent portfolio in an attempt to stave off incompatible fuel stations is apropos to this.
Platforms that run on multiple OEMs might be good, but you haven't proven that. Those choices would be good if they actually delivered a better experience than Apple's vertical integration. It doesn't matter to me (or any other end user) that its harder for Google or Microsoft to deliver a good experience with their strategy. That's their problem and something of their own choosing, so they don't get any points for that.
"Experience" is not the only axis of a successful strategy.
After a six-month experiment with Android on a Nexus 5, I couldn't disagree more. Separating the folks who make the OS from the folks who make the device just leads to compromises.
Apple has the right model. Just look at what they've managed to do, for example, with battery life. Nobody can match the hours of use per watt-hour of their tightly-integrated stack. This is the way forward. I'm extremely excited to see what Microsoft can do with Surface and Lumia brought under one roof.
That's not my (anecdotal) experience at all. My friends with similarly-specced phones like the Xperia Z1 Compact have their battery last way longer than my iPhone 5S. The iPhone may have better standby life, but we're heavy users, and as soon as you're using it the iPhone drains it like there's no tomorrow, and Apple arrogantly put a tiny battery in it (1400 mAh vs 2300 mAh for average Android phones).
Androids battery life woes are mainly due to the fact that apps can stay open in the background as much as they want, whereas on iOS Apple have strict limits (which is why stuff like IRC apps can't be done on iOS)
On the desktop side, Apple is in the 10-12 hour range of light use with the MBA and MBP Retina. Comparable ThinkPads require the six-cell add-on battery to get there.
The MBP Retinas boast up to 9 hours, at the max, although those models I haven't used routinely. However it has been my experience that the MBP Retina's battery life are significantly more preferment than their non-retina predecessors.
I don't have "cross-platform" experience with phones, but my iPhone4 running iOS7 is pretty much drained after a normal day's use (it was better with iOS6).
All "anectodical evidence" of course ;)
Also, not sure when you bought your particular iPhone, but the iPhone 4 is coming up on being 4 years old (announced round about the same time as the Galaxy S for comparisons sake) and it's still able to last a full day with the latest software, and all on single core processor. I find that really impressive, to say the least :)
If you want to see an iPhone 5S have the same battery life as an Android device, turn on Google Now on iOS with Location History.
On my list of annoyances with Android, the way it handles marginal signal conditions (on every Android device I've ever used, which is quite a lot of them) is very high up there. Android (relatedly) does not handle wifi/cell radio passing very well, it will hold on to a poor wifi signal long after it should have switched over to the much more usable cell connection. I find myself regularly having to explicitly switch wifi off when there is a poor wifi connection available (which is luckily pretty easy to do but annoying that you have to manage it manually) just to get a reasonably usable network connection for apps.
By definition, an opinion poll is not objective. Are the results of a presidential election objective data on who the best candidate for president is?
Battery shouldn't even be the last thing someone advocating an iPhone must argue upon. iPhone's battery life is dismal in a way that it feels like Apple engineered it - for whatever reason. You want to see battery life? I'll give two examples that doesn't even cost a limb - Lenovo P780 and Lenovo S860. (There are more). The point is iPhone's battery just doesn't last long enough if you use it as a "smartphone".
Me either. Even so, I still believe Apple got the model right. If only we could live in a world where we have a healthy competitive ecosystem of Apple-like companies. Then you would have many options at hand to control your house, car, and life.
That would require these companies to share interoperability specification. Something Apple tries mightily to not do.
All that being said, Apple definitely sets the gold standard on the user-experience axis, and the entire landscape is better for it.
If anything, Apple has popularized the tragedy of the commons, giving everyone a false prophet to worship: walled gardens are the way to make seemless experiences.
The only reason walled gardens provide seemless experiences is because everyone trying to make their own walled garden fragments things further.
I know of know experience more seemless than Internet Protocol. RSS and XMPP were also pretty seemless for the user.
A vision of the world where walled gardens are viewed as the only path to a seemless experience produces a vicious cycle leading to a dystopian self fulfilling prophecy.
The one API that is languishing at the W3C that would help us immensely is the Contacts API. Right now your contacts is effectively owned by companies like Google (via Android), Facebook, and Apple (via iOS). Every other company that wants access to your address book for the purpose of a social experience, needs to go through those three gatekeepers 99% of the time.
The ideal gatekeeper of your contacts should be the browser. The term for them is "user agent", i.e. it acts as an agent on behalf of the user. Right now there are a lot of "skills" these user agents lack. Investing in giving them more skills creates more decentralization and debases the power of the giants we resent.
But I believe the browser is NOT the ideal gatekeeper. The ideal gatekeeper for your contacts is, surprisingly enough, an app designed to manage contacts. And as long as the inerop protocols are respected, switching from one contacts app to another will never be a problem.
What browsers need to do is leave more of the experience to end developers and expose as many low level APIs in a safe way. Browsers would do best if they focused on a sane approach to ACLs.
Browser plugins like SafeScript for example one basic way in which things could be better for users. What SafeScript lacks is reputation information on resources to help non-technical users make decisions about what to trust and what not to trust.
e.g. Alice and Bob are friends. Carol is a tech professional with a stellar reputation. Alice is tech savvy. Bob is a luddite. When Bob is presented with an ACL request for an unrecognized resource (such as an app or script from an unrecognized domain), Bob should be able to check if either Alice or Carol decided to trust that script.
Reputation systems, the web of trust, organizations like Spamhaus, EFF, Mozilla etc. can all go a long way to helping users make sense of what they can and cannot trust on the internet.
The ideal user agent would be like a docker container with an ACL for taking sensitive user information and sharing it with whatever is running in the container in a safe sane way that puts the user's safety and experience first.
I would love to see someone take the following things/features and mash them up:
* docker/lxc * chromeless browser windows controllable via API and any programming language (not just javascript) * QT like windowing system with URI routing and skinnable with the good parts of CSS. * ACL * reputation system for resources with URIs * Incrementally loadable
Linux containers provide the ideal technology to reimagine what the web could have been if Kay [0] and Engalls vision had become the predominant way of internetworked sharing of stuff.
[0] http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit...
I think this attitude is a very typical of HN and very atypical of the larger world. Almost everyone I know who does not work in tech would be completely enamored of a single Apple device which seamlessly interfaces with their house, car and life. They would love to live in that world--and soon will. All this hand-wringing by a niche community over Apple's lack of openness seems incongruous when compared to the literally tens of millions who would embrace such a thing with open arms. You really begin to wonder which side has the right of it.
It is almost always the case that a company desires a monopoly on its market - despite whatever thin endorsement of "strong competition" they espouse.
Doubling down on mobile, say what you want about the walled garden, but it seems in "developer" experience Apple also wins when you consider the size of their developer eco systems. The App Store simply makes more money and it still seems that the iPhone still gets preferential treatment.
In the end open vs. closed or single OEM vs multi OEM doesn't seem to matter.
Apple did their GUI foundation right with CoreAnimation, touch recognition and choosing c++ & objective-c as the foundation of their mobile OS. Android didn't do it right with java, a garbage collected language and their UI rendering fundamentals, and everything suffers the consequences of that today.
But you are okay with your only option being some humans on this planet, you just don't want them to be in the same company?
> I feel like we're living in a constant world of incompatible systems whose (nearly) sole purpose is to "own the market": VHS vs. Beta, GSM vs. CDMA, Canon vs. Nikon lenses, and so on.
Isn't that what you said you wanted?
That said, that doesn't mean that I should choose my allegiance based solely on the point.
Years of development although does translate to maturity of the technology, it doesn't translate to superiority. Often, it could means lots of legacy, extra baggages in the name of backward compatibility and even stifled development.
If you consider Objective-C vs C#, Objective-C is over 20+ years old and have always been the main language for the Mac/iOS Platform. How have it served Apple? Many people here wouldn't argue against it. What do you think truly make C# much better than Objective-C? If we based our criteria on years of experience, Objective-C would be hands down winner here. But no, they have their pros and cons.
Xcode might not have been as well developed as compared to Visual Studio for a long time, but thats gap is closing rapidly. Since Xcode 5, I haven't been really haven't been mad at Xcode. I'm excited about Xcode 6.
Beneath Xcode is the amazing LLVM that provides a solid foundation. Previously, it was based on GCC. In the most simplistic term, think of LLVM as the .NET of Visual Studio. It allows multiple languages interoperability with the software interface, but LLVM did it in a much lower level and isn't specific for any single software interface. (This is a very dumb down explanation of LLVM capability and might not be true to its goal) It is being open sourced which spurs technologies like RubyMotion (Ruby to iOS/Mac/Android) and WebKit FTL JIT.
This bring me to Swift. Swift is technically 4 year old and designed by Chris Lattner, the creator of LLVM. I believe, my personal opinion, that Swift is born because optimising Objective-C with LLVM is reaching a point of diminishing returns. Objective-C is my favourite language but there are things that the compiler just can't statically analyse with high degree of confidence in Objective-C. A good example is NSArray or NSDictionary; You technically can store any object in a single array/dictionary, but its hard to be specific about the class/type of the objects stored at compile time. NSArray and NSDictionary is in NSFoundation API, rather and a language feature. I see no easy way to get around it, at least with my limited knowledge.
Swift is very strict about types and it learns heavily from other languages. That can only be good thing for Apple ecosystem. Not everything Apple does is to compete with others. They did it because they have set the foundation ready for this eventual transition. This is years in the planning, not out of the whim decisions.
Its a misconception for people to think of Apple technology of being incompatible with the overall technological ecosystem. But LLVM and WebKit have shown that Apple are extremely capable of building technology that play well and improve the overall technological ecosystem. Microsoft on the other hand haven't have such a good track record.
I welcome the more open Apple and I disagree with your second half of the comment as its a too simplistic and under appreciative view of Apple's technological stack.
Well, they do have the #1 app store, a syncing/backup service used by half a billion people, and the #1 music store in the world (per profit / people). Oh, and a huge music storage service.
I don't find iCloud or iTunes or the App Store slow myself. And I'm tens of thousands of miles from the US, and thousands of miles from a decent latency ISP.
They're "slow" and "frequently unavailable" compared to what? Is the experience of bying stuff from the Google Play store any better? Is the experience of buying music off of Amazon any better? (I'm not talking about Open vs Close, and other philosophical stuff -- I'm asking about what you claimed here, e.g that it's "slower").
I would argue that Google also has a superior app store buying experience, in at least one aspect, that I can use any web browser to install apps onto any of my phones, the usual example being I can install an app on my phone by selecting it in Chrome on my iMac.
As for the rest of their cloud, the "frequently unavailable" thing I am referring to is APNS, which seems to suffer from complete unreachability at least quarterly. This seems to have something to do with their flailover from their east coast to their west coast datacenter.
That video was almost certainly coming from a CDN. If you were experiencing connection difficulties to that CDN, I'm not so sure you can claim that's Apple's fault.
Besides, do you really think the competing services don't have the same potential for problems with whatever delivery network they're using?
Someone unwilling though, yeah? Lots of people I know don't turn on iCloud, and are annoyed with the iTunes implementation.
> and the #1 music store in the world (per profit / people). Oh, and a huge music storage service.
But Apple has done nothing to stop/retain the market of those flocking to music streaming sites (Spotify, which has record growth; rdio, Google Music, among others) except BUY a streaming service with poor adoption.
I think the Open/Close part is part of the reason why Apple's services pale in comparison.
As for speed, I would be very surprised if Apple had better service than Google or Amazon, as these companies are much more invested in the Web than Apple.
I don't know how many are those that don't "turn it on". Hundreds of millions DO use it. And it's only getting better (e.g see recent WWDC changes).
Those "annoyed" perhaps don't remember how phones were before iCloud, iTunes Backup. I had Sony and Nokia smartphones and it was dreadful. Even now, there's not much to write home about in the way Android handles backup/sync compared to iCloud.
>But Apple has done nothing to stop/retain the market of those flocking to music streaming sites (Spotify, which has record growth; rdio, Google Music, among others) except BUY a streaming service with poor adoption.
Except? I think it's enough of a bold move, and surely is not "nothing". Plus, iTunes Radio (which didn't get much love from Apple) already had more people than Spotify (almost twice as much).
>As for speed, I would be very surprised if Apple had better service than Google or Amazon, as these companies are much more invested in the Web than Apple.
It's not like that it takes anything special to get speed on the web. It's not rocket science. Apple uses Azure for a lot of its services, which is equivalent to AWS/Amazon.
Any comparable service doing it better? Because those are general concerns, nothing special about iCloud.
iTunes and the App Store are way slower than the typical web sites I browse (including other stores such as Amazon). I also have problems with them sometimes just not loading at all (white pages). And this is on LTE or 100 Mbit WiFi.
As a developer, you tell the App Store is janky since you can literally see the propagation of your app updates before your own eyes. Sometimes the "update" button shows up before the update is actually available (and the app store redownloads the same version), sometimes the update is available in search results before the app information page, some times the update push notification comes first, not to mention replication geographically and across the different country stores. It's first an hour after your update is released that the app store is consistent. It's pretty tolerable now, but it used to be way worse and would take up to 10 hours - we'd get complaints from users due to all the failed updates when the store was inconsistent. We still get complaints on new app releases for random "this product is not available" errors for the first couple hours.
I've tried in the past to follow Gruber regularly but there is just too much defensive negativity in his posts. I can only check it off and on, reading him every day would make me unhappy.
Is that not what he's doing? Is he just gratifying a need to be heard or something? I don't think so, it looks like he's attempting to perform journalism as described by this paragraph, and he falls short in some ways.
Current example: just below this article he credits Amazon with inventing a button that connects you to live customer service. The counterexample to that claim is Bloomberg, whose terminals have a dedicated Help key. Striking this key once gets you a help screen, but if you hit it twice someone from Bloomberg calls you immediately. Bloomberg has had that for decades.
oh my glob. Willfully misunderstand the world much? He's talking about consumer devices. How many devices in your home that aren't $10,000/month stock terminals have live under-5-second video support?
"That’s truly remarkable, and a unique Amazon advantage. No one else has anything like this." -- Gruber
What interests me about this Amazon Mayday button (which I had never heard of before) and why I think Gruber talked about it, is because it's a completely free service provided to owners of a consumer device. It's basically customer service, but it's extremely fast (average of 9.75 seconds to get a response? Wow!) and apparently rather comprehensive too (e.g. helping a customer beat an Angry Birds level) as opposed to being restricted to actual tech support with the device in question. This is why Gruber is saying it's remarkable and unique, and I think he's right.
"he just doesn't know anything about the industry he's writing on"
Your statement is using hyperbole for effect, but it is false if regarded in isolation as a logical proposition (which seems to be your angle). Gruber's Apple sources are gold and he's very well-connected to an influential Apple developer community. He does not "know nothing".
It's fine to critique him, but be smart about it. He is myopic (Apple, Yankees, Scotch, letterforms, etc. - it can be tiresome), he has a tendency to interpret all Apple happenings in the best light, and he's overly critical of Google.
His writing has a lot in common with sports commentary -- Apple is "his team", and he can be chauvinistic about them, but he's trying, in his own way, to understand the whole league.
It could be edited to half length if you cut out the apologia, but he's brought forward some interesting points that I think are the nucleus of an interesting discussion this time. I actually sort of just wish he posted the quotes from this article without any of his ridiculous commentary.
If asked to describe Daring Fireball with just one word, I would not choose weblog. Rather, I would call it a column. Given a few more words, I would call it as a Mac column in the form of a weblog.
He stated it again in an interview[1]:
In 2002, when I started Daring Fireball, doing a sort of columnist-style weblog simply felt like something I was compelled to do. I could write whatever I wanted, however I wanted.
I also still disagree with this article. This year was a surprising high note in the amount of stuff that came together assuming it all holds up well after you get past the marketing they're good at. We'll have to wait and see if this is a continuing trend for them or we just got lucky this year. I would love to see it continue.
When customers ask how you compare to competitor A or B, it's awesome to be able to say "we're the only people in the world who offer ______". Having one thing that only you do, allows you to completely reframe the conversation. If the customer cares enough about that feature, you become the obvious choice.
A nice side-effect is increased focus on your team because everyone knows the one thing that matters most.
Excellent way of putting it !
I think apple is going for the word "seamless-experience" here [1].
I do think microsoft has a word too, which they always strive for, and I hope it continues -- "backwards-compatible".
I must be honest, I find compatibility-breaking painful as a developer and as a user.
[1] I know, hyphenation is a cheap hack :)
Daring Fireball
is hard to
read because
the website
is so poorly
formatted.
I rarely
make it
past the
first
paragraph.
The font is
too small,
the margins
are too huge
and the colors
have poor
contrast.I agree that the font size is too small (I use the NoSquint plug-in to remember a 200% zoom for it) but the column width is bang on with about ten words per line.
There are about 75 character per line, that’s pretty much the sweet spot for characters per line. Going for a few more characters would be ok (120 is a usual guideline for the maximum), but 75 is pretty good. It’s actually pretty much the standard. I learned 60 to 90 characters per line.
Margins are your problem. Your browser is too wide. (I agree that the font is much too small. Also, Verdana is seriously ugly. A better font at a larger size would reduce the size of your margins, even if you are one of those strange fullscreen browser people.)
Seems like they're playing very safe.
That's not really "optimizing", considering that Apple is aiming at a range of improvements to the cross-device experience that other companies have only barely touched at (Chrome tab sync, etc).
1) Smaller satellite devices for iPhone (iWatch? I don't know, but something like it. Look for it in the Continuity & notification widget APIs).
2) More varied size devices (higher resolution iPhone? Look for it in the Xcode size "traits" APIs).
3) A hint that Macs may move to ARM in the next couple of years (look for it in the way they're rolling out new graphics APIs like Metal).
4) Apple TV may be getting native apps connected to your iPhone/iPad apps (look for it in the new Extensions APIs).
While none of the above are hard promises about where Apple's going, they pretty much have no choice than spill this out in the open, as they need to release the SDK and prepare devs for the changes at least some time ahead.
It seems their new strategy is to release software/SDK updates in preparation for new hardware in June during WWDC, then we have a few months padding until developers get their air back, and... starting August/September the new hardware starts coming, just in time for school, and just in time for the winter holiday season.
Neat, I think.
And maybe I'm cynical, but "unified ecosystem" sounds a lot like "total vendor lock-in" to me.
That may be so but honestly the last release of OS X that really worked for me was snow leopard. Just as a quick list of common well known issues with Mavericks that I have and I'm not the only one to have...
- Sometimes when I plug in my headphone, there's a bug and audio stops working instead of switching to the headphone. The only fix I found is to restart the computer.
- I'm using a macbook pro retina with 16GB of ram and mission control slows the system to a crawl whenever I want to use it. Expose just worked on a computer with 4 times less ram and vastly less powerful.
- Sometimes when I connect an external screen, the computer just crashes completely.
Honestly, I just wish Apple would start actually doing some QA and fix those issues... The machine itself is great and powerful but it's really a pain to have to deal with all the bugs. And I say that not as an apple hater (all of my computers are from them except my server).
There still haven't been many OS X os kernel-level since then (say, NFS+ is largely unchanged).
(But the point seems generally true other than that.)
Apple is second to last in that respect. Google and Amazon both understand the web a whole heck of a lot better than Apple. Only Samsung understands the web less than Apple.
Yes, they have cloud services, but for the most part, Apple's developer community has been generally unhappy about Apple's iCloud offering. This stems from two causes:
(1) first, the competency of Apple's team in this area are not comparable to the competency of Apple's other teams (mainly operating systems devs, app devs, industrial designers, supply chain specialists, etc.). No engineer who is truly competent in these domains (cloud, internet, web) has Apple as top of mind when they think about what company to go work for.
(2) second, Apple doe not only not understand the value of decentralization, but they actively fight it. This works fine for "single-player" experiences, but for "multi-player" experiences this is a disaster. I, as an Apple user, cannot dictate the devices and software my friends, family, colleagues, etc. will use, so any experience that is only truly complete when all these other people are also part of Apple's walled garden, will either never truly succeed or will outright fail.
So yes, only Apple can compete with Apple on it's home turf, but there are other playing fields than the ones Apple likes to talk about.
Lastly, Apple has only succeeded as much as it has with the unified experience, not because it did things better, but because the web (and specifically the browsers and the DOM) have failed to truly acknowledge that the web can't [yet] compete with Apple (and native in general), is that we don't have a feature complete and performant browser-based alternative for the building blocks you actually need to build apps, namely retain-mode scene graphs.
Browsers need to give some really deep thought to creating the equivalent APIs to things like qt, kde, gnome, Core Animation, etc. The DOM just does not cut it. FWIW, it's exactly what we're working on at Famo.us, and we're hoping others take note and some of the ideas we're exploring become co-opted by the browsers for inclusion as an alternative to the DOM, but that still plays nicely with the DOM.
Further proof that Apple has succeeded only because others have stumbled can be seen by comparing iOS to Android as well. Apple was a much better experience for a while before Android caught up. Some of this was because of Apple's big head start, but some of it was due to one technical/product decision made by Android early on, that when reversed made all the difference in Android's ability to compete with Apple: Early on Android settled on immediate mode graphics. This was the main reason Android user experience and performance just felt wrong for a while when Apple's felt right. Once Android embraced retain mode graphics fully, the Android experienced improved dramatically, so much so that I would say that Android, with its developer community, can also do anything Apple can do.
[0] http://famo.us/
I really doubt this. Google yes. Amazon no.
What has Amazon did that shows it "gets" the Cloud?
It has its one (and that's it) highly succesful store front (which is like a Google that only offered the search service). That's is, as far as the Cloud goes for Amazon.
As for AWS, the do get cloud infrastructure and services to developers. But that's not the Cloud (like CISCO is not the Internet), and it's a far cry from "getting" the Cloud itself, and being able to create cloud services people use.
Amazon can sell you the infrastructure to create Twitter, ot the new Gmail, or whatever yourself. But they don't really create those things themselves.
Kindle is a shining example of this.
Apple on the other hand... well, they created iTunes... but that's really the only "cloud" technology that they have besides the actual iCloud (hosted on AWS, possibly?). Apple has shown that they struggle when creating web experiences for customer. Remember ping.fm?
And iTunes worked for three reasons: (1) it's a single player experience; (2) the iPod; (3) DRM lock-in (there is no longer lock-in, but only for songs purchased after the date lock-in was expired. iTunes Match was a service added to maintain lock-in after DRM-free music was announced.)
I'm not handing out praise for being able to run an smtp server. (alright, that's a bit reductionist, but you get the idea)
It's a lot more than that. It's all of Apple's cloud offerings, including email, contacts, calendars, iWork, backup, document synchronization, data-specific synchronization of various things like keychain and mail accounts, photos (storage, syncing, and galleries), it even covers their services like Find My iPhone.
There is a lot of stuff Apple is doing with iCloud, but the vast majority of it just silently works, so you aren't even considering that it exists when you talk about iCloud.
I suspect that what you're really trying to say is that Apple has not done much in the arena of building web apps, but even that's not accurate anymore, they have a decent suite of stuff available on icloud.com (including collaborative document editing).
"It's all of Apple's cloud offerings, including email,
contacts, calendars, iWork, backup, document
synchronization, data-specific synchronization of various
things like keychain and mail accounts, photos (storage,
syncing, and galleries), it even covers their services
like Find My iPhone."
If I can only get access to this stuff via an API on the device, then it is not really cloud API. It's not like Apple is making these APIs available to developers via something like REST.
The only ones that are available are those that have a strong open standard that Apple can't wall gardenify like IMAP/SMTP, CalDAV and CardDAV.
Also, there's no such thing as "FoundationKit". There's a framework Foundation.framework, but most of the iCloud-related APIs live elsewhere.
Yes, what about it? I also remember 20+ music stores that were created, touted to high heavens, gone nowhere and stopped existing (from Napster to Rhapsody etc), whereas iTMS succeeded widly.
It's not like Google for example doesn't have its share of Cloud failures. Google Wave anyone? Google+ that everybody seems to hate except some a-list tech writers, and which hardly made a dent against FB usage? Google Video? And tons of other folded attempts.
And it's not just iTunes.
It's also the App Store (which is a different beast to the music store). The Movies. iCloud for sync and backup and image sharing etc.
I agree that their web (in-browser) offerings (like iCloud office apps) are not very enticing.
But Apple's really not into using the Cloud for in-browser web apps -- they use it for enabling native apps to communicate and share data, and at massive scale at that.
The only layer Apple gets is SaaS and really only for its own apps/services. Apple keeps trying to do PaaS, but the anti-decentralization and specifically wall-garden approach of a seemless experience across all your Apple devices, but a sometimes intentionally crippled experience across other devices you own and a certainly deficient experience with devices owned by others with whom you may want to share an experience, Apple will always be second fiddle.
They might be able to get somewhere with HealthKit, since AFAICT, that may be largely a single-player experience (at least for a while). HomeKit on the other hand is a different story. The moment you move to a household with more than one person, they will need to either play nicely with other devices not their own or become increasingly seen as irrelevant. HomeKit only working with Apple devices is a dealbreaker for every home with at least one resident using a non-Apple device. Now that Android has a comparable experience to Apple, that's a fairly common phenomenon.
Google understands PaaS and SaaS.
Amazon understands IaaS and PaaS.
Apple doesn't do IaaS anyway (at all), so it makes no sense to compare offerings in this area with Apple's.
For the SaaS that Apple does, it has huge successes with iCloud and iTMS and the App Store.
We might find them klunky or whatever (compared to what? Google Play? Kindle's sync?), but if it was a third party company called iTunes that had the #1 music store in the U.S, it would be hailed as a huge success in itself. And for Apple it's just a byproduct, and coming from a company with no roots in the music business at all when it started it.
>a certainly deficient experience with devices owned by others with whom you may want to share an experience, Apple will always be second fiddle.
At least Apple has the "seamlessly between Apple devices" right. There are platforms that even between devices of that one platform the sharing experience is subpar.
But, as someone who works with Windows and Linux too, and has an iPhone and a cheap Android phone, I really don't see any platform that does this cross-platform sharing thing any better ("first fiddle").
How's sharing from Android to iOS or Windows Phone or PC any better?
I don't think IaaS really comes into this discussion at all - If they did it or didn't do it, it wouldn't matter because it doesn't change how many phones or devices they sell. IaaS is targeted at a niche - companies/people who can afford server admins.
Calling apple's experience "intentionally crippled" is also disingenuous. Maybe you can find a few examples ie. storage size costs, but generally, they are trading off user simplicity and security against user control.
Apple's not alone in this regard either. You might say Google "intentionally cripple" their open source version of android: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-....
What I find more appalling is that google pretended to be open to get a marketplace advantage.
As for Homekit - can't you just buy home automation devices that adopt more than one standard? I would love for apple to open up more of their new apis to other platforms, but what do they do when an android device's insecurity causes someone's house to be hacked?
Google doesn't cripple the end-developers, it cripples the OEMs and their ability to take Android in other directions. This sucks because it hurts diversity of ideas that can succeed in the market. I don't like either Google's or Apple's approach here, but Google's is the lesser of two evils.
What's important to Apple is that you have a good user experience. As this applies to HomeKit, there are a few important requirements: battery life, and security/privacy. Keep in mind we are in the early days of home automation, and all it takes is one bad story about the hacker adjusting your thermostat to sour the market.
The only way to achieve those objectives is to exercise some control over hardware manufacturers. Sure, you may lose some compatibility this way, but that is infinitely preferable to a security risk in a poorly-understood environment without good security hygiene traditions. As a software developer who works with Bluetooth hardware, the Apple MFI certification process is the only hardware cert for home automation I am aware of. So even if I was an Android dev, I would prefer to purchase hardware that went through MFI as it gives me a basic level of confidence that somebody signed off on this.
Secondly HK explicitly includes measures for compatibility, including a type of "bridge device" that can translate between HK and a manufacturer's proprietary (or open, as the case may be) format.
Thirdly you have to consider HK's target audience. One of the headline features inside the HK Apis is the support for multiple homes. The people who are early adopters of HK in the near future are not hackers sharing an apartment. It's the Tim Cooks of the world where throwing out the existing automation hardware is not of any concern.
Sure, at some point it will become ubiquitous, and as the market matures news stories about the dangerous thermostat hackers will be less of a concern. But that's not this release, and it may not be within the next five years. That's more than enough time to create HK bridges and poly lingual lightbulbs that speak multiple APIs and so on.
It's a weird binary behavior that's tied to the pre-internet days. You buy into Apple's ecosystem and you do Apple-y things and you'll have a world class experience, a 9 or 10 on a 10 point scale.
But as soon as you start interfacing with anything else, especially something messy like the Internet, and hold onto your pants because you have no idea what the experience is going to be like, but you can guarantee it won't be better than a 5 out of 10 at best.
As much as other companies might like to provide an Apple-like walled garden (and I'll completely agree that previous attempts by non-Apples have been 3 out of 10s at best), they fundamentally understand that there is a bigger world out there. It's much harder to interface with the rest of the world, it is messy, but you can bring some kind of sanity to it if you work at it. These companies work really hard to provide a 7 or 8 out of 10 experience while Apple provides a 5. And they're rewarded for it. They hit these perfectly reasonable experience levels in-spite of the underlying mess they have to deal with, and they manage to make viable businesses out of it. What's more remarkable to me is that despite Apple controlling 100% of the experience in the Apple ecosystem, they aren't a perfect 10.
I think this magnifies the flaws even more and makes them more damning and I think a surprising amount of it backfires. Otherwise Apple would absolutely dominate the market, but it doesn't.
Where Apple does talk to the outside world, it's an acknowledgment that it's simply cheaper to deliver content through proprietary end-to-end points over the Internet rather than build the infrastructure themselves. But it's such a begrudging acknowledgment and the result is a collective "meh" out of Apple. "It's not part of us, so why really try?" Make no mistake, if Apple could replace Internet connectivity with a global AppleTalk network to deliver music and videos to you and ensure no unclean non-Apple users weren't dirtying up the bandwidth, they would.
The goal of other companies then is to try to hit the feel of this kind of tight vertical integration that Apple has, but to do it across vendors, networks, software, etc...to do it in a non-integrated way. And you know what? It's not bad. It's not Apple-level, but you have to admit the Internet, the Web, etc. all that is pretty bad ass. These things that we take for granted are the result of a decidedly non-Apple, very open, approach that benefits people far more in the balance.
>Apple is second to last in that respect. Google and Amazon both understand the web a whole heck of a lot better than Apple. Only Samsung understands the web less than Apple.
Then again, Samsung and Apple are two of the largest companies in the world. So maybe they're doing something right.
The only thing I would contest is the last comment about Samsung. It is like 1/3 of South Korea's economy, but its not a true comparable because it functions more like a keiretsu [0]. At it's core, it's a bank that finances many companies operating in different industries that cooperate when it makes sense. They are a giant in computing, but they also draw a ton of strength from other lines of business. For example, Samsung Heavy Industries is one of the biggest builders of large cargo container ships in the world. There are many more lines of business like this.
On that note, one reason for Apple's ability to deliver a 9/10 experience with a closed ecosystem is because it can afford to. There would be a lot more companies able to deliver a 9 out of 10 closed experience if they had the cash reserves Apple does. Cash funds the development of perfected services, but more importantly it affords Apple's leadership the luxury to focus on the long-term. When cash is an issue, companies have to make trade-offs that compromise on building the foundation to get to a 9 out of 10 experience. Apple never has to compromise. They just need to make sure there is a market and then build out the foundational layers of the onion necessary to build a unified experience including complementary products and services that make the difference between a 7 out of 10 experience and a 9 out of 10 experience.
I think what you're saying is that apple doesn't try to do everything like google does. They try and remain focussed on products that they think are the most important. I see this as a strength.
I watched the keynote from the WWDC, and I was struck by the very positive, upbeat, and friendly vibe that seemed to come from it. I'm a big Steve Jobs fan, and I hate to agree with a statement like the above, but my thoughts after watching the keynote were that Apple is done mourning the passing of their founder and former CEO and, if anything, seems stronger now. "Mercurial" isn't a compliment by anyone's standards, and it isn't easy working under someone like that. Perhaps Apple will thrive in its new era. Watching the keynote, it seemed like the people up on stage were pumped up in a very real way.
BTW, Gruber's article claims Apple makes most of their stuff, but as far as I can tell, they only make the CPU. Everything else is licensed ip: camera modules/sensors, GPU (PowerVR), etc.
This article reads a bit too much like PR+. A main point is trying to argue that Apple is genius at framing "conversations" to manage how their brand is emotionally considered. It does this by applying similar techniques like throwing the "Apple does their own CPUs!" and their stack is so unique, but that's not true enough and pervasive across all products, subsystems, etc.
The battery is another place where story has nuance to it, but we sure aren't going to get any of that here.
Crap. I've been post-baited.
I really wish Microsoft had pulled off Windows Phone; it arguably had a much better user experience than Android did (and still does) -- and interesting Nokia hardware.
I simply don't believe Google has the best interests of anyone at heart except themselves and advertisers.
The next 10 years are going to be very interesting indeed.
You think Apple has your interests at heart? Or Microsoft?
Like Google, they have your cash at heart. Not a thing more.
Not other companies looking to get my "attention"
Apple makes money by making toys for the wealthy. You have to be middle-class or higher in an advanced economy to use their system, in real terms. In comparison, Google lets anyone use basically all of their stuff for free. As long as you can get online in some form, Google welcomes you, no matter how poor you are or where in the world you might be or what hardware you use. Google also doesn't force you to relinquish control of your environment, whereas Apple has a big ruler it smacks your knuckles with if you don't do things The Apple Way.
Microsoft doesn't deserve to continue existing? Perhaps you should talk to large businesses, then. What are they going to use, because it's only Microsoft that's talking to them. Unix has a love affair with the backend in business, but it's really only Microsoft that's giving them what they want in the full stack. Compare to Apple, who points at the laptops and says "Hey everyone, look how cool we are", at which point business says "oo, cool. So what enterprise tools do you have?"... at which point Apple runs off into traffic, giggling like a mad four-year-old.
True for Apple PCs (except for the Mac Mini, but most people don't buy those.) Especially true for MacBooks.
Not true at all for iPhones which are available on very affordable plans in all developed countries, and are ubiquitous, even for users who are nowhere near middle class.
Microsoft is in transition. The idiocy that was Windows 8 all-but killed the Wintel desktop PC market. The server side is healthy, but desktop Windows is looking very shaky indeed.
For better or worse, Jobs deliberately moved Apple out of Enterprise. We can argue about why, and we can argue whether or not it was a good decision. But Apple decided to focus on consumer computing - which strengthened the consumer brand and freed up development resources, if nothing else.
MS is still trying to slide into all kinds of niches. It's succeeding in a few, but failing and flailing in many.
Nadella will likely be more focused than spaghetti-at-the-wall Ballmer, so we'll have to see how that works out.
Azure isn't solid enough as a cloud service yet - too many outages. Server is looking good. Office is kind of old and boring now, but still does what it does.
So what can MS offer modern startups that they can't get better and/or cheaper elsewhere?
How much of the internet is served up by OS X?
There is a reason Dell bought Quest for billions of dollars. It is not because they see a bright future for the consumer pc market.
I believe that too. However, I think that's generally true. You could replace Apple by Google or Microsoft there.
People on a whole are generally good (or at least I believe so).
If what you meant to say was "Apple cares about people and wouldn't let profit motives let them make questionable decisions, like including ads or adding DRM to software " then carry on.
If you indeed said what you meant to in your second sentence, then I think it was essentially meaningless since it's so generally true.
We can argue over which model is preferable to users, with may preferring to pay and others preferring the sponsored option, but you can't really say that Apple and Google are equivalent.
People like to frame the Apple vs Google battle as one of openness vs closed-ness, of an ecosystem with many participants vs a walled garden with just Apple. But I see it far more as a battle over how we choose to pay for technology...directly or indirectly.
For one, they could get the same or even more cash with far more crappier products (marketed more, altered to satisfy pundits, relax design and build requirements to cash-in on the Apple brand, etc). Nobody would have taken offense if they built a heavier, bulkier, plastic MacBook Air, with a DVD drive even and VGA ports and visible seams -- but they wanted to do things their was.
Second, wanting my cash is good. Because I get to be the judge when to give my cash, and I give it when I see things I want and like ("shut up and take my money"). Google, on the other hand, wants the advertisers' cash, which means they could not care less about me in lots of areas (except the area of seeing their ads).
So Apple might not have "my interests" at heart, but they are allowed by their management to take more pride in what they build than other companies, where the bottom line dictates more decisions.
Google is closest to the goal and Satya Nadella's new-guard at Microsoft is taking risks to get there as well. Among them Apple is doing the least to play nicely across platforms. So customers with 1-2 hardware touchpoints in the Apple ecosystem have to rely on Apple's competitor software and services.
When I think of the line of Apple products, I definitely don't think 'seamless'.
Company A does this and Company B does that and these two are a little similar but not really and this other Company wants this but can't get it. Only this Company. Yeah not that Company. See I figured all this out; see how smart I am?
Now and then on a lazy sunday morning with a cuppa in hand and the business news in my lap, I sink into this level of naval grazing. But I'd never have the time or motive to publish my drivel.
Thousands of hours are going to be wasted reading this shit, and to what end?
Clearly many people gained lots of value from this article, or it wouldn't be at the top of HN. Could one of you please explain what the value was? What did you gain from reading the article?
hi five
I am Mark, and any accounts I use for things I do in my downtime are called markdown. Work related accounts have the username markup.
iOS/OSX vs. Android/Chrome vs. Windows8/WP8
if you're just a consumer, then yes, not so interesting, but then this whole forum might not be for you.
My point isn't so much that the subject matter is relevant; just that his conclusions are obvious and have been for ages.
Put another way, did reading his essay cause you to change your mind about what you should be working on?
It's a thoughtful and timely analysis about the most important company currently in existence which many people routinely fail to understand or simply dismiss out of hand due to preexisting prejudice or misplaced nerd allegiance.
Having the most liquid assets does not mean that the company is the most important company. If Apple disappeared tomorrow, the world would go on without a hiccough. They are glitzy and glamourous and yes, influential, but there are more important companies out there - particularly in transport or essential services.
Edit: Updated for the benefit of eridius. The point does not change at all.
> the most important company
What you said:
> the most fundamentally necessary company
You just changed the entire argument right there, and yet blithely went on as if your counterpoint had any relevance to the original assertion. "The most important company" could be taken a lot of ways, and I highly doubt op was intending that to mean "fundamentally necessary".
I was saying that the term "the most important company in existence" is the kind of thing that comes out of the mouth of someone with "misplaced nerd allegiance". That was the point of juxtaposing those two snippets. What makes an important company? It depends on what you're talking about, hence the reference to transport or essential services. And if we're talking 'in existence', then that really widens the field. But it's the 'misplaced allegiance' people that come up with phrases like the OP did.
Basically I was calling the OP a hypocrite, deriding others for the same thing the OP is doing. And now you've responded twice, committing the same sins as you accuse me of... changing arguments, straw men, and pedantry.
And now you're trying to tell me I'm doing the same thing to you? That's preposterous. Stop trying to be evasive and just admit you committed a rather obvious and stupid logical fallacy and move on with your life.
(don't expect any more responses from me on this thread, since you only seem interested in being defensive)
The very first thing I did was accommodate your complaint, and change the words to what you wanted (and clearly mark it as an edit). That it didn't change the semantics of what I said at all suggests that it wasn't a logical fallacy.
And given that all you've done here is attack, attack, attack, what do you expect me to do other than be defensive? What have you said to me that I could take somewhere else?
And now you're trying to tell me I'm doing the same thing to you? That's preposterous. ; your entire argument is a meaningless straw man attack. ; Stop trying to be evasive ; stupid logical fallacy
Since you like logic, you'll like this: if you don't understand what I'm saying, then it's not a straw man on my part. It's a straw man in your head, based on your misunderstanding. My 'being evasive' is me trying to better explain what I meant, but you only know attack, attack, attack, and you won't accept anything but complete and utter submission.
and just admit ; don't expect any more responses from me on this thread
Not once have you 'just admitted' that you might have been off-kilter, not even an "I still disagree with you, but yeah, I could have behaved better". The mere thought of such an event is 'preposterous'.
And frankly, a promise not to engage in more blind offense devoid of self-reflection... isn't exactly a negative to me.
You did not mention that you had changed the words, and Hacker News does not present me with older posts in the thread, so I literally had no idea you did that. Since you changed the words, why didn't you just say so, instead of trying to defend your straw man?
Also, now that you've changed the words, I still disagree with what you wrote, because you're making an implicit assumption as to what it means for a company to be important, without defining that assumption. And without defining that assumption, you don't really have a basis for claiming that the op is wrong. Obviously op is wrong by your definition of important, but not wrong by their definition of important.
But at least it isn't a straw man anymore.
> And given that all you've done here is attack, attack, attack, what do you expect me to do other than be defensive?
I told you that you were committing a very obvious logical fallacy, and instead of simply saying "you're right, I've now changed the wording so my argument is no longer depending upon that logical fallacy", you started trying to accuse me of what is ultimately a meaningless non-semantic distinction in an attempt to trivialize and discredit my original response.
> Since you like logic, you'll like this: if you don't understand what I'm saying, then it's not a straw man on my part
That's bullshit. I do understand what you're saying. It may not be what you meant to say, but I can't look inside your head and figure out what you meant to say, all I can do is respond to the actual argument you write down. If that argument is wrong, the fault does not lie with me in pointing out the straw man, the fault lies with you in not expressing your argument in a manner that can be understood correctly and without logical fallacy.
> Not once have you 'just admitted' that you might have been off-kilter, not even an "I still disagree with you, but yeah, I could have behaved better"
What? What is this, kindergarden? Do I have to apologize to you for disagreeing with your argument and pointing out a logical fallacy? That's ridiculous. Nothing I have said in this thread is needlessly antagonistic or rude, or otherwise uncalled-for. The fact that you went on the defensive instead of appropriately responding to my criticism does not make my criticism something that I need to apologize for.
So, despite what I was saying, you never thought to go back over the words that both I and the OP said, and reconfirm that they were what you thought? That's just poor form from the outset.
a whole lot of guff in the middle I'm skipping because it's reiteration on both our behalves
.
What? What is this, kindergarden? Do I have to apologize to you for disagreeing with your argument and pointing out a logical fallacy?
Apparently it is kindergarten, because you would have me admit my 'wrongdoing' to satisfy you, but it's somehow juvenile for you to admit yours. Oh, and once again you commit the very same sins you accuse me of - I never asked you to apologise. I asked for some indication of self-reflection. Yet here you are putting words into my mouth, the very thing I supposedly did that started you in this thread. You really are quite the hypocrite.
The fact that you went on the defensive instead of appropriately responding to my criticism does not make my criticism something that I need to apologize for.
I guess changing my original wording to match your request doesn't count as 'responding appropriately'? That you never went back to reclarify what had been said between all three parties is bad form on your behalf. Particularly when the topic is about the meanings of words and phrases, it behooves you to go back and ensure you're clear on the matter.
In any case, for all you like to say that you haven't been rude here, you've been outstandingly rude. You haven't used profanity, but you write fluently enough to be fully aware that it doesn't require profanity to be rude. It's rather very obvious how stupidly and meaninglessly rude you've been in this preposterous conversation.
Or pehaps we disagree on the definition of 'needless', and you think that it was needed for someone to be rude to me as you have been?
It's a post about how companies operate, and especially about the largest companies in tech, and their methodologies and unique takes on the market.
HN is a social news site about startups and technology, built by a seed accelerator investing in tech startups. That is, by and for the very people that would be interested in the above article. You might "not get it", but all the HN readers that voted it to the top of the front page clearly do.
>Company A does this and Company B does that and these two are a little similar but not really and this other Company wants this but can't get it. Only this Company. Yeah not that Company. See I figured all this out; see how smart I am?
The same BS mocking method can be used to trivialize all topics ("Yeah, so the monkey that's better equiped to live gets to reproduce and so its genes are propagating, and future monkeys tend to have its features, big deal").
I don't get the "see I figured all this out; see how smart I am?" from the article. I do get it from your comment. There's an "I'm clearly above the herd on HN who voted for this. It's trivial, I can write 20 articles like this before breakfast" vibe.
TFA is clearly an insightful piece about how different big players operate. This "Company A does this and Company B does that and these two are a little similar but not really and this other Company wants this but can't get it", is basically high-level market analysis. And it's hard to do well.
Even if a lot of us know those things instictively, it's not easy to put it in words well. And it's amazing how many analysts and pundits get those things wrong (one can argue that this article gets the facts wrong too. But you didn't do that. You just trivialized it, as if what it says is something obvious, which is a different thing).