Apple: We have decided to no longer release Libm source (2013)

http://news.cnet.com/Apples-Jobs-calls-for-DRM-free-music/21...

I would argue that Apples strength is it's ability to make daring technology choices which drives the whole market forward. (Adoption of USB, dropping floppies, CDROMs, introducing iPhone, iPad) and in the long run that is very pro-consumer.

That's going to need some really impressive fact-based justification.

I think a good case could be made Apple's the only PC maker focused on making mass market consumers happy (vs enterprise or technology buyers).

They've also seemed more focused on the product experience than on market share.

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Some TL;DR specific thoughts on each of your examples:

- "finally offering larger screens for the iPhones" -- the giant screen move feels anti-Samsung, not pro-consumer. There is an ideal one handed screen size, and the 6/6+ are not it. The 5 series was already pushing it. The problem for Apple is in the big box or mobile store, bigger looks better. In every day use, once the phone is part of you, one handed becomes natural when right sized. (If you've only used bigger, you don't know any better.) In the store handling with two hands, you don't realize it won't go well. Buying experience and using experiences are at odds here, though I grant the bigger screens are nice when you are not mobile.

- "finally making iTunes (partially) DRM free" -- it's well documented that movie, TV, and record industry execs were the problem here, not tech providers, and Apple's fight to liberate music was quite public.

- cross compatibility -- this is a bugaboo (something that causes fear or distress out of proportion to its importance). with rapidly evolving technologies, it's extraordinarily difficult to have an end to end ecosystem 'just work' for normals not interested in diagnosing why it fails. Apple controls that end to end to make sure it works. Even then, things happen, like the Airport Extremes and iOS 8 WiFi, but because they control both, they can release updates to both to fix it. They don't have to support the lowest common denominator, they can push for performance and stability both. The bargain a user makes with Apple is "buy into the ecosystem, get peace of mind and eliminate the need for a tech guru."

OS X's libm contains only assembly functions re-written from scratch, originally in PowerPC assembly and then in IA-32 and x86-64, to be faster, more accurate and more standards-compliant than the FreeBSD versions.

I hope that this announcement will at least result in some interest in the versions that have been released as open-source and are still available, because this is beautiful code. But I am an optimist.