The sad thing about commercial products is that when a company stops working on something, you’re screwed. Perhaps Apple’s real Achilles Heel is not wanting to

The sad thing about commercial products is that when a company stops working on something, you’re screwed. Perhaps Apple’s real Achilles Heel is not wanting to give up full control. Yet Apple could still benefit significantly from even a slightly more open environment on both the software and hardware sides. Consider: for every “minor” free OS update in recent years from a bored Apple, open-source software developers could have made huge improvements in an open Mac environment. Someone might have boosted the App Store back-end to have package-manager-level robustness, completeness and convenience, for example. Similarly, with open hardware we probably would have had some really cool pro equipment and 3rd-party things like displays may not have so many issues. And heck, somebody probably would have figured out a great way to integrate iOS devices. All of that benefits Apple, which is not bad for a platform that their heart wasn’t in. Of course there is evidence that Apple still invests in the Mac but there is no doubt that they keep making one minor thing worse for every 4 things they fiddle with. This means they might be starting to lose their focus on end-to-end perfection (a Jobsian trait). And if I’m going to work day-to-day on a system that has loose ends requiring my attention to deal with, a big part of the Apple advantage is being lost.