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Apple’s lead is largely due to key decisions that competitors failed to emulate — leveraging bsd open source tooling, removing legacy io ports, largely perpetua

Apple’s lead is largely due to key decisions that competitors failed to emulate — leveraging bsd open source tooling, removing legacy io ports, largely perpetual OS licensing model. But now that Microsoft is emulating those decisions it will no longer be as crippled by its own past bad decisions. And in the meantime it has sunk tons of money into cloud and xbox which are massively profitable. And Apple’s refusal to cater to budget conscious consumers is starting to really hurt market share, while allowing competitors to extract a lot of undeserved profit simply by offering their goods at a relative discount compared to Apple. Apple’s most consequential f-up in my opinion has been the way it has priced solid state storage across its product line. This has left the door wide open for competitors to win on the basis of consumer ignorance about subtle performance differences, while forcing marginal apple buyers to settle for a highly inferior user experience bc of not enough (and not expandable) storage. Apple does a lot of things well but its weakness is that it doesn’t understand that not all of its customers work at apple. Even today Amazon is setting itself up to eat Apple’s lunch in educational tablets and parental controls, a major driver of consumer purchase decisions, but hard to understand if you are a recent grad from a top school seeking status who took a job in product at apple. Microsoft does a lot of things badly but seems to be willing to revert bad decisions and try hard for market share. Ultimately market share is what makes developers create high quality experiences for the platform. Microsoft had this and lost it, and doesn’t plan to lose it again.

radley 8y ago
> Even today Amazon is setting itself up to eat Apple’s lunch in educational tablets... I thought ed tablet demand was shifting to Chrome OS laptops. Further, I don't think I've ever heard of Amazon (Fire?) being a relevant part the ed market.
- resters 8y ago
  > I thought ed tablet demand was shifting to Chrome OS laptops. This is due to a massive sales/discounting effort and naive people doing the purchasing. > Further, I don't think I've ever heard of Amazon (Fire?) being a relevant part the ed market. It's under the radar at this point. For the price of one Chromebook you can get a half dozen 10" fire tablets. Amazon has a far more thoughtful kid-oriented experience compared to anything Apple, Google or Microsoft offers. Apple caters to big budget studios who make glossy but underwhelming kids content, Google just wants to show kids ads and monetize based on kid eyeballs, and Microsoft ignores kids until they are old enough to want an XBox.
  - jpatokal 8y ago
    There are no ads in Chrome/G Suite for Education. https://edu.google.com/intl/en_au/k-12-solutions/privacy-security/ https://edu.google.com/intl/en_au/k-12-solutions/privacy-sec... Also, Chromebooks start from around $150, can you point me to where I can buy some of those $25 Fire tablets?
rleigh 8y ago
Apple is riding on their earlier successes, and failing to look to the future. Take that "BSD open source tooling". It's a decade old. I depend on that stuff, and Apple used to market its UNIX roots heavily to people like me. I now see scripts breaking which work fine on Linux and real FreeBSD, because it doesn't support new options added to commands over the course of an entire decade. Or there are behaviour differences, or missing functionality. It's becoming significantly less useful. Enough that I hit these problems frequently and have to find workarounds. I want some commitment from them to actually maintain the system I pay for. The perpetual licensing did solve one of their problems, customers who didn't upgrade, and reduce their support burden. But this coincides very closely with the end of any real maintenance of the core operating system underneath the GUI. Since 10.6 it's been sorely lacking, and the quality drop is noticeable. You're right about the storage pricing. When you spec out a fully loaded Mac Mini, the pricing is obscene. I do need a new Mac to support Mac development for my customers. I need a system as a CI server, and for interactive testing. A Mac mini would be ideal for a small office. The old ones were woeful. The new ones are better on some fronts but terrible on other counts like graphics. And the pricing is insane for what you're getting. I don't need laptop parts in a tiny case. I do need an affordable system which will last a while, rather than an expensive fashion statement. If it was twice or even four times the size, I wouldn't care. I do however care that the storage is expensive and soldered. What if I wear it out in a few months after thrashing it soundly with CI builds and testing. The whole system will be an expensive brick. A single NVMe slot would have solved that. This does drive away developers, particularly ones who develop applications which require higher-end systems, such as scientific computing. Apple doesn't have a high-end system to offer. But I can get or build a PC with a fantastic spec for less than the cost of the Mac mini and run Linux or Windows on it. Microsoft have even started tools like vcpkg which significantly lower the entry barrier and maintenance cost for developing on Windows. It still has a number of disadvantages over Linux or MacOS, but they are actually catering to a real need while Apple stands aloof, ignoring the needs of people who would drive the use of their hardware and software.
- rleigh 8y ago
  Actually, I missed out what I really want. When it comes to CI, a Mac Mini is acceptable only because it's the cheapest bit of Mac hardware for the task. Not because it's the most appropriate. What I'd really like is to be able to run it on VMware on the hardware all my other CI systems are hosted on. Because paying for an overpriced bit of anæmic hardware for it to sit on a shelf in a machine room is a complete waste of money and space, as well as being a complete pain to administer. Better still would be some support for native containers in MacOS, do I can use docker or an equivalent directly, and run every build in a properly clean virtual environment. But I doubt the current Apple care about such things. I'm perfectly happy to pay for real Mac hardware for development, testing and end-user deployment. But for the back-end stuff, it's awful, just plain awful. If I could purchase a MacOS licence specifically for VMware usage, I'd do so immediately.

radley 8y ago

> Even today Amazon is setting itself up to eat Apple’s lunch in educational tablets... I thought ed tablet demand was shifting to Chrome OS laptops. Further, I don't think I've ever heard of Amazon (Fire?) being a relevant part the ed market.

resters 8y ago
> I thought ed tablet demand was shifting to Chrome OS laptops. This is due to a massive sales/discounting effort and naive people doing the purchasing. > Further, I don't think I've ever heard of Amazon (Fire?) being a relevant part the ed market. It's under the radar at this point. For the price of one Chromebook you can get a half dozen 10" fire tablets. Amazon has a far more thoughtful kid-oriented experience compared to anything Apple, Google or Microsoft offers. Apple caters to big budget studios who make glossy but underwhelming kids content, Google just wants to show kids ads and monetize based on kid eyeballs, and Microsoft ignores kids until they are old enough to want an XBox.
- jpatokal 8y ago
  There are no ads in Chrome/G Suite for Education. https://edu.google.com/intl/en_au/k-12-solutions/privacy-security/ https://edu.google.com/intl/en_au/k-12-solutions/privacy-sec... Also, Chromebooks start from around $150, can you point me to where I can buy some of those $25 Fire tablets?

rleigh 8y ago

Apple is riding on their earlier successes, and failing to look to the future. Take that "BSD open source tooling". It's a decade old. I depend on that stuff, and Apple used to market its UNIX roots heavily to people like me. I now see scripts breaking which work fine on Linux and real FreeBSD, because it doesn't support new options added to commands over the course of an entire decade. Or there are behaviour differences, or missing functionality. It's becoming significantly less useful. Enough that I hit these problems frequently and have to find workarounds. I want some commitment from them to actually maintain the system I pay for. The perpetual licensing did solve one of their problems, customers who didn't upgrade, and reduce their support burden. But this coincides very closely with the end of any real maintenance of the core operating system underneath the GUI. Since 10.6 it's been sorely lacking, and the quality drop is noticeable. You're right about the storage pricing. When you spec out a fully loaded Mac Mini, the pricing is obscene. I do need a new Mac to support Mac development for my customers. I need a system as a CI server, and for interactive testing. A Mac mini would be ideal for a small office. The old ones were woeful. The new ones are better on some fronts but terrible on other counts like graphics. And the pricing is insane for what you're getting. I don't need laptop parts in a tiny case. I do need an affordable system which will last a while, rather than an expensive fashion statement. If it was twice or even four times the size, I wouldn't care. I do however care that the storage is expensive and soldered. What if I wear it out in a few months after thrashing it soundly with CI builds and testing. The whole system will be an expensive brick. A single NVMe slot would have solved that. This does drive away developers, particularly ones who develop applications which require higher-end systems, such as scientific computing. Apple doesn't have a high-end system to offer. But I can get or build a PC with a fantastic spec for less than the cost of the Mac mini and run Linux or Windows on it. Microsoft have even started tools like vcpkg which significantly lower the entry barrier and maintenance cost for developing on Windows. It still has a number of disadvantages over Linux or MacOS, but they are actually catering to a real need while Apple stands aloof, ignoring the needs of people who would drive the use of their hardware and software.

rleigh 8y ago
Actually, I missed out what I really want. When it comes to CI, a Mac Mini is acceptable only because it's the cheapest bit of Mac hardware for the task. Not because it's the most appropriate. What I'd really like is to be able to run it on VMware on the hardware all my other CI systems are hosted on. Because paying for an overpriced bit of anæmic hardware for it to sit on a shelf in a machine room is a complete waste of money and space, as well as being a complete pain to administer. Better still would be some support for native containers in MacOS, do I can use docker or an equivalent directly, and run every build in a properly clean virtual environment. But I doubt the current Apple care about such things. I'm perfectly happy to pay for real Mac hardware for development, testing and end-user deployment. But for the back-end stuff, it's awful, just plain awful. If I could purchase a MacOS licence specifically for VMware usage, I'd do so immediately.