11 ms·

Apple is regressing to their 1990s identity

126 points by jasoneckert 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
DevKoala 7y ago
I actually like that Apple moves at its own pace and doesn’t wait for standards to evolve. If you are willing to adopt the Apple ecosystem, it’s a bliss. If you can’t then just ignore them. I’ve been on both sides of the fence during the last decade.
- dman 7y ago
  Could you elaborate the two different phases where you were on two different sides? What made you change?
- jay_kyburz 7y ago
  You don't have to wait for "standards to evolve" to be and open system. You can open your API and see if community wants to adopt it as a standard.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Doing this too much is the second “E” of embrace, extend, extinguish…
    - headsoup 7y ago
      Except in this case there is no first E for Embrace, so that doesn't work...
  - jonny_eh 7y ago
    Just like Apple promised to do with Facetime. https://www.cnet.com/news/steve-jobs-promised-to-make-facetime-open-source-its-time/ https://www.cnet.com/news/steve-jobs-promised-to-make-faceti...
    - chadcmulligan 7y ago
      That was stopped by the patent troll I believe https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/29/apple_fifth_facetime_appeal/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/29/apple_fifth_facetim...
      - zapeachy 7y ago
        The latest in that saga: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/09/virnetx-reverses-ruling-invalidating-patents-used-against-apple https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/09/virnetx-reverses-...
        lallysingh 7y ago
        What is FaceTime doing that you can't do with WebRTC? And that's already open.
        danaris 7y ago
        Whether FaceTime is doing things that can't easily be done with WebRTC, I don't know, but when FaceTime came out, WebRTC didn't even exist. Hell, it wasn't stable until just a year ago.
- techntoke 7y ago
  Apple waits till a company does something then copies it. Even their Window system features have been copied from Linux. Their hardware is overpriced and you are essentially just paying for an Apple logo and aesthetic pushed by a marketing company. It is like the Nike of computers.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Crucially, Apple usually copies it better. They drive niche or poorly implemented technologies and make them mainstream.
  - lupinglade 7y ago
    From Linux? Are you sure about that?
    - techntoke 7y ago
      Yes, there are several window managers that they copy from.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        Such as? What about all those Window managers that copied from NeXTSTEP?
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    What?!? Modern Apple platforms are an evolution from NeXTSTEP.
  - IOT_Apprentice 7y ago
    NeXTStep (September 18, 1989) predates Linux (September 17, 1991)and it's window managers. I'd suggest you also look at Apple's work on ARM processors. They were first to 64 bit in that space.
    - Polyisoprene 7y ago
      Apple was one the companies that created ARM as well. ”The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology.”
vinayan3 7y ago
Major difference between the 90s and now is the market dominance that Apple has with their iOS platform. As a company having a closed ecosystem which they can push in their own direction. The most important piece is that it drives their revenue either from app purchases, in-app purchases, subscriptions, and Apple services. I'm speaking mostly about their mobile platform... Mac laptops / desktops are another thing... Specifically, I think the lack of a reasonably affordable desktop solution for developers is kind of a bumper. We need upgradability and openness for drivers to make it viable. There are use cases for a less expensive desktop that developers would buy.
- dvdbloc 7y ago
  Does the Mac Mini not satisfy this need? At least for the desktop requirement, I’m aware it may not satisfy your driver requirements.
  - nexuist 7y ago
    The new Mac Mini starts at $700+ and still requires a separate monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers etc. Certainly not meant to be portable, so if you're a developer and want a laptop (as many developers do) your next choice is a MacBook which is well over $1k. You can buy some shitty Windows laptop to make Android apps on for $400. Will it be a good experience? Absolutely not; but at least you can get it done.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Apple no longer sells the MacBook; the cheapest portable they sell today is the MacBook Air.
      - oscilloscope 7y ago
        The latest MacBook Air starts at $849 refurbished. Quite a good value even compared to Windows laptops. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/FREA2LL/A/refurbished-133-inch-macbook-air-16ghz-dual-core-intel-core-i5-with-retina-display-silver https://www.apple.com/shop/product/FREA2LL/A/refurbished-133...
throw03172019 7y ago
I wish this site support reader mode! Hard to read on my iPhone.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  It does on my iPhone.
- ngngngng 7y ago
  Reader is working in Firefox nightly mobile for me, is it different for iPhone?
sk5t 7y ago
Well, it’s a perspective from tech outsiders looking down their noses on Apple, I guess. Macs had a role to play in the 90s, albeit the most interesting platforms were Unix and Linux.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  The most interesting platforms were Atari ST, Amiga, PC, Macs and BeOS. UNIX were interesting camouflaged as Irix and NeXTSTEP. Linux interesting bit was trying not to toast the monitor while attempting to get X working at all.
EGreg 7y ago
I disagree with one part. The 1990s was when Apple didn’t have Jobs for many years. Then Jobs came back and saved the company. Now Apple is without Jobs again for many years. But saying Apple chose closed solutions? That’s classic Jobs. He ended the open clones program and OpenDoc etc. and brought it all in-house. The only thing Apple ever did that was really open under Jobs was probably bringing NextStep UNIX onboard!
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > The only thing Apple ever did that was really open under Jobs was probably bringing NextStep UNIX onboard! Nit: Jobs did not make this decision as he was not part of the company when it was made.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Technically Apple bought NeXT, in reality it was an inverted takeover.
  - icedchai 7y ago
    Late 1990's Apple was basically mired in technical debt. The original classic Mac OS was over a decade old and on very shaky foundations. No memory protection, cooperative multitasking (until OS 8, I think?), etc. Their own internal OS projects (Copeland, Taligent) were never completed. NextStep was like night and day. It breathed new life into Apple.
jonny_eh 7y ago
> … Apple stores told customers that small repair issues would cost thousands of dollars to fix (to encourage them to buy a new Mac). Reference? That seems to be attributing malice when bad design (or design trade-offs) are more likely.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pnw_hazor 7y ago
  https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/complete-control-apple-accused-of-overpricing-restricting-device-repairs-1.4859099 https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/complete-control-apple-a...
43920 7y ago
I think this article accurately identifies Apple's moves towards a more closed ecosystem, but I don't think there's any particular reason to believe that "the future is open". Unlike in the past, Apple has a much broader ecosystem, to the point where you can use only Apple-approved products and services for almost everything you would want to do, so interoperability doesn't matter as much. Additionally, as computers have become more widespread, the demand for customization has declined significantly. Sure, there are still people that want to repair their computer, or install Linux, or customize it in some other way, but as a share of the overall market, it's a really tiny percentage. As long as smartphones remain most people's primary form of computing, I don't really see Apple beig hurt in any significant way. They've effectively created a monopoly on iOS software, so that developers have to put up with the experience, no matter how bad it gets, if they want to make any money. And until some major new technology comes along that Apple doesn't have, it doesn't seem like there's any reason for consumers to abandon Apple's ecosystem in favor of something else.
- fouc 7y ago
  Right. Apple became "open" as a competitive move. Catered to the tech folks with the UNIX-based OS. Then when they developed a new competitive moat in iPhones, they were able to move back to closed.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    And that was just an accident, if Jobs were at Be instead, not sure if they would have bothered with anything UNIX related. Even NeXT wasn't that open to UNIX, for them that was just a way to have a foot on the young workstation market, NeXTSTEP hardly leveraged POSIX for the framework APIs.
- bradknowles 7y ago
  The next billion-plus people to come online won’t be using smartphones. They’ll be using feature phones that can just barely do the job. I don’t see that Apple has a solution in this space, but maybe they can do something based on the Apple Watch platform. Don’t look behind you to figure out where you’re going in the future.
allthecybers 7y ago
I have to agree with this article. I’ve been a Mac User since the iBook G3 running both OS9 and OSX. Working as a video editor at the time Final Cut Pro was revolutionary and you could open up your G4/G5 and add RAM and hard drives. But recently I have to shell out $3000 USD for something with limited ports, a touchbar without a clear use case, poorly designed keyboards, and constant upcharging for docks, dongles and services. I get where they are going... appeal to pros who don’t care how much stuff costs and consumers who will pay anything for apple devices.
askafriend 7y ago
No they're not. They're a different company serving a different, and now global audience. Consider that Apple is more than 5% of America's entire GDP, and 1% of the world's entire GDP. There are ~1 billion people in the Apple ecosystem and that number is an under-estimate. When Apple chooses to add Sapphire as a material to the Apple Watch or iPhone, they affect global prices for the raw material. People still don't get it. It's not a game of pattern matching with their past. Not only have they and their customers changed, but the world has changed. Computing has changed. These articles always fail to consider context in favor of the easy, selective, myopic pattern matching. Don't take this to mean that Apple is above criticism. They're not. But articles like this are lazy.
- tbabb 7y ago
  I think the criticism that a closed ecosystem is myopic and a competitive disadvantage is a fair one, though. Apple used to have a monopolistic stronghold on smartphones, but that is no longer the case. As in the nineties, a walled garden is going to look less appealing if there are cheaper, more open competitors offering as-good or better hardware. Outside of phones, their MacBooks are teetering on the edge of no longer being competitive. The sole reason I most recently bought a MacBook instead of a different PowerBook with a tablet screen is that Linux support for tablet screens is still lacking, and my desire for POSIX overrode my desire for a touch screen. The next time I buy, I doubt that will be true of Linux. Either Apple will come late to the game with touch screen laptops (rather exemplifying the article's point that their hardware lags the competition), or they won't, and it will make far more sense to get a faster third party tablet book and put a free OS on it. And I doubt the average customer will care as much about POSIX as I do, but again, as in the nineties, serious developers aren't going to take Apple seriously forever if this keeps up.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Thing is, POSIX doesn't matter at all for developers that target Apple platforms. Our devs on Macs use them for Objective-C, Swift, Java and .NET Core.
  - bradknowles 7y ago
orev 7y ago
From the headline I thought this was going to be about them having too many SKUs, but after reading I see it’s just the standard techie tropes about overpriced and closed systems. The thing is that consumers (clearly) don’t care about that stuff. There is no such thing as “overpriced” as long as the item is selling. Consumers determine the price of something based on the single factor of “what they are willing to pay”. If Apple can sell devices at that price, and consumers are willing to pay it, then it is by definition not overpriced. Opennes is also overvalued for techies. While I am on the side of openness myself, the vast majority of consumers don’t care about it. They only care about the value they are getting from the product. There might be a few people who really want to crack open the case, but they do not have any significant presence in the market. What consumers do care about is feeling good about their purchase, and the Apple of the 1990s had so many products and was so unfocused that none of the products were good, and consumers felt bad when they bought them. The SKU problem is the same as today. Now you have half a dozen iPads to choose from, and a number of laptops that all seem to be the same except for half an inch between models. No matter what you pick, you leave the store with a sense of FOMO, not knowing if you really picked the right model. That is really what Steve did — you went in and bought the only option they gave you, and you felt confident you got the right one.
- headsoup 7y ago
  If only consumers wore a badge stating "what they are willing to pay" then it would be so much simpler! It is not a magic number, it is all the work of the company creating the desire, brand and product to create demand for the price they want to charge.
  - orev 7y ago
    I don’t see how that’s relevant to the post or my reply. I did not mention anything about how you find the price, only that the common complaint about Apple being overpriced isn’t really valid based on standard market theory.
    - headsoup 7y ago
analognoise 7y ago
"And in today’s age of open source, it’s clear that the future is open" Apple's is the third most valuable company in the world. You'd have to be delusional to think the future is open. Pack it in, fellow tech-priests, we lost this one.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Not sure I agree on this one... a significant portion of the internet, and other devices (that aren't thought of as computers) are running Linux underneath. Android being the most popular user facing variant (custom UI/UX). There's a lot to be said for open platforms. I'd also be surprised if given a few years that WebAssembly doesn't bring more open application options, even to closed ecosystems like Apple's iThings.
NikkiA 7y ago
And this time Jobs can't come back to save them... Well, unless he truly was techno jesus.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Steve at GamersNexus is Tech Jesus...
cavok 7y ago
Apple today is not the company it was 10 years ago, let alone 20 years ago. Comparison is not useful. People buy equipment for different reasons from different levels of expertise. Some people like to hack their hardware, some don't. I've grown out of hacking hardware and software and prefer high availability. Like cars, I guess, buy a Ford or a Merc. Customer's choice.
labrador 7y ago
Does Apple even matter anymore?
auslander 7y ago
From article: "Rather than adopting open standards in their operating systems, they started focusing on developing their own, intended to work within their own ecosystem only." I'm glad they did. MacOS is more clean and secure than Windows and Linux, and is a primary driver for Apple hardware sales. You can make Linux almost as secure, with enough tinkering, but it is not out of the box experience. Think Gatekeeper code signing.
- moring 7y ago
  Are there even good examples of "intended to work within their own ecosystem only"? I'm constantly surprised to the extent Apple embraces openness and interoperability (compared to my personal expectation of what they would do). It seems to me that they just totally ignore it in favor of building a "perfect" (by their own definition) product. If anything, I would describe that behavior as "extreme NIH syndrome".
  - auslander 7y ago
    You lost me here. What behaviour?
    - lowdose 7y ago
      Not Invented Here.
  - starsinspace 7y ago
    > Are there even good examples of "intended to work within their own ecosystem only"? AirDrop, AirPlay, iMessage, FaceTime
bitwize 7y ago
Apple is regressing to a Prada or Fendi identity. Now that they've become a "lifestyle brand" whose revenues come largely from Veblen goods they have much less incentive to foster technical excellence, engage with the technical community, or market products for use by professionals. At least 1990s Apple users were computer fans in an era when that was a rare thing. Today, strippers and drug dealers carry iPhones (and are proud of it).
garren 7y ago
...the release of the Mac OS X operating system, which was essentially a rebranded version of NeXTSTEP UNIX. Because Mac OS X was UNIX, it was fundamentally open... I truly appreciate the UNIX foundation and heritage of OSX, but "fundamentally open" is not a phrase I have ever associated with either or with UNIX. OSX is UNIX the way AIX, Irix, Solaris, HPUX, etc. are (were) UNIX. None of these are open in any meaningful sense (Solaris being an exception, but that's relatively recent.) The author seems to under the impression that because OSX is UNIX, it's suddenly in the same category of openness as the BSDs and Linux. To tech-minded people in the 2000s, Apple was no longer this closed, proprietary, expensive tinker toy. They were a decent UNIX workstation manufacturer that fostered openness. UNIX workstation? Yes. Fostering openness? No. The Apple of the 00's was essentially, and arguable remains, a closed, proprietary, expensive, consumer oriented UNIX workstation. But since then, it seems as if Apple has continually made decisions to move back in time to the 1990s. Rather than adopting open standards in their operating systems, they started focusing on developing their own, intended to work within their own ecosystem only. Maybe I'm missing the point. There certainly are Apple hardware changes and trends that I've not been happy about. I also recognize that there are software changes and standards deviations that are unfortunate. However, the idea that Apple was somehow a bastion of openness, and that their OS was open and now isn't seems inaccurate.
- icedchai 7y ago
  The Darwin kernel and many other macOS components are open. Just take a look at https://opensource.apple.com/ https://opensource.apple.com/ Are they perfect? No... but a lot further along than the Unix of old.
w0de 7y ago
My job is deploying and configuring Macbooks at reasonable scale (2000-5000). This article is nonsense.

126 points by jasoneckert 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

I actually like that Apple moves at its own pace and doesn’t wait for standards to evolve. If you are willing to adopt the Apple ecosystem, it’s a bliss. If you can’t then just ignore them. I’ve been on both sides of the fence during the last decade.

dman 7y ago
Could you elaborate the two different phases where you were on two different sides? What made you change?
jay_kyburz 7y ago
You don't have to wait for "standards to evolve" to be and open system. You can open your API and see if community wants to adopt it as a standard.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Doing this too much is the second “E” of embrace, extend, extinguish…
  - headsoup 7y ago
    Except in this case there is no first E for Embrace, so that doesn't work...
- jonny_eh 7y ago
  Just like Apple promised to do with Facetime. https://www.cnet.com/news/steve-jobs-promised-to-make-facetime-open-source-its-time/ https://www.cnet.com/news/steve-jobs-promised-to-make-faceti...
  - chadcmulligan 7y ago
    That was stopped by the patent troll I believe https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/29/apple_fifth_facetime_appeal/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/29/apple_fifth_facetim...
    - zapeachy 7y ago
      The latest in that saga: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/09/virnetx-reverses-ruling-invalidating-patents-used-against-apple https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/09/virnetx-reverses-...
      - lallysingh 7y ago
        What is FaceTime doing that you can't do with WebRTC? And that's already open.
        danaris 7y ago
        Whether FaceTime is doing things that can't easily be done with WebRTC, I don't know, but when FaceTime came out, WebRTC didn't even exist. Hell, it wasn't stable until just a year ago.
techntoke 7y ago
Apple waits till a company does something then copies it. Even their Window system features have been copied from Linux. Their hardware is overpriced and you are essentially just paying for an Apple logo and aesthetic pushed by a marketing company. It is like the Nike of computers.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Crucially, Apple usually copies it better. They drive niche or poorly implemented technologies and make them mainstream.
- lupinglade 7y ago
  From Linux? Are you sure about that?
  - techntoke 7y ago
    Yes, there are several window managers that they copy from.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Such as? What about all those Window managers that copied from NeXTSTEP?
- pjmlp 7y ago
  What?!? Modern Apple platforms are an evolution from NeXTSTEP.
- IOT_Apprentice 7y ago
  NeXTStep (September 18, 1989) predates Linux (September 17, 1991)and it's window managers. I'd suggest you also look at Apple's work on ARM processors. They were first to 64 bit in that space.
  - Polyisoprene 7y ago
    Apple was one the companies that created ARM as well. ”The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology.”

vinayan3 7y ago

Major difference between the 90s and now is the market dominance that Apple has with their iOS platform. As a company having a closed ecosystem which they can push in their own direction. The most important piece is that it drives their revenue either from app purchases, in-app purchases, subscriptions, and Apple services. I'm speaking mostly about their mobile platform... Mac laptops / desktops are another thing... Specifically, I think the lack of a reasonably affordable desktop solution for developers is kind of a bumper. We need upgradability and openness for drivers to make it viable. There are use cases for a less expensive desktop that developers would buy.

dvdbloc 7y ago
Does the Mac Mini not satisfy this need? At least for the desktop requirement, I’m aware it may not satisfy your driver requirements.
- nexuist 7y ago
  The new Mac Mini starts at $700+ and still requires a separate monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers etc. Certainly not meant to be portable, so if you're a developer and want a laptop (as many developers do) your next choice is a MacBook which is well over $1k. You can buy some shitty Windows laptop to make Android apps on for $400. Will it be a good experience? Absolutely not; but at least you can get it done.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Apple no longer sells the MacBook; the cheapest portable they sell today is the MacBook Air.
    - oscilloscope 7y ago
      The latest MacBook Air starts at $849 refurbished. Quite a good value even compared to Windows laptops. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/FREA2LL/A/refurbished-133-inch-macbook-air-16ghz-dual-core-intel-core-i5-with-retina-display-silver https://www.apple.com/shop/product/FREA2LL/A/refurbished-133...

throw03172019 7y ago

I wish this site support reader mode! Hard to read on my iPhone.

saagarjha 7y ago
It does on my iPhone.
ngngngng 7y ago
Reader is working in Firefox nightly mobile for me, is it different for iPhone?

sk5t 7y ago

Well, it’s a perspective from tech outsiders looking down their noses on Apple, I guess. Macs had a role to play in the 90s, albeit the most interesting platforms were Unix and Linux.

pjmlp 7y ago
The most interesting platforms were Atari ST, Amiga, PC, Macs and BeOS. UNIX were interesting camouflaged as Irix and NeXTSTEP. Linux interesting bit was trying not to toast the monitor while attempting to get X working at all.

EGreg 7y ago

I disagree with one part. The 1990s was when Apple didn’t have Jobs for many years. Then Jobs came back and saved the company. Now Apple is without Jobs again for many years. But saying Apple chose closed solutions? That’s classic Jobs. He ended the open clones program and OpenDoc etc. and brought it all in-house. The only thing Apple ever did that was really open under Jobs was probably bringing NextStep UNIX onboard!

saagarjha 7y ago
> The only thing Apple ever did that was really open under Jobs was probably bringing NextStep UNIX onboard! Nit: Jobs did not make this decision as he was not part of the company when it was made.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Technically Apple bought NeXT, in reality it was an inverted takeover.
- icedchai 7y ago
  Late 1990's Apple was basically mired in technical debt. The original classic Mac OS was over a decade old and on very shaky foundations. No memory protection, cooperative multitasking (until OS 8, I think?), etc. Their own internal OS projects (Copeland, Taligent) were never completed. NextStep was like night and day. It breathed new life into Apple.

jonny_eh 7y ago

> … Apple stores told customers that small repair issues would cost thousands of dollars to fix (to encourage them to buy a new Mac). Reference? That seems to be attributing malice when bad design (or design trade-offs) are more likely.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pnw_hazor 7y ago
https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/complete-control-apple-accused-of-overpricing-restricting-device-repairs-1.4859099 https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/complete-control-apple-a...

43920 7y ago

I think this article accurately identifies Apple's moves towards a more closed ecosystem, but I don't think there's any particular reason to believe that "the future is open". Unlike in the past, Apple has a much broader ecosystem, to the point where you can use only Apple-approved products and services for almost everything you would want to do, so interoperability doesn't matter as much. Additionally, as computers have become more widespread, the demand for customization has declined significantly. Sure, there are still people that want to repair their computer, or install Linux, or customize it in some other way, but as a share of the overall market, it's a really tiny percentage. As long as smartphones remain most people's primary form of computing, I don't really see Apple beig hurt in any significant way. They've effectively created a monopoly on iOS software, so that developers have to put up with the experience, no matter how bad it gets, if they want to make any money. And until some major new technology comes along that Apple doesn't have, it doesn't seem like there's any reason for consumers to abandon Apple's ecosystem in favor of something else.

fouc 7y ago
Right. Apple became "open" as a competitive move. Catered to the tech folks with the UNIX-based OS. Then when they developed a new competitive moat in iPhones, they were able to move back to closed.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  And that was just an accident, if Jobs were at Be instead, not sure if they would have bothered with anything UNIX related. Even NeXT wasn't that open to UNIX, for them that was just a way to have a foot on the young workstation market, NeXTSTEP hardly leveraged POSIX for the framework APIs.
bradknowles 7y ago
The next billion-plus people to come online won’t be using smartphones. They’ll be using feature phones that can just barely do the job. I don’t see that Apple has a solution in this space, but maybe they can do something based on the Apple Watch platform. Don’t look behind you to figure out where you’re going in the future.

allthecybers 7y ago

I have to agree with this article. I’ve been a Mac User since the iBook G3 running both OS9 and OSX. Working as a video editor at the time Final Cut Pro was revolutionary and you could open up your G4/G5 and add RAM and hard drives. But recently I have to shell out $3000 USD for something with limited ports, a touchbar without a clear use case, poorly designed keyboards, and constant upcharging for docks, dongles and services. I get where they are going... appeal to pros who don’t care how much stuff costs and consumers who will pay anything for apple devices.

askafriend 7y ago

No they're not. They're a different company serving a different, and now global audience. Consider that Apple is more than 5% of America's entire GDP, and 1% of the world's entire GDP. There are ~1 billion people in the Apple ecosystem and that number is an under-estimate. When Apple chooses to add Sapphire as a material to the Apple Watch or iPhone, they affect global prices for the raw material. People still don't get it. It's not a game of pattern matching with their past. Not only have they and their customers changed, but the world has changed. Computing has changed. These articles always fail to consider context in favor of the easy, selective, myopic pattern matching. Don't take this to mean that Apple is above criticism. They're not. But articles like this are lazy.

tbabb 7y ago
I think the criticism that a closed ecosystem is myopic and a competitive disadvantage is a fair one, though. Apple used to have a monopolistic stronghold on smartphones, but that is no longer the case. As in the nineties, a walled garden is going to look less appealing if there are cheaper, more open competitors offering as-good or better hardware. Outside of phones, their MacBooks are teetering on the edge of no longer being competitive. The sole reason I most recently bought a MacBook instead of a different PowerBook with a tablet screen is that Linux support for tablet screens is still lacking, and my desire for POSIX overrode my desire for a touch screen. The next time I buy, I doubt that will be true of Linux. Either Apple will come late to the game with touch screen laptops (rather exemplifying the article's point that their hardware lags the competition), or they won't, and it will make far more sense to get a faster third party tablet book and put a free OS on it. And I doubt the average customer will care as much about POSIX as I do, but again, as in the nineties, serious developers aren't going to take Apple seriously forever if this keeps up.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Thing is, POSIX doesn't matter at all for developers that target Apple platforms. Our devs on Macs use them for Objective-C, Swift, Java and .NET Core.
- bradknowles 7y ago

orev 7y ago

From the headline I thought this was going to be about them having too many SKUs, but after reading I see it’s just the standard techie tropes about overpriced and closed systems. The thing is that consumers (clearly) don’t care about that stuff. There is no such thing as “overpriced” as long as the item is selling. Consumers determine the price of something based on the single factor of “what they are willing to pay”. If Apple can sell devices at that price, and consumers are willing to pay it, then it is by definition not overpriced. Opennes is also overvalued for techies. While I am on the side of openness myself, the vast majority of consumers don’t care about it. They only care about the value they are getting from the product. There might be a few people who really want to crack open the case, but they do not have any significant presence in the market. What consumers do care about is feeling good about their purchase, and the Apple of the 1990s had so many products and was so unfocused that none of the products were good, and consumers felt bad when they bought them. The SKU problem is the same as today. Now you have half a dozen iPads to choose from, and a number of laptops that all seem to be the same except for half an inch between models. No matter what you pick, you leave the store with a sense of FOMO, not knowing if you really picked the right model. That is really what Steve did — you went in and bought the only option they gave you, and you felt confident you got the right one.

headsoup 7y ago
If only consumers wore a badge stating "what they are willing to pay" then it would be so much simpler! It is not a magic number, it is all the work of the company creating the desire, brand and product to create demand for the price they want to charge.
- orev 7y ago
  I don’t see how that’s relevant to the post or my reply. I did not mention anything about how you find the price, only that the common complaint about Apple being overpriced isn’t really valid based on standard market theory.
  - headsoup 7y ago

analognoise 7y ago

"And in today’s age of open source, it’s clear that the future is open" Apple's is the third most valuable company in the world. You'd have to be delusional to think the future is open. Pack it in, fellow tech-priests, we lost this one.

tracker1 7y ago
Not sure I agree on this one... a significant portion of the internet, and other devices (that aren't thought of as computers) are running Linux underneath. Android being the most popular user facing variant (custom UI/UX). There's a lot to be said for open platforms. I'd also be surprised if given a few years that WebAssembly doesn't bring more open application options, even to closed ecosystems like Apple's iThings.

NikkiA 7y ago

And this time Jobs can't come back to save them... Well, unless he truly was techno jesus.

tracker1 7y ago
Steve at GamersNexus is Tech Jesus...

cavok 7y ago

Apple today is not the company it was 10 years ago, let alone 20 years ago. Comparison is not useful. People buy equipment for different reasons from different levels of expertise. Some people like to hack their hardware, some don't. I've grown out of hacking hardware and software and prefer high availability. Like cars, I guess, buy a Ford or a Merc. Customer's choice.

labrador 7y ago

Does Apple even matter anymore?

auslander 7y ago

From article: "Rather than adopting open standards in their operating systems, they started focusing on developing their own, intended to work within their own ecosystem only." I'm glad they did. MacOS is more clean and secure than Windows and Linux, and is a primary driver for Apple hardware sales. You can make Linux almost as secure, with enough tinkering, but it is not out of the box experience. Think Gatekeeper code signing.

moring 7y ago
Are there even good examples of "intended to work within their own ecosystem only"? I'm constantly surprised to the extent Apple embraces openness and interoperability (compared to my personal expectation of what they would do). It seems to me that they just totally ignore it in favor of building a "perfect" (by their own definition) product. If anything, I would describe that behavior as "extreme NIH syndrome".
- auslander 7y ago
  You lost me here. What behaviour?
  - lowdose 7y ago
    Not Invented Here.
- starsinspace 7y ago
  > Are there even good examples of "intended to work within their own ecosystem only"? AirDrop, AirPlay, iMessage, FaceTime

bitwize 7y ago

Apple is regressing to a Prada or Fendi identity. Now that they've become a "lifestyle brand" whose revenues come largely from Veblen goods they have much less incentive to foster technical excellence, engage with the technical community, or market products for use by professionals. At least 1990s Apple users were computer fans in an era when that was a rare thing. Today, strippers and drug dealers carry iPhones (and are proud of it).

garren 7y ago

...the release of the Mac OS X operating system, which was essentially a rebranded version of NeXTSTEP UNIX. Because Mac OS X was UNIX, it was fundamentally open... I truly appreciate the UNIX foundation and heritage of OSX, but "fundamentally open" is not a phrase I have ever associated with either or with UNIX. OSX is UNIX the way AIX, Irix, Solaris, HPUX, etc. are (were) UNIX. None of these are open in any meaningful sense (Solaris being an exception, but that's relatively recent.) The author seems to under the impression that because OSX is UNIX, it's suddenly in the same category of openness as the BSDs and Linux. To tech-minded people in the 2000s, Apple was no longer this closed, proprietary, expensive tinker toy. They were a decent UNIX workstation manufacturer that fostered openness. UNIX workstation? Yes. Fostering openness? No. The Apple of the 00's was essentially, and arguable remains, a closed, proprietary, expensive, consumer oriented UNIX workstation. But since then, it seems as if Apple has continually made decisions to move back in time to the 1990s. Rather than adopting open standards in their operating systems, they started focusing on developing their own, intended to work within their own ecosystem only. Maybe I'm missing the point. There certainly are Apple hardware changes and trends that I've not been happy about. I also recognize that there are software changes and standards deviations that are unfortunate. However, the idea that Apple was somehow a bastion of openness, and that their OS was open and now isn't seems inaccurate.

icedchai 7y ago
The Darwin kernel and many other macOS components are open. Just take a look at https://opensource.apple.com/ https://opensource.apple.com/ Are they perfect? No... but a lot further along than the Unix of old.

w0de 7y ago

My job is deploying and configuring Macbooks at reasonable scale (2000-5000). This article is nonsense.