10 ms·

Apple continues to not give any care whatsoever to anything outside their walled garden. For the longest time you couldn't even preview songs on iTunes store wi

Apple continues to not give any care whatsoever to anything outside their walled garden. For the longest time you couldn't even preview songs on iTunes store without having iTunes. Want to watch their biggest WWDC live? Had to use Safari until last year. Obviously iMessage and FaceTime are complete no-gos outside their walled garden too. This is how they keep people in. They have to close down their walls as tightly as possible, to force people in. And once you're in, they make it as hard as possible to leave.

pier25 7y ago
I use a mix of Apple and non-Apple devices. It's a shame that I can't, for example, use Safari on Windows or Android.
- freehunter 7y ago
  There used to be a Safari for Windows. No one used it so Apple dropped support.
  - K0SM0S 7y ago
    More specifically, Apple never made it good enough compared to alternatives, so no one used it. It eventually died at the hands of its maker.
    - wlesieutre 7y ago
      IMO what killed it was the text rendering. They brought their font smoothing over from Mac OS and that's not what Windows users are acclimated to. It might be more "correct" in some ways, especially from a graphic design / typography standpoint, but it looks fuzzy when you put it next to ClearType on the same screen. https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophies-of-windows-and-mac-os-x https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosoph... https://blog.codinghorror.com/whats-wrong-with-apples-font-rendering/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/whats-wrong-with-apples-font-r...
  - mavhc 7y ago
    Well, there was Mac GUI toolkit for Windows, which Safari and iTunes used, wasn't really Safari for Windows
- wolco 7y ago
  Firefox might be the answer or cross platform applications. Always good to get out of the ecosystem when you can.
  - pier25 7y ago
    I've been using Firefox for the last couple of months but I'm not satisfied with it. I'm using Brave now but it only syncs bookmarks... I'm using a password manager but it doesn't sync extensions, autofills, settings, etc.
    - jonathankoren 7y ago
      What are your problems with Firefox?
      - pier25 7y ago
        Major issues: 1. Lack of multilingual spell checking (without having to manually switch languages). For non English natives this is a must since we write in at least 2 languages every day. There is an extension that tries to solve this but it is quite slow to the point that I've had to disable it. 2. It just feels slower than Chromium browsers and Safari, at least on macOS. In Windows it's blazing fast but I have a Ryzen 3700X there. 3. On my MBP I get random CPU spikes from time to time and I'm forced to close and reopen FF. I haven't seen this in my iMac or Windows machine. I've never experienced this with any other browser. 4. On Android FF seems to be a battery hog. I haven't done any serious measuring but since I switched to FF my battery has gone from 3-4 days between charges to 2-3 days. Minor issues: 1. I think the UI is inferior to all other browsers 2. I've had sync issues. I try to login to a website and for some reason FF will not write the credentials unless I manually sync. This has happened in iOS and Android. 3. I've had several minor issues on iOS. For example yesterday there was a weird bug in Twitter with the keyboard suggestions. I know it uses WKWebView under the hood but Chrome for iOS does not have those issues. 4. For some reason Mozilla decided to remove an extension that I use very frequently called UI Stack.
        7y ago
pfranz 7y ago
For this and many examples I think it's more ignoring those use-cases than maliciously blocking them. > For the longest time you couldn't even preview songs on iTunes store without having iTunes. I'm confused what the use case for this is? > Want to watch their biggest WWDC live? Had to use Safari until last year. Keynote streaming has had a long, weird history over the past decades. Even when Quicktime was dominant, they would only occasionally stream it live. My understanding over the past decade or so has been they've used "standards" to stream, but just the standards Safari had implemented. I just don't think they cared that much about getting it to any home users live.
- favorited 7y ago
  > My understanding over the past decade or so has been they've used "standards" to stream, but just the standards Safari had implemented. It's just HLS, which Chrome didn't support
  - Uehreka 7y ago
    I’ve long wondered why Chrome doesn’t support HLS (HTTP Live Streaming for those who don’t know) given that it’s been standardized for a while. I get that we’ve got stuff like MPEG DASH and Web RTC now and so the use case for HLS is mostly fulfilled, but having a couple different options for streaming live video with low latency to massive audiences is nice and allows folks like me who have worked in this space to offer multiple options when designing a streaming systems.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - saurik 7y ago
      Well, Chrome also "doesn't support" MPEG DASH: all of Chrome, Firefox, and IE11+ instead chose to support the Media Source Extensions API, which allows you to, with very little JavaScript glue, support any of these other standards you want, as well as new standards or custom streaming solutions. Apple, always the ecosystem's asshole, hardcoded HLS support into their browser and provided no way to implement any alternative as they refused to implement Media Source Extensions. So no, Chrome should really not support HLS nor should it support MPEG DASH: Safari should just support Media Source Extensions. Apple finally did support Media Source extensions at some points on desktop Safari, which makes some sense as they effectively lost the war for the browser on macOS: no one was going to go to the ludicrous cost to support HLS (which would require you storing not just extra copies of all of your assets but also storing many copies of your audio as I am pretty sure HLS doesn't support separated streams) for Safari users given the existence and already-dominance of Chrome. (FWIW, the cost of the duplicate storage was such a "bottom line" reason for websites to not support HLS that Apple finally decided to break a bit and support the MPEG DASH fragment files in Safari 10. It still is an extra implementation burden to support this hard coded spec and hobbles the entire industry to "whatever capabilities are sort of supported by HLS" instead of "whatever can be imagined on top of Media Source Extensions", but it no longer isn't "a major cost of our business operations is going to more than double".) But, they still have not implemented it on iOS, because there they have control over the browser (disallowing any alternative) and are also a force in the mobile market you can't ignore (which is why this should be illegal). This means that you are forced as a content provider to support HLS so you can target iOS users (and before Apple lost, macOS Sadari), and that's the only reason anyone cares at all about HLS. HLS offers absolutely no advantages to MPEG DASH to anyone but Apple, and so would be dead if it weren't for Apple's active resistance to Media Source Extensions.
sul4bh 7y ago
I would rather have a delightful user experience than multi platform support. Worst service to ever come out of Apple is Apple Music because it is multi platform. Their desktop app is just a shell around their BETA web version. Sluggish UI, memory usage goes up to 4GB easily...They didn't even try...all in the name of making it easier to support multiple platforms.
- mehhh 7y ago
  Sounds like they did not make a modicum of effort to support any platform. iTunes was multiplatform (Windows & OS X), if Apple wanted they could invest the resources to do so for Apple Music. Apparently it is not a priority tho
dcolkitt 7y ago
Isn't this kind of in the DNA of the company? Even going back to its first decade, what distinguished Apple from other early PC companies was that its O/S was only meant to run on its hardware, and its hardware was only meant to run its O/S. This obviously didn't work out for it in the late 80's and 90's. But its fortunes changed by the mobile device era. One challenge of this model is that you have to maintain execution excellence in not one, but two separate areas. Both your hardware and design execution, as well as your software engineering, have to be industry leading. If either one falls short, it brings down the other.
- oneplane 7y ago
  Ironically it didn't work out both ways: for a short time you could run Mac OS on non-Apple hardware, licensed and stuff, but all it did was hurt hardware sales while not making enough money to cover software engineering for the OS. Then again, a ton of stuff went bad for Apple at that time. NeXT on the other hand was always intended to run on diverse architectures, not sure on the timeline vs. Windows NT, which had the same model (with the HAL, multiple kernels etc.). It's pretty sad to see that go away, but it also makes total sense; modularity and USP-as-a-service doesn't pay off and doesn't make users (the mass of them) happy. Loosely coupled but highly cohesive systems work best, it's why classic Mac OS completely failed in at the end of its life, and why all the other projects at Apple were a dead end compared to the *nix projects (and of course buying NeXT). It's also why NT worked, and why at some levels Android fails miserably. (but Google notices and started to fix the cohesion issue at the OS level with Android One and their patching methods vs. complete monolithic OS upgrades which then needs vendors to back port)
ljm 7y ago
And what company does care about the open web, no strings attached? Google and Facebook sure as hell don’t. I’m not going to apologise for Apple, but I thought this sign in feature was iOS specific. They’re offering to proxy your email on their own account and buying an iPhone pays for that. It’s a privacy feature so that you can protect your personal email, it’s not federated auth. A better example is that I think the Apple Music API is pretty robust now. That’s been some time in the making.
- enos_feedler 7y ago
  110% - Google wouldn’t let me use Safari for youtube TV or for Stadia. The open web is a total mirage.
  - Nullabillity 7y ago
    Goes both ways. It shouldn't be too surprising that people don't bother testing against the only browser that isn't just a download away. For all of IE's/Edge's faults (and there are tons), at least they offer public VM images.
    - culturestate 7y ago
      > people don't bother testing against the only browser that isn't just a download away Considering that a) Stadia officially supports macOS and b) most Google engineers use Macs, I don't think that's really a valid argument here. They just want people to use Chrome, full stop.
    - thewebcount 7y ago
      > It shouldn't be too surprising that people don't bother testing against the only browser that isn't just a download away. What does that mean? If you want to test Safari you only need a Mac or an iPhone, which Google has plenty of since they make native software for those platforms. If they want to test Chrome on a Mac, they can also test stuff with Safari on that same Mac.
    - skinnymuch 7y ago
coldtea 7y ago
>This is how they keep people in. They have to close down their walls as tightly as possible, to force people in. And once you're in, they make it as hard as possible to leave. I call old wives tales. I'm a close-to-20-years Apple user. The walled garden has never been a problem, more of a strength (integration, cohesion, etc). Especially today where everything is a subscription, there has never been LESS of a walled garden in that regard. I can move anytime (and I do use also Windows and Linux) and I wont have any issue with OS X/iOS. I just wont have my apps -- which has been the case for every OS ever. My music is in Spotify and Apple Music, my video is Netflix and Amazon Prime and Apple+, my email is Gmail, my eBooks in Kindle for Mac and iOS, I talk with friends with Skype, Facetime, Messenger and Whatsup. Even my iCloud apps (Calendar, email, etc) are available from any browser. Some "walled garden". The reason I don't want to move from OS X/iOS is cohesion and usability. Despite BS like the 3+ years MBP keyboard fiasco or the not-really-useful BS touch strip, it's still the best HW/SW combo for my kind of computing (programming, lots of UNIXy stuff, lots of video and music as well).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- miloignis 7y ago
  I feel like reason you can move is because you haven't put all your eggs in their walled garden, not that they don't have one. I know people who either won't or have regretted switching from an iPhone because they have trouble talking to their friend who only use iMessage. I think Apple is only increasing their walled garden into more areas by expanding into music streaming, TV, etc. You can still use their hardware and OS without fully buying into their walled garden though and maintain more freedom, as you seem to do! edit: I should mention that while I don't like their walled gardens in general, I don't mind them for other people except iMessage. iMessage makes me fairly angry because they're using & dividing people's social connections for profit.
  - thephyber 7y ago
    iMessage is backwards compatible with SMS. Are you talking about the unwillingness of users to migrate their chats to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc? That’s not a walled garden - that’s the natural hesitance to leave any comfortable/familiar system that any social media / network effect site/app has. It’s more like a psychological moat. And even the app you want Apple users to migrate to has it.
WA 7y ago
> This is how they keep people in. But sometimes, it also keeps iOS users out of stuff. For example, in Germany, Android has a market share of 70%. Hence, iMessage is useless here, because the majority can’t be reached. Thus, WhatsApp has the biggest market share for messaging services. Now, it probably doesn’t matter for Apple, but it prevents the iMessage experience for most iPhone users in Germany, because it’s kinda useless here. I guess the same is true for most European countries.
FabHK 7y ago
> And once you're in, they make it as hard as possible to leave. Nonsense. On my Mac, I can export all my pictures from Photos as jpeg (or several other formats); contacts as .vcf; calendars as .ics; documents in several portable formats; my music is in iTunes as (unencumbered) mp3 or m4a, nicely organised by Artists and Albums; emails are in traditional .mbox files, unless I'm mistaken, but at any rate mailboxes can be exported; even Messages are available in some directory in the Library folder, though in an ugly XML-y format; etc. I don't know how easy other OSes make it to "leave", but you can't really argue that Apple is trying to make it hard (except by making the garden more beautiful, safe, and well organised than the others).

pier25 7y ago

I use a mix of Apple and non-Apple devices. It's a shame that I can't, for example, use Safari on Windows or Android.

freehunter 7y ago
There used to be a Safari for Windows. No one used it so Apple dropped support.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  More specifically, Apple never made it good enough compared to alternatives, so no one used it. It eventually died at the hands of its maker.
  - wlesieutre 7y ago
    IMO what killed it was the text rendering. They brought their font smoothing over from Mac OS and that's not what Windows users are acclimated to. It might be more "correct" in some ways, especially from a graphic design / typography standpoint, but it looks fuzzy when you put it next to ClearType on the same screen. https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophies-of-windows-and-mac-os-x https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosoph... https://blog.codinghorror.com/whats-wrong-with-apples-font-rendering/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/whats-wrong-with-apples-font-r...
- mavhc 7y ago
  Well, there was Mac GUI toolkit for Windows, which Safari and iTunes used, wasn't really Safari for Windows
wolco 7y ago
Firefox might be the answer or cross platform applications. Always good to get out of the ecosystem when you can.
- pier25 7y ago
  I've been using Firefox for the last couple of months but I'm not satisfied with it. I'm using Brave now but it only syncs bookmarks... I'm using a password manager but it doesn't sync extensions, autofills, settings, etc.
  - jonathankoren 7y ago
    What are your problems with Firefox?
    - pier25 7y ago
      Major issues: 1. Lack of multilingual spell checking (without having to manually switch languages). For non English natives this is a must since we write in at least 2 languages every day. There is an extension that tries to solve this but it is quite slow to the point that I've had to disable it. 2. It just feels slower than Chromium browsers and Safari, at least on macOS. In Windows it's blazing fast but I have a Ryzen 3700X there. 3. On my MBP I get random CPU spikes from time to time and I'm forced to close and reopen FF. I haven't seen this in my iMac or Windows machine. I've never experienced this with any other browser. 4. On Android FF seems to be a battery hog. I haven't done any serious measuring but since I switched to FF my battery has gone from 3-4 days between charges to 2-3 days. Minor issues: 1. I think the UI is inferior to all other browsers 2. I've had sync issues. I try to login to a website and for some reason FF will not write the credentials unless I manually sync. This has happened in iOS and Android. 3. I've had several minor issues on iOS. For example yesterday there was a weird bug in Twitter with the keyboard suggestions. I know it uses WKWebView under the hood but Chrome for iOS does not have those issues. 4. For some reason Mozilla decided to remove an extension that I use very frequently called UI Stack.
      - 7y ago

pfranz 7y ago

For this and many examples I think it's more ignoring those use-cases than maliciously blocking them. > For the longest time you couldn't even preview songs on iTunes store without having iTunes. I'm confused what the use case for this is? > Want to watch their biggest WWDC live? Had to use Safari until last year. Keynote streaming has had a long, weird history over the past decades. Even when Quicktime was dominant, they would only occasionally stream it live. My understanding over the past decade or so has been they've used "standards" to stream, but just the standards Safari had implemented. I just don't think they cared that much about getting it to any home users live.

favorited 7y ago
> My understanding over the past decade or so has been they've used "standards" to stream, but just the standards Safari had implemented. It's just HLS, which Chrome didn't support
- Uehreka 7y ago
  I’ve long wondered why Chrome doesn’t support HLS (HTTP Live Streaming for those who don’t know) given that it’s been standardized for a while. I get that we’ve got stuff like MPEG DASH and Web RTC now and so the use case for HLS is mostly fulfilled, but having a couple different options for streaming live video with low latency to massive audiences is nice and allows folks like me who have worked in this space to offer multiple options when designing a streaming systems.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - saurik 7y ago
    Well, Chrome also "doesn't support" MPEG DASH: all of Chrome, Firefox, and IE11+ instead chose to support the Media Source Extensions API, which allows you to, with very little JavaScript glue, support any of these other standards you want, as well as new standards or custom streaming solutions. Apple, always the ecosystem's asshole, hardcoded HLS support into their browser and provided no way to implement any alternative as they refused to implement Media Source Extensions. So no, Chrome should really not support HLS nor should it support MPEG DASH: Safari should just support Media Source Extensions. Apple finally did support Media Source extensions at some points on desktop Safari, which makes some sense as they effectively lost the war for the browser on macOS: no one was going to go to the ludicrous cost to support HLS (which would require you storing not just extra copies of all of your assets but also storing many copies of your audio as I am pretty sure HLS doesn't support separated streams) for Safari users given the existence and already-dominance of Chrome. (FWIW, the cost of the duplicate storage was such a "bottom line" reason for websites to not support HLS that Apple finally decided to break a bit and support the MPEG DASH fragment files in Safari 10. It still is an extra implementation burden to support this hard coded spec and hobbles the entire industry to "whatever capabilities are sort of supported by HLS" instead of "whatever can be imagined on top of Media Source Extensions", but it no longer isn't "a major cost of our business operations is going to more than double".) But, they still have not implemented it on iOS, because there they have control over the browser (disallowing any alternative) and are also a force in the mobile market you can't ignore (which is why this should be illegal). This means that you are forced as a content provider to support HLS so you can target iOS users (and before Apple lost, macOS Sadari), and that's the only reason anyone cares at all about HLS. HLS offers absolutely no advantages to MPEG DASH to anyone but Apple, and so would be dead if it weren't for Apple's active resistance to Media Source Extensions.

sul4bh 7y ago

I would rather have a delightful user experience than multi platform support. Worst service to ever come out of Apple is Apple Music because it is multi platform. Their desktop app is just a shell around their BETA web version. Sluggish UI, memory usage goes up to 4GB easily...They didn't even try...all in the name of making it easier to support multiple platforms.

mehhh 7y ago
Sounds like they did not make a modicum of effort to support any platform. iTunes was multiplatform (Windows & OS X), if Apple wanted they could invest the resources to do so for Apple Music. Apparently it is not a priority tho

dcolkitt 7y ago

Isn't this kind of in the DNA of the company? Even going back to its first decade, what distinguished Apple from other early PC companies was that its O/S was only meant to run on its hardware, and its hardware was only meant to run its O/S. This obviously didn't work out for it in the late 80's and 90's. But its fortunes changed by the mobile device era. One challenge of this model is that you have to maintain execution excellence in not one, but two separate areas. Both your hardware and design execution, as well as your software engineering, have to be industry leading. If either one falls short, it brings down the other.

oneplane 7y ago
Ironically it didn't work out both ways: for a short time you could run Mac OS on non-Apple hardware, licensed and stuff, but all it did was hurt hardware sales while not making enough money to cover software engineering for the OS. Then again, a ton of stuff went bad for Apple at that time. NeXT on the other hand was always intended to run on diverse architectures, not sure on the timeline vs. Windows NT, which had the same model (with the HAL, multiple kernels etc.). It's pretty sad to see that go away, but it also makes total sense; modularity and USP-as-a-service doesn't pay off and doesn't make users (the mass of them) happy. Loosely coupled but highly cohesive systems work best, it's why classic Mac OS completely failed in at the end of its life, and why all the other projects at Apple were a dead end compared to the *nix projects (and of course buying NeXT). It's also why NT worked, and why at some levels Android fails miserably. (but Google notices and started to fix the cohesion issue at the OS level with Android One and their patching methods vs. complete monolithic OS upgrades which then needs vendors to back port)

ljm 7y ago

And what company does care about the open web, no strings attached? Google and Facebook sure as hell don’t. I’m not going to apologise for Apple, but I thought this sign in feature was iOS specific. They’re offering to proxy your email on their own account and buying an iPhone pays for that. It’s a privacy feature so that you can protect your personal email, it’s not federated auth. A better example is that I think the Apple Music API is pretty robust now. That’s been some time in the making.

enos_feedler 7y ago
110% - Google wouldn’t let me use Safari for youtube TV or for Stadia. The open web is a total mirage.
- Nullabillity 7y ago
  Goes both ways. It shouldn't be too surprising that people don't bother testing against the only browser that isn't just a download away. For all of IE's/Edge's faults (and there are tons), at least they offer public VM images.
  - culturestate 7y ago
    > people don't bother testing against the only browser that isn't just a download away Considering that a) Stadia officially supports macOS and b) most Google engineers use Macs, I don't think that's really a valid argument here. They just want people to use Chrome, full stop.
  - thewebcount 7y ago
    > It shouldn't be too surprising that people don't bother testing against the only browser that isn't just a download away. What does that mean? If you want to test Safari you only need a Mac or an iPhone, which Google has plenty of since they make native software for those platforms. If they want to test Chrome on a Mac, they can also test stuff with Safari on that same Mac.
  - skinnymuch 7y ago

coldtea 7y ago

>This is how they keep people in. They have to close down their walls as tightly as possible, to force people in. And once you're in, they make it as hard as possible to leave. I call old wives tales. I'm a close-to-20-years Apple user. The walled garden has never been a problem, more of a strength (integration, cohesion, etc). Especially today where everything is a subscription, there has never been LESS of a walled garden in that regard. I can move anytime (and I do use also Windows and Linux) and I wont have any issue with OS X/iOS. I just wont have my apps -- which has been the case for every OS ever. My music is in Spotify and Apple Music, my video is Netflix and Amazon Prime and Apple+, my email is Gmail, my eBooks in Kindle for Mac and iOS, I talk with friends with Skype, Facetime, Messenger and Whatsup. Even my iCloud apps (Calendar, email, etc) are available from any browser. Some "walled garden". The reason I don't want to move from OS X/iOS is cohesion and usability. Despite BS like the 3+ years MBP keyboard fiasco or the not-really-useful BS touch strip, it's still the best HW/SW combo for my kind of computing (programming, lots of UNIXy stuff, lots of video and music as well).

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
miloignis 7y ago
I feel like reason you can move is because you haven't put all your eggs in their walled garden, not that they don't have one. I know people who either won't or have regretted switching from an iPhone because they have trouble talking to their friend who only use iMessage. I think Apple is only increasing their walled garden into more areas by expanding into music streaming, TV, etc. You can still use their hardware and OS without fully buying into their walled garden though and maintain more freedom, as you seem to do! edit: I should mention that while I don't like their walled gardens in general, I don't mind them for other people except iMessage. iMessage makes me fairly angry because they're using & dividing people's social connections for profit.
- thephyber 7y ago
  iMessage is backwards compatible with SMS. Are you talking about the unwillingness of users to migrate their chats to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc? That’s not a walled garden - that’s the natural hesitance to leave any comfortable/familiar system that any social media / network effect site/app has. It’s more like a psychological moat. And even the app you want Apple users to migrate to has it.

WA 7y ago

> This is how they keep people in. But sometimes, it also keeps iOS users out of stuff. For example, in Germany, Android has a market share of 70%. Hence, iMessage is useless here, because the majority can’t be reached. Thus, WhatsApp has the biggest market share for messaging services. Now, it probably doesn’t matter for Apple, but it prevents the iMessage experience for most iPhone users in Germany, because it’s kinda useless here. I guess the same is true for most European countries.

FabHK 7y ago

> And once you're in, they make it as hard as possible to leave. Nonsense. On my Mac, I can export all my pictures from Photos as jpeg (or several other formats); contacts as .vcf; calendars as .ics; documents in several portable formats; my music is in iTunes as (unencumbered) mp3 or m4a, nicely organised by Artists and Albums; emails are in traditional .mbox files, unless I'm mistaken, but at any rate mailboxes can be exported; even Messages are available in some directory in the Library folder, though in an ugly XML-y format; etc. I don't know how easy other OSes make it to "leave", but you can't really argue that Apple is trying to make it hard (except by making the garden more beautiful, safe, and well organised than the others).