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And yet they fail so spectacularly at software. All their devices are limited by software, they can't swing their weight to develop software across all platform

by jwr 6y ago

And yet they fail so spectacularly at software. All their devices are limited by software, they can't swing their weight to develop software across all platforms, and they can't deal with software bugs in a scalable way. It's intriguing: they managed to scale their hardware in an impressive way, but software lags so far behind it's not even funny.

simonh 6y ago
I hesitated to reply because this is such a subjective issue. I look at the software on the Android and Windows side and just don't see much of interest to me. That's just me though. I think one area that Apple clearly does excel at though is software features that take advantage of specific hardware features. The fact they design the whole product in sync on both the hardware and software side, without either taking priority by itself is truly unique in the industry. So for example the way the M1 has instructions that accelerate particular operations common on the OSX/iOS software stack, or the computational photography software that works hand in glove with the neural engine hardware. The fact that apple develops their own developer tools, OS, application software, hardware and even CPUs now is unique in the industry and deep software skills are a really important differentiator. Maybe that side is slipping, but if so that will be a big problem for them down the line.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > I look at the software on the Android and Windows side and just don't see much of interest to me. That's just me though. At the end Windows Phone ended up being tightly integrated to the handsets Microsoft built. And it could run extremely well on hardware considered too light to ever run Android smoothly. But it dropped compatibility for a lot of Windows API surfaces. Windows has to maintain 25+ years of compatibility in certain areas (and still run software that only exists in compiled blobs, the source having been lost a long time ago by whatever enterprise software shop gone bankrupt). Android has no excuses however. It's OEM cutting corners and shipping patched kernels and "fixes" for their SoC that's plaguing the whole ecosystem.

by jwr 6y ago

simonh 6y ago

I hesitated to reply because this is such a subjective issue. I look at the software on the Android and Windows side and just don't see much of interest to me. That's just me though. I think one area that Apple clearly does excel at though is software features that take advantage of specific hardware features. The fact they design the whole product in sync on both the hardware and software side, without either taking priority by itself is truly unique in the industry. So for example the way the M1 has instructions that accelerate particular operations common on the OSX/iOS software stack, or the computational photography software that works hand in glove with the neural engine hardware. The fact that apple develops their own developer tools, OS, application software, hardware and even CPUs now is unique in the industry and deep software skills are a really important differentiator. Maybe that side is slipping, but if so that will be a big problem for them down the line.

908B64B197 6y ago
> I look at the software on the Android and Windows side and just don't see much of interest to me. That's just me though. At the end Windows Phone ended up being tightly integrated to the handsets Microsoft built. And it could run extremely well on hardware considered too light to ever run Android smoothly. But it dropped compatibility for a lot of Windows API surfaces. Windows has to maintain 25+ years of compatibility in certain areas (and still run software that only exists in compiled blobs, the source having been lost a long time ago by whatever enterprise software shop gone bankrupt). Android has no excuses however. It's OEM cutting corners and shipping patched kernels and "fixes" for their SoC that's plaguing the whole ecosystem.