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Apple has fought so hard to not be fragile by trying to control its own destiny. Dont depend on Microsoft for a browser or office, dont depend on Intel, or befo

Apple has fought so hard to not be fragile by trying to control its own destiny. Dont depend on Microsoft for a browser or office, dont depend on Intel, or before that Motorola for CPUs, and so on. The problem now is that they do everything so, now they have to be best at everything. If you want to run graphics or ML on the Mac, you have to use Apple hardware and APIS, you cant use nVidia hardware or a lot of industry standard APIs, so apple is at a disadvantage. If you want to develop on Mac, you have to use Xcode, you cant use any other tools. So Apple is at a disadvantage. Try connecting a variable refresh rate screen to a mac, or a VR headset, or Thundebolt device, or just a USB device in to one of their mobile devices. Try playing the latest hot AAA game everyone is talking about. Try installing a better voice assistant, store, browser or music player and you will find that Apple has made it hard or impossible. Everything that Apple itself isn't heavily invested in and market leader at sucks. Apple isn't leveraging the industry to its advantage. Apple is fine now, because its great at a few things and good enough at the rest of the things it needs to find a large market. How long can a company not fail at one of so many things?

jbverschoor 5y ago
Nvidia wants you to use CUDA instead of OpenCL..
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Thankfully, otherwise we would be stuck with compiling C on the fly without any kind of debugging experience other than GPU printfs.
adventured 5y ago
> Apple isn't leveraging the industry to its advantage. Apple is the industry. When you're the industry, you don't leverage it, everybody else attempts to leverage you. If for some reason they find themselves needing to eg switch back to CPUs supplied by someone else because they can no longer be great at that - given their scale, Intel or AMD (or whomever) will get on their knees and crawl begging for the business. None of what you're claiming are disadvantages are actual disadvantages unless they lose the iPhone's position. Unless that happens, they are the industry, they are the (increasingly) dominant ecosystem, the advantage is theirs to press. They're winning.
hardlianotion 5y ago
>If you want to develop on Mac, you have to use Xcode, you cant use any other tools. So Apple is at a disadvantage. I don't think that's true even if you consider IDEs that target the OS X frameworks only. Intellij has a product, Flutter targets iOS, I am not an OS X developer but those two jump out straight away. As for developing on Mac - it's a Unix & so a very capable development tool to target a range of platforms.
- toshk 5y ago
  Even though you can develop in Flutter, you still need xcode tools to build the apps, even if you can mostly skip the IDE.
  - rgbrenner 5y ago
    We should differentiate between Xcode the ide and Xcode tools, which are just git, clang, etc. The tools aren’t apple’s product. In Linux they would have been separate packages, but I don’t think the App Store has dependencies so how else are they going to get the required packages installed for their ide.
    - toshk 5y ago
      In this case the argument is focused on Apple forcing you into their ecosystem. Even though some packages might be generic, Xcode tools & codesign wont run and build on another OS then MacOS.
      - jen20 5y ago
        This is just like saying clang compiled for Linux won’t run on Windows [1]. [1]: Yes, I know about WSL. No, that doesn’t count.
        simiones 5y ago
        It's not: for any other OS, you can develop and compile on whichever other OS you want. Sure, MSVC won't run on Linux, but you can just compile it with clang or GCC on Linux and target Windows. There is no way to do that for iOS. And this is not because no one wants to write a backend to target iOS, it's because Apple won't allow it. If you want to run native code on iOS, it must be built and signed with XCode on a Mac.
mschuster91 5y ago
> The problem now is that they do everything so, now they have to be best at everything. They certainly have the cash on hand to actually do so. > If you want to develop on Mac, you have to use Xcode, you cant use any other tools. Unlike Windows you can do everything you want in free Xcode, only when you want to distribute your applications to others you need the 99$/year codesign certificate. Also, you don't even need full Xcode to compile programs, see e.g. Homebrew or MacPorts. > Try connecting a variable refresh rate screen to a mac, or a VR headset, or Thundebolt device, or just a USB device in to one of their mobile devices. Try playing the latest hot AAA game everyone is talking about. Most of what you mentioned is gaming, that has never been any market of Apple's - and besides, you can always dual-boot into Windows on the Intel side (and probably, soon enough into Linux on the M1 side). The other stuff (TB, USB on mobile) isn't well supported on the competitions' side too - all I can plug in into my Android phone and tablet is a mouse, keyboard and USB soundcard. > Try installing a better voice assistant, store, browser or music player and you will find that Apple has made it hard or impossible. Agreed on the voice assistant. The rest? I can download and install apps like I want, I am not depending on the App Store for anything. Browser? Chrome or Firefox (although I admit, I would be happier if Apple opened up and documented the ways that Safari can use to save battery life) can be downloaded and installed in minutes. Music player? Spotify and VLC have all you want, Amazon Music has an OS X app, and for the iOS side foobar2000 also exists. > Apple is fine now, because its great at a few things and good enough at the rest of the things it needs to find a large market. How long can a company not fail at one of so many things? Apple has enough cash on hand and cash flow from their current product line to wait out any "failure" - and they have the cash to buy so much advertising to make a literal pile of poo a bestseller anyway. They are so huge they literally cannot fail.
- alkonaut 5y ago
  > Unlike Windows you can do everything you want in free Xcode, only when you want to distribute your applications to others you need the 99$/year codesign certificate Are you comparing this to e.g Visual Studio now? Because most SDKs are free (.NET, even the C++ compiler can be used freely now afaik), as is vscode and there are of course several other free IDEs.
xvector 5y ago
Maybe it's just me, but the integration of my Apple ecosystem makes each device feel generations ahead of my Windows/Linux devices. The whole UX flow is just so damn smooth and convenient, from AirPlay to controlling my smart home. I can't imagine doing this with non-Apple devices. Apple does not even have to be the best at everything, or even particularly great at everything. What they need to do is be good at integrating everything, which they are.
- quelsolaar 5y ago
  You are right. If you do mainstream things and stay within their products it works great. The thing is that what is bleeding edge today is mainstream tomorrow. The worlds brain trust is moving away from Apple, and if Apple wants to keep up they cant rely on anyone else to help them.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    That's the Nintendo problem: how do you create a platform, when your first party solutions are incredibly well-executed? You need third parties (sort of) for scaling and long tail reasons, but it's always an uneasy relationship. If you don't expand enough, or the market doesn't generate a solution, your platform has a gap. If you expand too much, third party developers feel burned and desert your platform. Microsoft solved this by clearly staking its monetized territory ("the office suite"), and not really expanding in other directions (after those weird 90s attempts).
    - quelsolaar 5y ago
      Thats a great example. I love Nintendo. Mario and Zelda is always great, but historically Nintendo has not been a good platform for 3rd party developers (I read somewhere that 30% of wii owners didn't know you could take out wii sports and replace it with another game...). The bets that Nintendo has made that hasn't been smash hits, have been terrible failures, because no one else is there to pick up the slack. If you buy an X-Box, and the next Halo turns out to suck, you are still going to get your moneys worth of 3rd party titles.
Closi 5y ago
> Try connecting a VR headset to a Mac Well, try connecting a VR headset to anything that isn't a Windows PC. > Try playing the latest hot AAA game everyone is talking about. Again, this is mainly because of the dominance of Windows, and also to some extent DirectX. My personal take is that, when left to their own devices, developers and the industry will focus on the dominant platform first (Windows) and other vendors (Mac) will tend to be an afterthought. This was more true 10-20 years ago, when Mac wasn't as dominant. Because of that, in order for Apple to be successful, Apple couldn't rely on the industry to make their platform great, so they had to build their own 'exclusives'. Taken another way - in a parallel universe where Apple hadn't heavily invested in building a lot of this stuff themselves and relied on leveraging the industry, I'm not convinced that they would be alive today.
- MayeulC 5y ago
  > Well, try connecting a VR headset to anything that isn't a Windows PC. I have never tried a VR headset under anything that wasn't Linux, so our experiences differ on that point.
  - Closi 5y ago
    I'll concede the point that SteamVR on Linux is possible because of Valve after some research, but I still think it's an example of were Mac can't rely on outside industry because they will only support the dominant platforms or their own platforms (for instance, Valve supports linux primarily because of steamboxes). And Valve not supporting Mac again shows that relying on outside industry is not a viable strategy if you are not the dominant platform. Mac wasn't a big platform for them to sell VR titles as it's not used by many consumers to play VR titles, so they drop support. As another example, the Oculus client only supports Windows (outside of the Quest etc). There are mac's out there with powerful graphics cards and lots of RAM, however they are few and far between compared to Windows boxes, so Oculus chooses Windows as the dominant platform - If you are going to support one, it will be Windows, and if you are going to support Mac, well it's not going to be the first-class citizen. If Apple wants VR support they are going to have to go out there and graft for it. The overall point is just - Apple is successful because they decided they wouldn't wait for industry to support their platforms, and that they would just build it themselves if the industry didn't come. For instance, iWork is a direct result of Microsoft not bringing Office to Mac originally - The lack of good presentation software was going to be something that prevented professionals using Mac, so they went out and built Keynote themselves. On the flip side, Photoshop was a great app with best support on the Mac, so they never needed to build a good photo editor. The investments are all to fill in gaps where other people in the industry weren't bringing stuff to the party.
quickthrower2 5y ago
So they are not commoditizing their complement [1] in general (app store excepted!)? [1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement
Svoka 5y ago
Most of this are factually untrue. Do you use mac? Like you can play music with VLC and use VS Code or soma JetBrains IDE. Most developers who use mac never launched Xcode, because, you know, it is mainly to make iOS/macOS apps, and it by far the best tool I seen to make mobile apps. Do you often run ML jobs on workstations? Why? Yes, macs are not great for gaming, oh well.
- quelsolaar 5y ago
  > it is mainly to make iOS/macOS apps You are talking about developers using a Mac, who also develop for the Mac, as if its this tiny corner case that isn't important. Maybe thats true. But it should be really important for Apple that those developers target the Mac, thats how Apple gets 3rd party software.
- FractalHQ 5y ago
  My intel MacBook Pro runs AAA games just fine on it’s Windows Bootcamp partition.
ksec 5y ago
It may be worth watching D5 again, but here is the bit [1] >We wont so good at partnering with people, where as Bill and Microsoft were really good at it. They learn how to partner with people really well. And I think if Apple had a little more of that in its DNA, it would have become more successful. And I dont think Apple learned that until few decades later. - Steve Jobs. I think Steve Jobs was way way better with partnering in his return from NeXT. From iPhone with Cingular to patent signing with Qualcomm partnership. He really knew which battle to fight and which to work with. Tim Cook seems to have a very bean counting view on almost everything. To the point of not valuing much partnership. Which may be a good thing in Supply Chain but not so good with other businesses. [1] https://youtu.be/wvhW8cp15tk?t=5012 https://youtu.be/wvhW8cp15tk?t=5012
adamlett 5y ago
I'm sorry, but this is a really bad take. The premise of the argument, namely that Apple does (or attempts to do) everything, and does not leverage the industry to its advantage, does not stand up to scrutiny. Apple relies heavily on a modularised supply chain. It designs its own chips, true, but relies on TSMC and Samsung to fab them. It designs its own camera system, yes, but buys the crucial components (the sensors) from Sony. It designs its own screens, but uses Samsung technology and production capability to do so. It runs its cloud services on top of AWS and MS Azure. And famously of course, they outsource production of almost all their devices to Foxconn.
- saurik 5y ago
  Apple carefully selects all of this and makes it work; the "take", as it were, wasn't precisely that Apple does everything (and so I feel like you critically misunderstood it), but that Apple controls everything: any extension of the ecosystem doesn't just block on Apple... it nigh unto must be initiated by Apple.
- tucosan 5y ago
  This. Plus, their dependence on Chinas goodwill makes them vulnerable. China commands significant power over Apples manufacturing capabilities. Just take a look at Apples supplier list ^1 This is the opposite of antifragile. Tencent, Pinduoduo, Alibaba are prime examples of how much influence the Chinese government is willing to exercise over companies in case it finds them to not be aligned with it's own interests. The Chinese government effectively has access to the private iCloud keys for Apples Chinese users. From an investors perspective I'm a bit bearish on AAPL. ^1: https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Supplier-List.pdf https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Supp...
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  TSMC isn't going anywhere and semiconductor production for 3rd parties at Samsung isn't going anywhere either, they do tons of it. I know lots of people that work there. EVERYONE (almost) outsources semiconductor fabrication. Are they all fragile? Not many companies own their own plastic or metal factories either. I really am not sure what you're trying to get at here.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
It all works beautifully until it doesn't then it all becomes close to worthless. Take getting videos off an iPhone for instance, something I have to do many times a week in my job. If you have AirDrop it's effortless. But my MBP has a faulty bluetooth chip so bluetooth generally stops working after the machine has been running a few hours so I need to reboot every time I move videos from my phone to my machine. Are there alternatives? Nope not really, moving iPhone videos to a PC, Which most video editing workstations are now because Apple neglected or fumbled the high end for close to a decade. You can't AirDrop so what do you do? - WhatsApp? Nope has a 60 meg limit - Slack? Nope, for some reason trying to send video files 90% of the time stalls or just takes close to 20 minutes. I think they have some built in throttling to prevent my using their service as a AirDrop-drop in because airdropping then sending the same video from desktop is fast - Email? Nope, files are too big Only real solutions are AirDropping to a Mac then sending on slack or over network or trying to figure out how to do it over the network via the Files app which is also slow and weird. All that beautiful interoperability goes from being a benefit to actually making the product look bad the second it can't just interoperate with things you need to get your work done. End of the day they can't do everything and are unwilling to create machines that are competitive in these niche areas but once you're in this niche the whole Apple philosophy starts to look like a bad one. All it would take would be for them to release an AirDrop for Windows app which would make their platform look better, I'm still your customer even when I have to send a file to a Windows machine Apple... not providing that feature isn't making Windows look bad because the reason I'm there in the first place is because it outperforms even a $20K Mac Pro.
- javagram 5y ago
  Couldn’t you just use Dropbox or iCloud Photo Library? Yes you would have to pay. I think you can transfer photos and videos for free using a usb cable as well. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/import-photos-and-videos-from-an-iphone-to-pc-2e4e4db4-4c3d-041c-b88f-3ee4358dd95e https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/import-photos-an...
- snazz 5y ago
  These came to mind right away and work for both macOS and Windows: - Upload to a cloud storage service of your choice and download on the other end—Google Drive is very fast - Use iCloud Photos (there’s client software for Windows too) - Plug a cable in and drag and drop like it’s any other digital camera - Create a Windows SMB network share (or Samba on other platforms), connect to it from Files, and use the share menu from Photos to put it in the network share
nathanvanfleet 5y ago
Your argument is basically what everyone said in the introduction of the article and in fact what was generally said even before the iPhone came out. It's not even a new situation for Apple to be in. 20 years ago it was companies willfully not wanting to support apple for their game or software or whatever. I think companies have come a long way on that.
boublepop 5y ago
Tech has this perversive notion that you have to be either the objectively best possible option or you’ll die. And this opinion seems to be held by the same people who have been proclaiming that Apple are going out of business because they can’t compete with Linux or Lenovo on pricing and that their mobile phone would fail for lack of physical keyboard or that they where a joke as a mobile company because “they only sell one model of phones”. You don’t have to be the best, you just have to be your customer bases favorite choice. And Apple is great at delivering to and making money off their customer segment. No need to have a monopoly, no need to “slay the competition” they are just doing their thing making tons of money on a smaller segment of the total market. Imagine if people assumed the same about car brands, that there was only room in the world for a single car company. Sounds absolutely absurd doesn’t it? Perhaps we can entertain the thought that Apple might not be going away even though they’ve been going out of business since 1976 according to public opinion.
david38 5y ago
What are you talking about? The literally outsource all their manufacturing. They didn’t even write their own OS or browser or compiler. Microsoft at least does that.

jbverschoor 5y ago

Nvidia wants you to use CUDA instead of OpenCL..

pjmlp 5y ago
Thankfully, otherwise we would be stuck with compiling C on the fly without any kind of debugging experience other than GPU printfs.

adventured 5y ago

> Apple isn't leveraging the industry to its advantage. Apple is the industry. When you're the industry, you don't leverage it, everybody else attempts to leverage you. If for some reason they find themselves needing to eg switch back to CPUs supplied by someone else because they can no longer be great at that - given their scale, Intel or AMD (or whomever) will get on their knees and crawl begging for the business. None of what you're claiming are disadvantages are actual disadvantages unless they lose the iPhone's position. Unless that happens, they are the industry, they are the (increasingly) dominant ecosystem, the advantage is theirs to press. They're winning.

hardlianotion 5y ago

>If you want to develop on Mac, you have to use Xcode, you cant use any other tools. So Apple is at a disadvantage. I don't think that's true even if you consider IDEs that target the OS X frameworks only. Intellij has a product, Flutter targets iOS, I am not an OS X developer but those two jump out straight away. As for developing on Mac - it's a Unix & so a very capable development tool to target a range of platforms.

toshk 5y ago
Even though you can develop in Flutter, you still need xcode tools to build the apps, even if you can mostly skip the IDE.
- rgbrenner 5y ago
  We should differentiate between Xcode the ide and Xcode tools, which are just git, clang, etc. The tools aren’t apple’s product. In Linux they would have been separate packages, but I don’t think the App Store has dependencies so how else are they going to get the required packages installed for their ide.
  - toshk 5y ago
    In this case the argument is focused on Apple forcing you into their ecosystem. Even though some packages might be generic, Xcode tools & codesign wont run and build on another OS then MacOS.
    - jen20 5y ago
      This is just like saying clang compiled for Linux won’t run on Windows [1]. [1]: Yes, I know about WSL. No, that doesn’t count.
      - simiones 5y ago
        It's not: for any other OS, you can develop and compile on whichever other OS you want. Sure, MSVC won't run on Linux, but you can just compile it with clang or GCC on Linux and target Windows. There is no way to do that for iOS. And this is not because no one wants to write a backend to target iOS, it's because Apple won't allow it. If you want to run native code on iOS, it must be built and signed with XCode on a Mac.

mschuster91 5y ago

> The problem now is that they do everything so, now they have to be best at everything. They certainly have the cash on hand to actually do so. > If you want to develop on Mac, you have to use Xcode, you cant use any other tools. Unlike Windows you can do everything you want in free Xcode, only when you want to distribute your applications to others you need the 99$/year codesign certificate. Also, you don't even need full Xcode to compile programs, see e.g. Homebrew or MacPorts. > Try connecting a variable refresh rate screen to a mac, or a VR headset, or Thundebolt device, or just a USB device in to one of their mobile devices. Try playing the latest hot AAA game everyone is talking about. Most of what you mentioned is gaming, that has never been any market of Apple's - and besides, you can always dual-boot into Windows on the Intel side (and probably, soon enough into Linux on the M1 side). The other stuff (TB, USB on mobile) isn't well supported on the competitions' side too - all I can plug in into my Android phone and tablet is a mouse, keyboard and USB soundcard. > Try installing a better voice assistant, store, browser or music player and you will find that Apple has made it hard or impossible. Agreed on the voice assistant. The rest? I can download and install apps like I want, I am not depending on the App Store for anything. Browser? Chrome or Firefox (although I admit, I would be happier if Apple opened up and documented the ways that Safari can use to save battery life) can be downloaded and installed in minutes. Music player? Spotify and VLC have all you want, Amazon Music has an OS X app, and for the iOS side foobar2000 also exists. > Apple is fine now, because its great at a few things and good enough at the rest of the things it needs to find a large market. How long can a company not fail at one of so many things? Apple has enough cash on hand and cash flow from their current product line to wait out any "failure" - and they have the cash to buy so much advertising to make a literal pile of poo a bestseller anyway. They are so huge they literally cannot fail.

alkonaut 5y ago
> Unlike Windows you can do everything you want in free Xcode, only when you want to distribute your applications to others you need the 99$/year codesign certificate Are you comparing this to e.g Visual Studio now? Because most SDKs are free (.NET, even the C++ compiler can be used freely now afaik), as is vscode and there are of course several other free IDEs.

xvector 5y ago

Maybe it's just me, but the integration of my Apple ecosystem makes each device feel generations ahead of my Windows/Linux devices. The whole UX flow is just so damn smooth and convenient, from AirPlay to controlling my smart home. I can't imagine doing this with non-Apple devices. Apple does not even have to be the best at everything, or even particularly great at everything. What they need to do is be good at integrating everything, which they are.

quelsolaar 5y ago
You are right. If you do mainstream things and stay within their products it works great. The thing is that what is bleeding edge today is mainstream tomorrow. The worlds brain trust is moving away from Apple, and if Apple wants to keep up they cant rely on anyone else to help them.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  That's the Nintendo problem: how do you create a platform, when your first party solutions are incredibly well-executed? You need third parties (sort of) for scaling and long tail reasons, but it's always an uneasy relationship. If you don't expand enough, or the market doesn't generate a solution, your platform has a gap. If you expand too much, third party developers feel burned and desert your platform. Microsoft solved this by clearly staking its monetized territory ("the office suite"), and not really expanding in other directions (after those weird 90s attempts).
  - quelsolaar 5y ago
    Thats a great example. I love Nintendo. Mario and Zelda is always great, but historically Nintendo has not been a good platform for 3rd party developers (I read somewhere that 30% of wii owners didn't know you could take out wii sports and replace it with another game...). The bets that Nintendo has made that hasn't been smash hits, have been terrible failures, because no one else is there to pick up the slack. If you buy an X-Box, and the next Halo turns out to suck, you are still going to get your moneys worth of 3rd party titles.

Closi 5y ago

> Try connecting a VR headset to a Mac Well, try connecting a VR headset to anything that isn't a Windows PC. > Try playing the latest hot AAA game everyone is talking about. Again, this is mainly because of the dominance of Windows, and also to some extent DirectX. My personal take is that, when left to their own devices, developers and the industry will focus on the dominant platform first (Windows) and other vendors (Mac) will tend to be an afterthought. This was more true 10-20 years ago, when Mac wasn't as dominant. Because of that, in order for Apple to be successful, Apple couldn't rely on the industry to make their platform great, so they had to build their own 'exclusives'. Taken another way - in a parallel universe where Apple hadn't heavily invested in building a lot of this stuff themselves and relied on leveraging the industry, I'm not convinced that they would be alive today.

MayeulC 5y ago
> Well, try connecting a VR headset to anything that isn't a Windows PC. I have never tried a VR headset under anything that wasn't Linux, so our experiences differ on that point.
- Closi 5y ago
  I'll concede the point that SteamVR on Linux is possible because of Valve after some research, but I still think it's an example of were Mac can't rely on outside industry because they will only support the dominant platforms or their own platforms (for instance, Valve supports linux primarily because of steamboxes). And Valve not supporting Mac again shows that relying on outside industry is not a viable strategy if you are not the dominant platform. Mac wasn't a big platform for them to sell VR titles as it's not used by many consumers to play VR titles, so they drop support. As another example, the Oculus client only supports Windows (outside of the Quest etc). There are mac's out there with powerful graphics cards and lots of RAM, however they are few and far between compared to Windows boxes, so Oculus chooses Windows as the dominant platform - If you are going to support one, it will be Windows, and if you are going to support Mac, well it's not going to be the first-class citizen. If Apple wants VR support they are going to have to go out there and graft for it. The overall point is just - Apple is successful because they decided they wouldn't wait for industry to support their platforms, and that they would just build it themselves if the industry didn't come. For instance, iWork is a direct result of Microsoft not bringing Office to Mac originally - The lack of good presentation software was going to be something that prevented professionals using Mac, so they went out and built Keynote themselves. On the flip side, Photoshop was a great app with best support on the Mac, so they never needed to build a good photo editor. The investments are all to fill in gaps where other people in the industry weren't bringing stuff to the party.

quickthrower2 5y ago

So they are not commoditizing their complement [1] in general (app store excepted!)? [1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement

Svoka 5y ago

Most of this are factually untrue. Do you use mac? Like you can play music with VLC and use VS Code or soma JetBrains IDE. Most developers who use mac never launched Xcode, because, you know, it is mainly to make iOS/macOS apps, and it by far the best tool I seen to make mobile apps. Do you often run ML jobs on workstations? Why? Yes, macs are not great for gaming, oh well.

quelsolaar 5y ago
> it is mainly to make iOS/macOS apps You are talking about developers using a Mac, who also develop for the Mac, as if its this tiny corner case that isn't important. Maybe thats true. But it should be really important for Apple that those developers target the Mac, thats how Apple gets 3rd party software.
FractalHQ 5y ago
My intel MacBook Pro runs AAA games just fine on it’s Windows Bootcamp partition.

ksec 5y ago

It may be worth watching D5 again, but here is the bit [1] >We wont so good at partnering with people, where as Bill and Microsoft were really good at it. They learn how to partner with people really well. And I think if Apple had a little more of that in its DNA, it would have become more successful. And I dont think Apple learned that until few decades later. - Steve Jobs. I think Steve Jobs was way way better with partnering in his return from NeXT. From iPhone with Cingular to patent signing with Qualcomm partnership. He really knew which battle to fight and which to work with. Tim Cook seems to have a very bean counting view on almost everything. To the point of not valuing much partnership. Which may be a good thing in Supply Chain but not so good with other businesses. [1] https://youtu.be/wvhW8cp15tk?t=5012 https://youtu.be/wvhW8cp15tk?t=5012

adamlett 5y ago

I'm sorry, but this is a really bad take. The premise of the argument, namely that Apple does (or attempts to do) everything, and does not leverage the industry to its advantage, does not stand up to scrutiny. Apple relies heavily on a modularised supply chain. It designs its own chips, true, but relies on TSMC and Samsung to fab them. It designs its own camera system, yes, but buys the crucial components (the sensors) from Sony. It designs its own screens, but uses Samsung technology and production capability to do so. It runs its cloud services on top of AWS and MS Azure. And famously of course, they outsource production of almost all their devices to Foxconn.

saurik 5y ago
Apple carefully selects all of this and makes it work; the "take", as it were, wasn't precisely that Apple does everything (and so I feel like you critically misunderstood it), but that Apple controls everything: any extension of the ecosystem doesn't just block on Apple... it nigh unto must be initiated by Apple.
tucosan 5y ago
This. Plus, their dependence on Chinas goodwill makes them vulnerable. China commands significant power over Apples manufacturing capabilities. Just take a look at Apples supplier list ^1 This is the opposite of antifragile. Tencent, Pinduoduo, Alibaba are prime examples of how much influence the Chinese government is willing to exercise over companies in case it finds them to not be aligned with it's own interests. The Chinese government effectively has access to the private iCloud keys for Apples Chinese users. From an investors perspective I'm a bit bearish on AAPL. ^1: https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Supplier-List.pdf https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Supp...
stjohnswarts 5y ago
TSMC isn't going anywhere and semiconductor production for 3rd parties at Samsung isn't going anywhere either, they do tons of it. I know lots of people that work there. EVERYONE (almost) outsources semiconductor fabrication. Are they all fragile? Not many companies own their own plastic or metal factories either. I really am not sure what you're trying to get at here.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

It all works beautifully until it doesn't then it all becomes close to worthless. Take getting videos off an iPhone for instance, something I have to do many times a week in my job. If you have AirDrop it's effortless. But my MBP has a faulty bluetooth chip so bluetooth generally stops working after the machine has been running a few hours so I need to reboot every time I move videos from my phone to my machine. Are there alternatives? Nope not really, moving iPhone videos to a PC, Which most video editing workstations are now because Apple neglected or fumbled the high end for close to a decade. You can't AirDrop so what do you do? - WhatsApp? Nope has a 60 meg limit - Slack? Nope, for some reason trying to send video files 90% of the time stalls or just takes close to 20 minutes. I think they have some built in throttling to prevent my using their service as a AirDrop-drop in because airdropping then sending the same video from desktop is fast - Email? Nope, files are too big Only real solutions are AirDropping to a Mac then sending on slack or over network or trying to figure out how to do it over the network via the Files app which is also slow and weird. All that beautiful interoperability goes from being a benefit to actually making the product look bad the second it can't just interoperate with things you need to get your work done. End of the day they can't do everything and are unwilling to create machines that are competitive in these niche areas but once you're in this niche the whole Apple philosophy starts to look like a bad one. All it would take would be for them to release an AirDrop for Windows app which would make their platform look better, I'm still your customer even when I have to send a file to a Windows machine Apple... not providing that feature isn't making Windows look bad because the reason I'm there in the first place is because it outperforms even a $20K Mac Pro.

javagram 5y ago
Couldn’t you just use Dropbox or iCloud Photo Library? Yes you would have to pay. I think you can transfer photos and videos for free using a usb cable as well. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/import-photos-and-videos-from-an-iphone-to-pc-2e4e4db4-4c3d-041c-b88f-3ee4358dd95e https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/import-photos-an...
snazz 5y ago
These came to mind right away and work for both macOS and Windows: - Upload to a cloud storage service of your choice and download on the other end—Google Drive is very fast - Use iCloud Photos (there’s client software for Windows too) - Plug a cable in and drag and drop like it’s any other digital camera - Create a Windows SMB network share (or Samba on other platforms), connect to it from Files, and use the share menu from Photos to put it in the network share

nathanvanfleet 5y ago

Your argument is basically what everyone said in the introduction of the article and in fact what was generally said even before the iPhone came out. It's not even a new situation for Apple to be in. 20 years ago it was companies willfully not wanting to support apple for their game or software or whatever. I think companies have come a long way on that.

boublepop 5y ago

Tech has this perversive notion that you have to be either the objectively best possible option or you’ll die. And this opinion seems to be held by the same people who have been proclaiming that Apple are going out of business because they can’t compete with Linux or Lenovo on pricing and that their mobile phone would fail for lack of physical keyboard or that they where a joke as a mobile company because “they only sell one model of phones”. You don’t have to be the best, you just have to be your customer bases favorite choice. And Apple is great at delivering to and making money off their customer segment. No need to have a monopoly, no need to “slay the competition” they are just doing their thing making tons of money on a smaller segment of the total market. Imagine if people assumed the same about car brands, that there was only room in the world for a single car company. Sounds absolutely absurd doesn’t it? Perhaps we can entertain the thought that Apple might not be going away even though they’ve been going out of business since 1976 according to public opinion.

david38 5y ago

What are you talking about? The literally outsource all their manufacturing. They didn’t even write their own OS or browser or compiler. Microsoft at least does that.