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> There's nothing surprising here, it's been Apple's style for the entire time I've been working in tech - 15 years or so - to create formats that they control

> There's nothing surprising here, it's been Apple's style for the entire time I've been working in tech - 15 years or so - to create formats that they control and preferably which only work on Apple devices. Assuming no intentional bias, it's personally hard for me to imagine how anyone could be in the industry for that long and not understand Apple's contributions to formats and other standards we take for granted. * Apple was the first major adopter and popularizer of now-de-facto standards like 3.5" floppy drives, USB, Wi-Fi, and DisplayPort, and additionally created (and gave away) DisplayPort Mini * Apple co-developed and popularized IEEE 1394 (FireWire), USB-C, Thunderbolt, and USB 4 * Apple created the ISO base media file format (ISOBMFF), which is the basis for MPEG-4 and many other time-based and image file formats * Apple popularized today's most popular compressed media formats, and will do the same for AV1 (with hardware decode in M3 and newer Macs today, and Apple TV soon) * Apple dropped a proprietary OS for the BSD-based OS used across their product line, from wearables, to mobile, to HMDs, to laptops/PCs * Apple used its open source WebKit to advance modern web standards, and are one of the few defenders against Google's near-total hegemony of web technologies * Apple's contributions to and investments in open-source technologies like Clang/LLVM and Swift have helped all developers directly and indirectly Using an as-yet-undocumented projection format to argue the opposite isn't super-persuasive, since Apple eats their own dog food (sometimes for years) before promoting it to an open, generalized industry standard (e.g. "QuickTime Movie" container format).

spookie 2y ago
To be fair they forked KHTML to make WebKit. Even if they wanted, they needed to remain open source. Same with Blink (Chromium), a lot of shared history there. But that would take way too long to explain.
quitit 2y ago
The thing about building an uncharitable narrative is that one can spin anything to be a nefarious deed. Literally anything, and we're seeing that here. A common aspect to this is distilling something as large as a company of many thousands of people with different views, projects and outputs into a singularly thinking entity that has evil intentions (along with an unhealthy dose of double-standards.) It takes someone with a good deal of integrity to display a nuanced view of something, weighing both the good and bad. Such observations aren't typically wanted in forums. Forums favour a "hive mind" mentality, because that's easy and doesn't require thought. Simply put <x> into the good or bad box. If we play the same game of distilling HN into a singular entity, then we already know what it thinks about Apple. As for Apple's actions I don't think it deserves the polarised views that we see on HN. I've been around long enough to see how companies come in and out of favour and often the meddling efforts by competitors to sway such public opinion. Some people are just really distracted by team fandom and cheerleading, instead of looking at the more important question "what does <x> do for or against me personally?"

spookie 2y ago

To be fair they forked KHTML to make WebKit. Even if they wanted, they needed to remain open source. Same with Blink (Chromium), a lot of shared history there. But that would take way too long to explain.

quitit 2y ago

The thing about building an uncharitable narrative is that one can spin anything to be a nefarious deed. Literally anything, and we're seeing that here. A common aspect to this is distilling something as large as a company of many thousands of people with different views, projects and outputs into a singularly thinking entity that has evil intentions (along with an unhealthy dose of double-standards.) It takes someone with a good deal of integrity to display a nuanced view of something, weighing both the good and bad. Such observations aren't typically wanted in forums. Forums favour a "hive mind" mentality, because that's easy and doesn't require thought. Simply put <x> into the good or bad box. If we play the same game of distilling HN into a singular entity, then we already know what it thinks about Apple. As for Apple's actions I don't think it deserves the polarised views that we see on HN. I've been around long enough to see how companies come in and out of favour and often the meddling efforts by competitors to sway such public opinion. Some people are just really distracted by team fandom and cheerleading, instead of looking at the more important question "what does <x> do for or against me personally?"