4 ms·

That was always the strategy, the whole apple ecosystem was always obtuse and closed off from compatibility with the rest of the computing world just to maximiz

That was always the strategy, the whole apple ecosystem was always obtuse and closed off from compatibility with the rest of the computing world just to maximize rents. If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices.

m0llusk 1mo ago
That isn't true. The original Apple Store proposal by Bertrand Serlet is available and it is pretty clearly driven by the need to polish the user experience of installing and managing applications. Being able to charge a significant premium was just a part of the picture and originally considered to be required to pay for the associated infrastructure of reviews and such.
- throwawayffffas 1mo ago
  I am not even talking about the apple store, i am talking about printers, cables and file systems in the 90s. Since the beginning of the company everything they made did not work with stuff from other manufacturers on purpose.
  - naravara 1mo ago
    I don’t think there’s inherent virtue in zagging just because everyone else zags if zigging is better. There’s trade-offs, but in most cases the Apple call has tended to err on the side of ease of use and ease of access to the mass market at the expense of flexibility and versatility for tinkerers. It’s good for a market to have companies willing to make different sets of trade-offs to please different segments of the market rather than all herding around the preferences of a cluster of nerds. The real problem is that the rest of the industry has “Apple envy” and just copies everything they think they can get away with instead of making their own sets of trade-offs.
    - throwawayffffas 1mo ago
      I think you have this backwards. For the majority of apples history their products were incredibly niche mostly used by designers because certain admittedly superior software for these professionals only shipped with MacOS. The ipod and iphone were the first true mass market products. And even to this day PCs and Android(outside the US) dominate the market share by user count. PC and android are not for tinkerers and nerd, they are the default, apple positions itself as the premium.
      - pjmlp 1mo ago
        They have become the default, before PC clones, everyone had their own hardware standards.
  - philistine 1mo ago
    Apple chose SCSI as its connector of choice in the 90s. It was a standard, it was faster and better than Serial, and PC manufacturers never bothered to offer it. Apple chose an internal connector that worked with their CPUs. They couldn't even offer the connection styles on PCs; they worked differently. Apple built its own mouse and keyboard cabling because they wanted to allow their users to connect their mouse to their keyboard, and to start the computer from the keyboard. No common cable offered them that. Apple was literally first to the common rigid diskette. That they came up with file systems of their own is a measure of their early investments, and their need to maintain compatibility. They couldn't move to FAT, they had already made their own stack. From my side of the fence, PC makers were laggards trying to save pennies who couldn't be bothered to invest in better technologies. Apple's success in cornering the majority of profits in the computer sector is a measure of their continued failures.
  - ceejayoz 1mo ago
    > Since the beginning of the company everything they made did not work with stuff from other manufacturers on purpose. But that's often the right route. Sometimes what the others are doing is not enough to deliver a good result. Micro-USB sucked, so they made Lightning. Flash ran slow, so they helped kill it.
pjmlp 1mo ago
The openness of PC clones was a mistake IBM failed to regain control from, everyone was like Apple.
- Pet_Ant 1mo ago
  This is true and I don’t know why it’s downvoted. IBM was notoriously obsessed with lock-in, they just bungled it with the IBM PC because they needed to move fast because they didn’t want it to slip away from them. So, they used off the shelf components that anyone else could buy. The lenient contract with Microsoft and the unexpected to them ruling on reverse engineering the BIOS sealed their fate. But no company wants to compete in a commodity, they all want to be monopolies. All the Unix vendors tried to be common enough to be a selling point but idiosyncratic enough to lock in their clients. Apple isn’t nefarious… they are the default. Now, if we want to support their ambitions with our wallets is another question
  - xattt 1mo ago
    How should have IBM acted if they wanted to keep their lock-in?
    - pjmlp 1mo ago
      They did try to keep the lock in, with the release of PS/2 and MCA architecture, which many think it relates only to keyboard and mice ports. However it was too late to regain control and PS/2 alongside MCA was largely ignored. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2
  - ahartmetz 1mo ago
    Nefarious and default aren't incompatible properties. If companies (especially large, public ones) were benevolent by default, a lot of laws and institutions would not be needed anymore.
  - throwawayffffas 1mo ago
    > Apple isn’t nefarious… they are the default That's not true, well the second part is not true. it's not the default, it's a choice they made, there is no default. They could have opted for maximum interoperability and openess. Sk Hynix does not work with only sk hynix motherboards(I don't know if they even make motherboards), Intel cpus do not only work with Intel NICs. AMD GPUs do not only work with AMD CPUs. Nvidia GPUs do not require an imaginary Nvidia OS. Hell windows is happy to work with whatever hardware you throw at it, but Macs nowadays have soldered ram and storage. And you can't install MacOS on any hardware you might like. Getting files in or out of an iPhone without a Mac was a nightmare just a few years ago and I am confident it still is.
fassssst 1mo ago
> If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices. Basically what Apple News is, they don’t have a web or Android client.
- drfloyd51 1mo ago
  News is hardly the Internet. And everything in News is on the Internet. There are news+ articles available to Apple subscribers. This is hardly “the internet”. This is analogous to premium memberships on websites. Nor is it required that an app developer make an app for every platform. Microsoft doesn’t make office for Linux.
- lucky_cloud 1mo ago
  Is there anything on Apple News that doesn't also exist as a web page?
jfb 1mo ago
I don't know that it was always the strategy; there's a difference between openness and rent seeking.
alsetmusic 1mo ago
> That was always the strategy Wrong. Steve would have charged you for everything he thought they deserved, but he'd never allow ads in Apple Maps. ["We like our own stickers better."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COAOknlfMgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COAOknlfMgI)
- ethbr1 1mo ago
  Apple of Jobs' era also realized their price premium came from a combination of 'their devices worked for most users' and 'cool' -- Cook inherited an Apple that was already a behemoth, and completely ignored (or never knew) how they became one. Handing the CEO reigns over to a supply chain or financial person is almost always a bad move. They're the critical engine to every physical business, but don't confuse an engine with a steering wheel. (And yes, I know Apple may be a more valuable company today from Cook's tenure, but I don't think anyone would say it's as cool of one)
  - y1n0 1mo ago
    > Cook inherited an Apple that was already a behemoth, and completely ignored (or never knew) how they became one. Cook joined apple in 1998. They were not a behemoth. His first year, their net income was 300 million for the entire year.
    - ethbr1 1mo ago
      He was chosen as CEO in 2011. There's a bit of power difference between SVP for worldwide operations (read: component supply and international manufacturing) and CEO.
KellyCriterion 1mo ago
Mmmh ... whats the difference to what MS is doing then? :-D
mns 1mo ago
That's not really true. He was a control freak and thought he and Apple knew better what people need. They always wanted to control the whole experience and most of the things were initially closed off because he never wanted anyone to modify the Apple experience and his products. That's why initially he didn't even want to let people install other apps on the iPhone and was against the AppStore.
elorant 1mo ago
If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices. Well Microsoft tried to do the exact same thing with that dreadful Microsoft Network in the early days of the web. So it's not inherit to Apple only, all large corporations would like their users locked up in their ecosystems.
- presto8 1mo ago
  Companies with ecosystems would like their users locked into their ecosystems. There are many large companies that still do business with customers even if their customers do business with their competitors.
coldtea 1mo ago
As a commercial OS, OS X/macOS was quite compatible: FOSS Darwin core, FreeBSD userland, POSIX compiant certified UNIX, built-in Python and Java support. Apple/OS X also contributed some nice things, by way of funding, hiring main devs, and/or heavily supporting certain FOSS projects: LLVM and Clang, CUPS printer drivers, WebDAV, WebKit, libc++, and Swift. Also designed some widely used interface standards: FireWire (started by Apple), Thunderbolt (co-designed with Intel driven by Apple) which eventually turned into USB 4, Mini DisplayPort (later incorporated to the official DisplayPort standard, and even the design re-used for Thunderbolt). There was nothing to "maximize rents" as there were no rents for the most part of OS X's journey until later Cook. They put out good products and people bought them, getting them out of near certain bankruptcy.
reaperducer 1mo ago
If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleLink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleLink

m0llusk 1mo ago

That isn't true. The original Apple Store proposal by Bertrand Serlet is available and it is pretty clearly driven by the need to polish the user experience of installing and managing applications. Being able to charge a significant premium was just a part of the picture and originally considered to be required to pay for the associated infrastructure of reviews and such.

throwawayffffas 1mo ago
I am not even talking about the apple store, i am talking about printers, cables and file systems in the 90s. Since the beginning of the company everything they made did not work with stuff from other manufacturers on purpose.
- naravara 1mo ago
  I don’t think there’s inherent virtue in zagging just because everyone else zags if zigging is better. There’s trade-offs, but in most cases the Apple call has tended to err on the side of ease of use and ease of access to the mass market at the expense of flexibility and versatility for tinkerers. It’s good for a market to have companies willing to make different sets of trade-offs to please different segments of the market rather than all herding around the preferences of a cluster of nerds. The real problem is that the rest of the industry has “Apple envy” and just copies everything they think they can get away with instead of making their own sets of trade-offs.
  - throwawayffffas 1mo ago
    I think you have this backwards. For the majority of apples history their products were incredibly niche mostly used by designers because certain admittedly superior software for these professionals only shipped with MacOS. The ipod and iphone were the first true mass market products. And even to this day PCs and Android(outside the US) dominate the market share by user count. PC and android are not for tinkerers and nerd, they are the default, apple positions itself as the premium.
    - pjmlp 1mo ago
      They have become the default, before PC clones, everyone had their own hardware standards.
- philistine 1mo ago
  Apple chose SCSI as its connector of choice in the 90s. It was a standard, it was faster and better than Serial, and PC manufacturers never bothered to offer it. Apple chose an internal connector that worked with their CPUs. They couldn't even offer the connection styles on PCs; they worked differently. Apple built its own mouse and keyboard cabling because they wanted to allow their users to connect their mouse to their keyboard, and to start the computer from the keyboard. No common cable offered them that. Apple was literally first to the common rigid diskette. That they came up with file systems of their own is a measure of their early investments, and their need to maintain compatibility. They couldn't move to FAT, they had already made their own stack. From my side of the fence, PC makers were laggards trying to save pennies who couldn't be bothered to invest in better technologies. Apple's success in cornering the majority of profits in the computer sector is a measure of their continued failures.
- ceejayoz 1mo ago
  > Since the beginning of the company everything they made did not work with stuff from other manufacturers on purpose. But that's often the right route. Sometimes what the others are doing is not enough to deliver a good result. Micro-USB sucked, so they made Lightning. Flash ran slow, so they helped kill it.

pjmlp 1mo ago

The openness of PC clones was a mistake IBM failed to regain control from, everyone was like Apple.

Pet_Ant 1mo ago
This is true and I don’t know why it’s downvoted. IBM was notoriously obsessed with lock-in, they just bungled it with the IBM PC because they needed to move fast because they didn’t want it to slip away from them. So, they used off the shelf components that anyone else could buy. The lenient contract with Microsoft and the unexpected to them ruling on reverse engineering the BIOS sealed their fate. But no company wants to compete in a commodity, they all want to be monopolies. All the Unix vendors tried to be common enough to be a selling point but idiosyncratic enough to lock in their clients. Apple isn’t nefarious… they are the default. Now, if we want to support their ambitions with our wallets is another question
- xattt 1mo ago
  How should have IBM acted if they wanted to keep their lock-in?
  - pjmlp 1mo ago
    They did try to keep the lock in, with the release of PS/2 and MCA architecture, which many think it relates only to keyboard and mice ports. However it was too late to regain control and PS/2 alongside MCA was largely ignored. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2
- ahartmetz 1mo ago
  Nefarious and default aren't incompatible properties. If companies (especially large, public ones) were benevolent by default, a lot of laws and institutions would not be needed anymore.
- throwawayffffas 1mo ago
  > Apple isn’t nefarious… they are the default That's not true, well the second part is not true. it's not the default, it's a choice they made, there is no default. They could have opted for maximum interoperability and openess. Sk Hynix does not work with only sk hynix motherboards(I don't know if they even make motherboards), Intel cpus do not only work with Intel NICs. AMD GPUs do not only work with AMD CPUs. Nvidia GPUs do not require an imaginary Nvidia OS. Hell windows is happy to work with whatever hardware you throw at it, but Macs nowadays have soldered ram and storage. And you can't install MacOS on any hardware you might like. Getting files in or out of an iPhone without a Mac was a nightmare just a few years ago and I am confident it still is.

fassssst 1mo ago

> If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices. Basically what Apple News is, they don’t have a web or Android client.

drfloyd51 1mo ago
News is hardly the Internet. And everything in News is on the Internet. There are news+ articles available to Apple subscribers. This is hardly “the internet”. This is analogous to premium memberships on websites. Nor is it required that an app developer make an app for every platform. Microsoft doesn’t make office for Linux.
lucky_cloud 1mo ago
Is there anything on Apple News that doesn't also exist as a web page?

jfb 1mo ago

I don't know that it was always the strategy; there's a difference between openness and rent seeking.

alsetmusic 1mo ago

> That was always the strategy Wrong. Steve would have charged you for everything he thought they deserved, but he'd never allow ads in Apple Maps. ["We like our own stickers better."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COAOknlfMgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COAOknlfMgI)

ethbr1 1mo ago
Apple of Jobs' era also realized their price premium came from a combination of 'their devices worked for most users' and 'cool' -- Cook inherited an Apple that was already a behemoth, and completely ignored (or never knew) how they became one. Handing the CEO reigns over to a supply chain or financial person is almost always a bad move. They're the critical engine to every physical business, but don't confuse an engine with a steering wheel. (And yes, I know Apple may be a more valuable company today from Cook's tenure, but I don't think anyone would say it's as cool of one)
- y1n0 1mo ago
  > Cook inherited an Apple that was already a behemoth, and completely ignored (or never knew) how they became one. Cook joined apple in 1998. They were not a behemoth. His first year, their net income was 300 million for the entire year.
  - ethbr1 1mo ago
    He was chosen as CEO in 2011. There's a bit of power difference between SVP for worldwide operations (read: component supply and international manufacturing) and CEO.

KellyCriterion 1mo ago

Mmmh ... whats the difference to what MS is doing then? :-D

mns 1mo ago

That's not really true. He was a control freak and thought he and Apple knew better what people need. They always wanted to control the whole experience and most of the things were initially closed off because he never wanted anyone to modify the Apple experience and his products. That's why initially he didn't even want to let people install other apps on the iPhone and was against the AppStore.

elorant 1mo ago

If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices. Well Microsoft tried to do the exact same thing with that dreadful Microsoft Network in the early days of the web. So it's not inherit to Apple only, all large corporations would like their users locked up in their ecosystems.

presto8 1mo ago
Companies with ecosystems would like their users locked into their ecosystems. There are many large companies that still do business with customers even if their customers do business with their competitors.

coldtea 1mo ago

As a commercial OS, OS X/macOS was quite compatible: FOSS Darwin core, FreeBSD userland, POSIX compiant certified UNIX, built-in Python and Java support. Apple/OS X also contributed some nice things, by way of funding, hiring main devs, and/or heavily supporting certain FOSS projects: LLVM and Clang, CUPS printer drivers, WebDAV, WebKit, libc++, and Swift. Also designed some widely used interface standards: FireWire (started by Apple), Thunderbolt (co-designed with Intel driven by Apple) which eventually turned into USB 4, Mini DisplayPort (later incorporated to the official DisplayPort standard, and even the design re-used for Thunderbolt). There was nothing to "maximize rents" as there were no rents for the most part of OS X's journey until later Cook. They put out good products and people bought them, getting them out of near certain bankruptcy.

reaperducer 1mo ago

If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleLink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleLink