> You would think Apple as a hardware company would open up software to increase hardware sales, but instead it seems to try to control everything so it is fighting a battle on multiple fronts.
Purely on the business perspective, Apple has seen tremendous benefit with their locked ecosystem and vertical integration. Bringing that strategy to the PC market was bound to happen and it's likely going to work extraordinarily well for their share holders if performance/productivity benefits (from Apple Silicon) at low-mid end forces traditional PC consumers to Mac.
On the consumer perspective, Would we accept a $1000 PC couple of years back with no means to install other Operating System (Officially), Only 3-5 years of updates(if lucky), Use only manufacturer approved apps, Repair only at their approved centres?
Then why did we accept it to be a norm for >$1000 smartphones?
We made them smell money with our consumer decisions to trade 'freedom in computation' in smartphones and it's now coming to haunt us with personal computers. The line between Smartphones and PCs have been blurred with Apple Silicon, Google will do it with their Chromebooks(which was already happening even without their custom silicon [Update cycle, Locked boot-loaders etc.]) and Microsoft with their Surface line up.
There’s never been more diverse software, more readily and easily available, than there is today (mainly due to the web and app stores). Software has never been easier to write, to distribute, or to monetize.
Users don’t care about if the platform is “open” or if they can install Linux. In fact, in many cases, the things are a massive source of pain to end users that want devices that just work, which the iPhone and iPad largely do.
It’s also, by the way, never been easier to build your own hardware from ready-made components and platforms.
I don’t know why we should lament users choosing devices that are easy, fun and reliable to use, and that provide them with single tap access to massive software libraries and entice them to pay for that software. Seems like an absolute win to me.
>I don’t know why we should lament users choosing devices that are easy, fun and reliable to use, and that provide them with single tap access to massive software libraries and entice them to pay for that software. Seems like an absolute win to me.
I'm finding it difficult to see this as an absolute win given that Apple's absolute control over these devices facilitates human rights abuses and a general trend towards censorship and authoritarianism all over the world.
As a developer I don't see it as an absolute win if my distribution channels are dominated by an oligopoly of two all powerful gatekeepers. But I completely understand that consumers don't care about that or even like it.
I also understand that consumers don't care much about Apple's cultural anti-porn bias. It's all on the web anyway.
But what about human and civil rights? Can we really celebrate something as an absolute win if it hands absolute control over our access to encryption to anyone who happens to control Apple?
> But what about human and civil rights? Can we really celebrate something as an absolute win if it hands absolute control over our access to encryption to anyone who happens to control Apple?
How exactly is Apple going to ban encryption? Isn't HTTPS outside of Apple's control?
And how would Apple manage to "ban encryption" on Windows, Linux, or Android devices?
Obviously not https, but if end-to-end encryption or some consumer VPNs are banned then people whose only personal computing device is a locked down Apple device will instantly lose access.
It‘s not going to be up to individual users to decide wether or not to use it anyway and perhaps fight for their constitutional rights in the courts.
Exactly. This is why I'm wary of all these arguments for opening up the iPhone. There is large value (in the form of security and minimum quality bar in app review) in the closed ecosystem.
If you don't like it, it's never been easier to build a replacement, or install a dev certificate on your iPhone and load whatever you want.
When software has political agenda, stop it is a harm to free speech. Not stopping it will be a threat to business (said to china). Hence all customers not care. Try to deal with the post china world.
If the early pioneers of Computers & Internet thought the same way we wouldn't be even having this conversation. I think they made conscious decisions to keep computing out of total control by capitalism.
Unfortunately we've failed them & ourself with our consumer decisions.
Uh, not really. Usually quite the opposite actually. For instance, Linux, the modern land of free/open computing, comes to us from Unix... which was made by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, two early pioneers of OSs... who worked for Bell Labs, owned by AT&T (and maybe shared with Western Electric? I forget).
Computers back then were far too expensive for them to be anything but reliant on capitalism. It was only with the commoditization of hardware that free and open computing really even became an option.
True, but Bell labs is hardly an example of normal capitalism. As I understand it, AT&T during the Bell labs era was more like the East India Company, or a PRC-style state-controlled corporation, or Pacific Gas and Electric.
(I find that this is an under-explored option in discussions of socialism-vs-anarchism-vs-capitalism these days. State-controlled corporations seems to have a very good track record. But I haven't seriously studied this.)
I disagree. The landscape has changed significantly since the 80s. A locked down platform makes a lot more business sense now than it did back then (unfortunately). Its not like computing company pioneers were so ideological that they turned down $$$$ for freedom. Nor is it like there weren't more closed platforms back then, the closed off platforms just got outcompeted.
> with our consumer decisions to trade 'freedom in computation' in smartphones
TBF, the first few iPhone releases were arguably better and more open than anything before them. Apple refused to bow to carriers and provided a standard development platform for the first time. Then the Appstore, again bypassing carriers, increased developer access to mobile platforms by 1000x or more.
Sadly, both consumers and developers then failed to push for even more open alternatives, to the point where Apple and Google managed to entrench themselves too deeply to address this problem through simple market mechanisms. It's time for authorities to step in, hopefully we're seeing that (slowly) happening.
I don’t think Android was well understood by the Linux and Open Source community in it’s first three years. A lot of people happy that it was consumer Linux and hacking away on root kits, bootloaders, and alternative marketplaces. We didn’t realize Google would have an effective monopoly on software distribution inside of the Android ecosystem (at least in western markets).
yeah but they refused to integrate with carrier crapware or otherwise customize it in any way to suit the carrier. iOS was iOS and that was it. This seems trivial now, but at the time it was new - most phones would be sold with carrier-tailored operating system and apps, which made it difficult to build anything on multiple devices.
Did you actually do it...? J2ME was a nightmare of incompatibilities. You could basically use it only for games, because you took control of the whole shebang. The slightest attempt at integration with platform services or native widgets brought utter pain across devices.
Symbian also changed drastically from featurephone to featurephone. WinCE was a bit more consistent but nobody used it on actual phones, it was largely a PDA os and PDAs were a very small market.
You must have few hairs left then :) I worked a bit on j2me on Nokia and ran away very quickly. Cross-device testing was a massive (and expensive) issue. Definitely it was not comparable with the ease enjoyed on iOS today, where there are very few devices and the emulator is enough most of the time.
The only hair I lost on those days were caused by Symbian C++ and the multiple reboots on the development environment, from Metrowerks all the way into the burning platforms memo.
I have an 8 year old MacBook Air. Still getting updates, still working perfectly well. Best 1000$ ever spent on a PC. Zero seconds invested in configuring or setting up anything.
At the end of the day, buying a Computer is a tradeoff. A lot of people would very happily tradeoff freedom for other values if the value proposition is good.
I purchased a MBA 4 years ago (i5/8GB/256GB) and it is by far the best investment in technology I have made. Ultra reliable, amazing battery life, light weight and nice to type on. At home it's plugged into a monitor/kb/mouse like a desktop. I like the tight software and hardware integration, which extends to an iPhone and iPad.
I have a 2013 13” MBP that I have not being nice to (to put it mildly). It’s working great.
I have a 2013 15” MBP that I babied and kept in immaculate condition. It also worked great until some RAM failed a couple of weeks ago. It’s a brick now
If Apple were to release low level documentation and source code for hardware it considers obsolete to help developers support it, it would not effect their business other than getting a lot of goodwill.
it may not affect them at a pennies-in-billions level, but those pennies are owned by a few patent holders whose heirs will profit many times over in the foreseeable future
why? I doubt those obsolete chipsets will be used by anyone else, or anyone will be particularly motivated to shell out a lot of money for access to schematics.
Purely on the business perspective, Apple has seen tremendous benefit with their locked ecosystem and vertical integration. Bringing that strategy to the PC market was bound to happen and it's likely going to work extraordinarily well for their share holders if performance/productivity benefits (from Apple Silicon) at low-mid end forces traditional PC consumers to Mac.
On the consumer perspective, Would we accept a $1000 PC couple of years back with no means to install other Operating System (Officially), Only 3-5 years of updates(if lucky), Use only manufacturer approved apps, Repair only at their approved centres?
Then why did we accept it to be a norm for >$1000 smartphones?
We made them smell money with our consumer decisions to trade 'freedom in computation' in smartphones and it's now coming to haunt us with personal computers. The line between Smartphones and PCs have been blurred with Apple Silicon, Google will do it with their Chromebooks(which was already happening even without their custom silicon [Update cycle, Locked boot-loaders etc.]) and Microsoft with their Surface line up.