At least one person[0] didn't understand and publicly stated as much. While iOS was originally spun off from macOS, it's very much it's own system, with there being no ability to run macOS applications on iOS, and vice versa (although the latter is slowly changing with recent macOS releases). Comparing the two is disingenuous at best.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21452862
EDIT: And here's at least one more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21453368
Most iOS app can run on MacOS - the iPhone simulator compiles iOS code natively to x86 and links to an x86 version of the iOS frameworks.
Apple also introduced both catalyst and SwiftUI to make porting back and forth easier.
And yes “words mean things”. I specifically said “variants.” So if again you want to be pedantic, I could just as easily say that Apple sells more iOS devices than all Windows PC makers combined.
Also, if you want to try to exclude iPads from the iOS ecosystem because Apple now calls it “iPadOS”, iPads can still run iPhone apps.
Yeah, except no app developer ships their simulator build to customers to run in the iOS Simulator…
Even in their crowning achievement - the cloud, they are a distant second to AWS and Amazon always brags that they run more Windows instances in AWS than Microsoft runs on Azure.
MS’s revenue is half that of Apple’s and they have lower profits. Heck, last quarter Apple made about the same as Microsoft even if you subtract iPhone revenue.
They missed out on mobile for sure, but it's not because of their focus on the enterprise or backwards compatibility, and you'll have a very hard time proving so. Also they haven't missed out on the web either, and neither can you prove that they did. Just because there is a bigger cloud provider doesn't mean that they 'missed out'. And there will be bigger fish to fry, new technologies are coming out every year.
Apple and Microsoft are in vastly different spaces. Apple focuses on consumer products, Microsoft makes its money from the enterprise. An Apples to orange comparison is not meaningful.
As far as mobile, Apple was able to take its much smaller less bloated OS, cut it down to a size that could fit on a device with 128MB of RAM and have for what at the time was a full featured web browser. Did you ever use IE on a Win CE device?
And are you forgetting that Microsoft was the dominant consumer operating platform before mobile? MS didn’t have any choice but to retreat to Enterprise.
So what “bigger technologies” do you see coming out then mobile? The smart phone already has an 80%+ worldwide penetration rate of adults.
They run windows at Google HQ and AWS but you don't see anyone saying Google and Amazon "missed out"
How is it “disinformation”? Do you think anyone on HN doesn’t understand the statement to mean what I said for it to mean? I said nothing about the computers MS sells (the Surface line). I said Windows PCs in general.
Microsoft sells a lot of Windows licenses to business and consumers but all of the energy from a development and usage standpoint is on the web. I bet most businesses could replace a lot of their computers with Chrome OS boxes and not miss a beat.
Apple sells a >$1000 phone labeled for "Professionals" which comes with 32GB of on board memory.... total. When you upcharge high end customers $150 for a $15 stick of NAND, yeah, people are more touchy about 8GB of system file
It’s not about the “system file”. It’s also about RAM usage. Lowend Surface laptops come with the same amount of storage as iPads but between using x86 chips that are a lot slower and less energy efficient and the boost of Windows, it’s nowhere near the same experience.
No iPhone Pro comes with less than the 64GB of storage. Do you really want to talk about marginal price and marginal cost? A Windows license has no marginal cost.