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.

So yes the UX is great (I would not say amazing) and when the integration exists, the experience is almost always fantastic..

But I've always felt like it has come with trade-offs, and in recent years Apple has moved the balance enough that I no longer believe the trade-offs are worth it for me, at least when it comes to my daily driver computer.

I moved back to Windows (+Linux thanks to WSL2) in 2020 - after being a Mac-first user for almost 15 years - and am very happy with my choice.

Microsoft / Linux doesn't do everything, but if you need something specific you can bet that there is someone out there that provides that functionality for those platforms.

In my own circles (so anecdotally) I've had plenty of conversations over the last 20+ years about helping tech and non-tech people upgrade RAM on their computers, including laptops.. And in the last 5 years I've heard plenty of people be surprised (and bummed) that they can't upgrade the RAM on their Macs post-purchase anymore.

And of course maxing out the RAM at purchase time is a complete rip-off compared to market prices.

Every Mac I've owned (5 machines across desktops/laptops from 2006 through to 2016 I think), I eventually upgraded the RAM myself via aftermarket parts at reasonable market rates and it greatly extended the life of the computer.

Given the premium cost you already pay for a Mac, not being able to do this anymore is a deal breaker, for me at least.

I have a friend who has a 2015-ish Macbook with 4GB RAM - and she is getting into Photoshop.

So her computer works well for her. The monitor is good enough, the CPU is good, and so on. 4GB just won't cut it.

Since she can't upgrade her RAM for $150 like she should, she has to get a new computer. But she likes the trackpad and the Apple UI so much, she is going to get an iMac with 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD for $1600, instead of a Windows PC with a top-line processor, 32GB RAM, 27" screen and 1TB+ of SSD.

There is simply no contest in reliability, you’re always expecting a new problem with windows - just yesterday, in fact, an OS update disabled my network card and I had to reinstall everything to “fix” it. You can use a Mac for years without even knowing what a driver is.

Windows is very solid and we rarely see issues with it on decent hardware which still costs 1/2 of what a lower spec Mac equivalent.

Regarding the software I use, I wouldn't say that it's any more stable on macOS than on Windows.

I've literally never had a problem for years. Switching is seamless. I don't even have to manually switch, it happens automagically. Same for everyone I know with AirPods.

I don't consider myself overly dogmatic about controlling my devices or data but the thought of going all in on one tech company for my gadgets for the next decade or so is both gross and, to be honest, really boring. I don't see how I could get excited about tech when the only choice I get is what colour it is (or the storage space).

I don’t think of these things as gadgets anymore. In the past I’ve built a Linux DVR - so I know how to tinker and find it fun for certain things but not things I depend on and want to behave like appliances. I don’t tinker with my refrigerator or my automobile either.

Certain things with iOS are just overly difficult like getting files on or off or trying to add new music to the music app without a PC.

Not really, the M1 is a smashing success with most techies. People seem to like the phones too. The watches are doing really well too. Oh, and the tablets are really popular also. Even with techies.

There seems to be a group of people sworn never to be corrupted by the evil Apple and their evil ways. I first saw it on /., and the same group has been ringing out death knells for Apple ever since.

It feels similar to the end of MS's domiance. They were always profitable and had huge marketshare, but just because everybody was running Windows, that didn't mean they were really embracing the full MS ecosystem. Apple feels that way today.

I'm talking about a much more nebulous concept of a company as a thought leader, one that people follow. There was a time when the rumor of MS entering a market would cause competition to shut down. Now nobody blinks an eye when MS ships an actual product that competes with them.

And in that regard, I think we're seeing the end of Apple's role as a technologically interesting company (at least wrt software). For example it used to be pretty much only Apple and a few exclusive MacOS developers who actually cared about design. Now designing thinking has gone mainstream all while Apple seems to be busy ignoring everything from their classic HIG.

Same with iPads. By far the most common brand of large screen device I see. Outside of office environments I see more iPads than laptops, and even in office environments I'm seeing more iPads today than even just 3 years ago.

iPads are doing exceptionally well, I'm surprised you are unaware. They're replacing laptops for a lot of users, especially those that did not grow up around PCs. It's just that you won't often see them in public.

Apple has a significant presence in Central Europe. Not overwhelming one, American market is obviously a stronger one. It might have something to do with purchasing power parity, which is still not that good behind the former Iron Curtain. But it is a big player here, especially in the richer demographics.

I have never used any Apple products, but I am tempted. People will sing paeans about how their gadgets just work and interact together. I am more of a tinkering-hacking type, so I do not really mind delving deep into my Windows or Linux installation, but Android messes with me sometimes.

There's definitely a huge market of people buying it.

Whenever I go out in major cities in the US, Canada or the UK, I'll always see someone with it

The Apple products I do have were either broken and given or sold to me to repair or found at thrift shops and pawn shops for deep discounts, and they are all going up for sale soon to recoup my expenses.

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).

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.

The Wii was designed with different assumptions in mind, which led to a lean machine they could sell at a profit. Someone buying and Xbox and Gears of War was a huge problem for Microsoft, if someone bought a Wii and Mario Kart, it was just fine for Nintendo as long as the customer was happy: Every sale was profit, plain and simple.

I don't know about the Wii not being good for 3rd parties either, it's more that the Wii didn't do what the 3rd parties wanted to do (high tech edgelord games). So we got completely moronic things like a Castlevania fighting game, a Soul Calibur that wasn't a fighting game. How about Dead Space, a slow, ponderous horror title? Yeah, the devs turned it into a rail shooter, just about the most anti-horror genre choice imaginable.

In simple terms, they thought the Wii userbase were morons who would lap up anything - after all, they'd bought a motion control toaster to play technically really simplistic titles, and in the devs' world, technically simplistic = bad. So they gave people disrespectful shovelware, which, surprise surprise, bombed.

They had the opportunity to make solid titles - the Wii may have been a toaster, but it was still beefier than the PS2 or Gamecube which had a lot of really good titles and anyone who's played Metroid Prime knows those controls are crack.

I think the big miss with the Wii wasn't how good/bad it was, but communication. What was the philosophy behind the machine, Nintendo communicating that, the devs really trying to understand that.

Also GNU/Linux phones running mainline Linux kernel (but they don't exist for 5 years yet).

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-se

EDIT: its $149 currently https://www.walmart.com/ip/Verizon-Apple-iPhone-SE-2020-64GB...

I'm sure you could find even better deals on eBay.

Smarthome is one place Apple fell down. I tried to add my hue lights and instead of just automatically finding the hub like Amazon and Google I was supposed to take a picture of a sticker? Could never get it to work. They also took far too long getting an affordable voice speaker for the home out. I'm not digging my phone out every time either.

That's because many smart home devices are only supporting the duopoly OOB due to their market prominence, indeed both Apple & Google are doing something good enough to retain their *poly position.

If the smart home devices have open API, then there's no reason for it to work great with anything else. A case in point, put KDEConnect on Android, Linux Phone or Sailfish and you can even play the audio from your desktop browser on your phone speaker.

It’s funny that you take AirPlay as an example. I would have agreed with most other things, but AirPlay is light years behind stuff like Google Cast or Spotify Connect.

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.

- 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

Yeah, this rarely works. It takes a long time to acknowledge there's any files, and then it tries to copy them, and then crashes instead. Over and over. Turning off the mechanism that autoconverts image files from HEIC to JPG helps (I never tried JUST video files, but those are unreliable either way in my experience). Obnoxious, overall.

Now I see in the comment above that cables often don't work.

I wonder if there're apps for saving files to USB memories

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-an...

I don’t even consider it an ‘option’ anymore while transferring files. I’ll just upload it to my server, since I know - by default - even on the same wifi network, AirDrop is as useful as picking a number in your head and having a friend guess it.

I can’t honestly think of a regular ‘service’ on iOS and MacOS that is as fundamentally broken as AirDrop. I’m not sure what’s so complicated about writing a device to device file sharing service, but - for instance - I just tried to share a file from my Mac to my iPhone. Didn’t work; don’t see my iPhone. Same wifi network - no firewall; no filters. This is a majority of the time.

Although I agree with general sentiment. I used to have android phone and I really enjoyed that you could just connect your phone with cable and browser data with any file manager.

I always have a bad mood when I have to download/upload/sync something via itunes, e.g. voice recordings / pdf / documents / ebooks

But yes, Apple should have made it easier.

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.

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-Supp...

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.

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.

[1]: Yes, I know about WSL. No, that doesn’t count.

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.

I will still note that debugging and monitoring are usually not going to work cross-platform - try to log to journalfs from a Windows system (wihtout using MinGW or similar).

if you want to build ios apps installing xcode is a requirement (to get the proprietary cli tools) but launching xcode is not required

to build native mac apps, neither installing nor running xcode is necessary, as you can build with the smaller cli-only tools which include only mac os headers/libs

As for those IDEs, they are a subpar experience of what the whole AppFrameworks are capable of, just like Borland of yore always playing catch up with Windows SDKs.

That's a bad analogy IMO. GNU/Linux is mostly POSIX compliant. There are some edge cases one runs into with C programming, but if talking about shell scripting, sticking to POSIX is definitely more portable. Bash would be a chrome equivalent, otherwise it's like targeting a subset of what every browser can do. Testing against Busybox/musl (Alpine) is a good way to assess portability.

Or asynchronous network programming with certificates, while using only POSIX APIs.

Dealing with filesystem capabilities, file locations, daemon configurations, port management utilities,...

Ah, and anything GUI related is not even part of POSIX.

Do you often run ML jobs on workstations? Why? Yes, macs are not great for gaming, oh well.

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.

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.

I have never tried a VR headset under anything that wasn't Linux, so our experiences differ on that point.

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.

Yes and no - I think part of that was also that Apple is openly hostile to other app stores on the Mac. It's true that third parties are lukewarm in their support for Mac, but it's very hard to disentangle to what extent that's the effect of Apple's lukewarm support for third parties rather than the cause of it.

Unless you specifically need to target Apple, you don't come across their ecosystem of APIs, which makes it harder to maintain cross-platform compatibility.

Reportedly, Apple is "all-in" on xR, so wait and see I guess. But they're not on the public supporter list of OpenXR for now, as a datapoint: https://www.khronos.org/OpenXR/

When was that? MS Word has been available on the Mac since 1984, Excel since 1985 and PowerPoint since 1987.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office#Mac_versions

Keynote was made because Steve Jobs wanted better presentation software than what others provided that was more like Concurrence on NeXTSTEP.

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.

>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

[1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement

They didn’t even write their own OS or browser or compiler. Microsoft at least does that.

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.

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.

VS Code supports a subset of Windows development workloads, try to develop C++/WinRT applications or a WPF GUI in VS Code, for example.

VS Community is only free for open source, students or companies up to 5 employees with a specific yearly revenue limit.

The issue with macOS development is that there are simple things you pretty much have to do for even the most basic app to work correctly--such as build the menu bar from a nib or bundle icons--that require you to use closed source software like altool and ibtool that come with Xcode (and then, despite being command line tools, for some incompetent reason tend to be tied very tightly to the current version of the operating system, which makes stuff like CI extremely annoying).

So many examples that are beyond bare bones Win32 C calls.

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.