For a company with Apple's budget, XCode is a disgrace.
Constant crashes, unreliable and underdocumented apis. Urgh.
I’ve been doing web programming for the last decade or so. When I started web programming, it was a mess of browser incompatibilities and jquery. But now I’d take modern web development over apple’s hellscape any day. MDN, caniuse, flexbox & grid CSS, modern bundlers, svelte and solidjs - this stuff is a delight in comparison.
If it weren’t for the AppStore, it would’ve been the end of Apple. The iPhone wasn’t released with it at the outset - because this “make your own” wasn’t a part of the ethos. The Mac also suffered tremendously with no love to Final Cut, snipping Aperture, and leaving the hardware to bit rot for the longest.
iPod was a hugely profitable windfall and iPhone was too - somehow the AppStore slipped in there and became the lone remaining ember that reignited the hacker mindset - Swift I believe is that true rekindling; everything else follows M series, OSX continuities, etc
I’m starting to rethink everything I thought I knew.
It's never been trivial to configure the Mac in terms of things like skinning, but third-party tools to do so have always existed for those who cared enough to look, and today, if you want to install Linux on your Mac, you can. If you want to install Windows on your Intel Mac, you can even do that. Those options were, at best, incredibly niche back in the pre-Intel days (though I remember toying with SuSE Linux for PowerPC in the early 2000s), and nearly nonexistent in the pre-MacOS X days.
So it's definitely not a simple case of "Apple in the '90s was in favor of customization; when Jobs came back, he locked them all down and made them toasters."