It also creates walled gardens and reduced incentives to invest in user experience once those walls are built.

I switched from Mac to Linux precisely for this reason and the biggest surprise has been that whenever I touch a Mac again it feels like poverty.

Not because the UX is bad but because I know how the company behind it operates and I have zero trust for anything that happens on the machine.

> It also creates walled gardens and reduced incentives to invest in user experience once those walls are built.

> Not because the UX is bad

I don’t see the connection. The first sentence says that walled gardens create bad UX, but Macs are the premier mainstream walled gardens and you don’t find their UX bad.

I dunno, the last two generations of MacBook pro pretty much feature for feature provide fixes for all the widely criticized issues of the last Johnny Ive models. Apple has plenty of faults but they seem to actually be listening to user feedback in some areas despite a captive audience.

But you can't run Windows or Linux (not sure of the state of Asahi) on it anymore.

natively. But can you really blame apple for Windows not having an ARM version?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/options-for-usin...

Windows does have an ARM version. You can even run it on the Raspberry Pi 4. That article is just about Apple's hardware specifically.

> It also creates walled gardens and reduced incentives to invest in user experience once those walls are built.

Which is why the EU has decided to break up the walled gardens - although IMHO they could ramp up their efforts a bit.

> reduced incentives to invest in user experience

Using my Apple Silicon Macbook is a way better user experience than my Intel Macbook ever was. It certainly feels like they invested in user experience well after the walls were up around the garden.

And Next cubes and UltraSPARCs? Or maybe vertical integration isn't a silver bullet?

I have a windows laptop for 1/3rd of the price, and am perfectly happy with it. (After switching from a Macbook Pro.)

This is a funny example because Apple has disproven this logic just as often as they have proven it. Carplay and the App Store are two examples. People generally prefer the software Apple makes over the software car manufacturers make. People also like to install their own software on their devices beyond the software that Apple makes.

Just because vertical integration occasionally works doesn't mean it is actually good for the consumer.

> People also like to install their own software on their devices beyond the software that Apple makes.

Omg this, can Apple please stop sabotaging Google Maps and Google Photos :(

… what is Apple sabotaging? Google intentionally holds back features on iOS…

Source: former Xoogler PM

Oh so Google is the one making it impossible to set Google Maps as the default maps option on Apple? And Google is making it impossible to one-click delete backed up photos?

I fully believe Google holds back features but these basic functionalities are probably not the ones. Or maybe DSPA is really that mismanaged? There's always the tradeoff between serving 50%+ of your mobile users and trying to differentiate Android/Pixel.

Apple also does shit like make it impossible for Google Fi to set up easily on iPhone.

Source: long-tenured googler

“good for the consumer” is as subjective as the consumer.

the eu disagrees in that it views itself as representative of the consumer. similar to how us states set laws that may be more strict than others.

get a large enough government of a populace with a large enough portion of the sales, and companies can be made to act. which can be good, but isn’t a guarantee.

just because companies can be forced to act doesn’t mean the forced actions are actually good for the consumer.

(plus a decent amount is political theatre.)

Can you give some other examples besides Apple? One anecdote does not make a theory.