Yes, although I could pick nits about the significance of each of these (Webkit being open source is somewhat less significant that it appears since web browsers nowadays are de facto somewhat unforkable; the open-sourcing of clang was partly or mainly an attack on the GPL). But while Apple's continued doing many of those things (and done some similar things like GCD), they've also started doing other things they weren't doing back in 1999 or 2003, like breaking new ground in walled-garden application platforms and aggressive use of patents. The iPhone has never been as open to non-native apps as desktop OS X, while even desktop OS X's support for them is declining. (That's especially significant if you take the post-PC-era viewpoint and see phone/tablet devices as displacing or succeeding the PC rather than just supplementing them.) So overall Apple fits the mould pretty well.

Not to mention the fact that webkit itself is a fork of khtml - so while apple's contributions are clearly valuable, it's quite a different story. If apple had not open sourced webkit, given its origins, that would have been resoundingly bad PR at the time.

Apple built on oss foundations, and most of what they've open sourced is simply a result of them not closing forks of once open projects, which is very valuable, but nevertheless less impressive that releasing important bits of their own making.

Darwin was based on NeXT, which as far as I can recall, wasn't open source before Apple opened it. While a number of the userland tools were (and are) open source, I don't recall the kernel being open.

There's also things like the streaming server which as far as I can tell was strictly an Apple project. I think libdispatch was also strictly an Apple project.

I mean it's based on Mach and FreeBSD both of which are open source.

True they're open source. One of the lead developers on Mach was Avie Tevanian who went to work at NeXT after he left CMU. It was later that components from FreeBSD were included.

None of them should be lumped together. There's no evidence that open-sourcing is a "standard play" demonstrative of anything as specific as what leoc claimed or with predictive power. That list of companies seems to demonstrate the opposite, in fact.

> That list of companies seems to demonstrate the opposite, in fact.

How do you reckon that?

Apple took advantage of things that were already open source. How many innovative, profitable programs has it developed itself and then made open source?

The fact that the core OS is still open source doesn't actually mean much when there's a huge layer of proprietary code on top, does it?

The Darwin Streaming Server for one. There's also the Apple Lossless Codec. Plus, they're heavily involved in work on LLVM and have been for quite some time. Lastly, There's Grand Central Dispatch (libdispatch). Plus, WebKit is quite far from it's KHTML roots.

Doesn't sound like much for the worlds's most valuable company with $150 billion (or whatever) in the bank.

As for the Apple Lossless Codec, it open-sourced a failure. It would have been much better for everyone if Apple had just supported FLAC.

Like Android these days...

Given that all of those are already open sourced, do you know how bad it would look to close source them now? Especially Webkit/KHTML - that would be a PR disaster. I don't keep track of what Apple does - have they open sourced anything within the last few years? If not, I think they fit right in with the other companies.

Grand Central Dispatch[0] is the latest (2009) I can think of...

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch

"We're going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we're going to make FaceTime an open industry standard" 2010. Oh yes, that never happened.

Their Clang Arm64 back end as well, among other things.

Apple also open-sourced their boot process software (launchd[0], which was fully developed in-house IIRC.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchd

Hate to burst your bubble, but the only thing apple has going for them is the iPhone, which is arguably a fad. The reason Rolex never goes out of style is because they never change their style, and apple is no Rolex like a lot of people seem to think. People easily forget about all the hype around the iMac g3. Sure, it changed the company, but they still have yet to over take windows. Now Android is out selling the iPhone because of the business model. No large companies would ever replace current desktops with iMacs except in specialized "labs" where they're needed (mostly for designers). Apple isn't dominating any market. They're not on servers, they're not embedded, they're not on super computers, they're not on mainframes. They're no where, but if you spend your whole life surrounded by graphic designers and programmers and hacker news, they're going to appear to be everywhere.

Only thing Apple has going for them is the iPhone.

And the iPad, which is kicking the hell out of Android tablets (to my consternation, because I'm primarily an Android user and their tablets are terrible).

And the Macbook Pro, which is making pretty major inroads at leading-edge companies. A buddy of mine is working on *nix software at IBM and they asked if he wanted a Thinkpad or an MBP; that blew my mind.

They don't do big iron, but they move a lot of product and very little of it is faddish. They Get It, or have Gotten It historically, and a lot of people respond well to that. They might at some point no longer Get It, but until then, saying that they only have the iPhone going for them is wishcasting.

You're right, how could I forget the iPad, the thing is the business model they have for all of their products is unsustainable. The iPad is doing well now, just as the iPhone did initially, but less and less people are buying the iPhone because the Android environment has had time to develop. Even chromebooks out sold mac books [1] in 2013. A lot of companies allow developers to use Linux too. The fact that people working for large tech companies are allowed to develop for *nix on a macbook is kind of irrelevant. The circle jerk on HN around apple is deplorable, but lets let the down votes commence.

[1] http://www.ibtimes.com/googles-chromebook-outsells-apples-ma...

Are less and less people buying iPhones, or more and more people buying phones? (Not a rhetorical question, I don't know whose numbers to trust for mobile stuff.)

Apple's business is not one that has to own a market to make gobsmacking amounts of money. As such I doubt they see being outsold by Chromebooks as being a serious problem; they've been being outsold in the laptop market forever and are still making yachtloads of cash.

Sales year on year for Apple phones have increased, but at the same time, market share is slinking, since just so much more Android phones are being sold. See: http://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-iphon...

Eh, while it may be accurate enough to say that to a first approximation Apple is an iOS company now, I don't think that's an unsustainable thing to be by tech standards. They may not need new triumphs to be very profitable for a long time: think of the golden decade or so MS had after '95 mainly from milking its already-existing successes.

This is simply false. More and more people are buying both iPhones and iPads.

And as to sustainable business models - the iTunes Ecosystem alone is a large as half of Google's entire business and is growing faster.

I know Chromebooks outsold MacBooks but I don't think you can compare them. Chromebooks are like disposable cameras. If they are referring to the cheapy plastic things, I wonder if people are buying them as devices to use whilst on the toilet or in areas where mugging is a risk?

Most Chromebooks are glorified phone hardware. Even the one with the whizzbang screen has lousy soldered-on local storage, so it fails as a microcomputer. It essentially is a terminal with a fantastic screen. I certainly wouldn't attempt to use one to develop on (and I mean develop on, not RDP/VNC/SSH to a box elsewhere). Could I write C++ on it for multiple OSes thanks to virtualization on a Chromebook? I know my needs are niche but I don't think Chromebooks compete with MacBooks, even if they look similar-ish and one has outsold the other. Out of interest, have Kindles outsold MacBooks? Would that be the death-knell for MacBooks? Really is comparing Apples and Oranges I think.

My acer c720p has a haswell processor, 4 GB ram and I'm working from ssd right now. You can dual boot into Linux and develop in rails, vim, x-windows is 3d accelerated. Virtualbox, vmware, libreoffice, postgresql, nginx - everything works. Linux is not as shiny as OSX, but it gets the job done.

That's good. I'm not trying to rally for OSX's cause as I develop on all platforms, with Mac OSX only being officially/legally able to be ran on Mac hardware which is why I didn't get a PC for developing on a Mac properly. I did build a hackintosh but found the hardware on MacBooks compelling when I saved up enough.

Do you supplement the internal storage with external? Is it a hassle? My Windows VMs are all 50GB+ so having tiny internal SSD storage is crippling.

Ah. Apple is doomed. I see.

Chromebook costs 1/10 of the MacBook

> A buddy of mine is working on *nix software at IBM and they asked if he wanted a Thinkpad or an MBP; that blew my mind.

Except, you know, IBM doesn't have anything to do with Thinkpad anymore, and hasn't for years.

"Except, you know," that it's a highly conservative company and offering a line developer a Mac is, in my experience, kind of weird.

True, but I wonder if it is because they are both seen as "high end" laptops? I know that you can go to PC World and buy a £500 device or cheaper models but MacBooks and high-end Thinkpads have always commanded a higher location in the market. If I were to sell my MacBook and get another laptop, I think the only other option would be Thinkpads.

Thinkpad or Macbook? Which did he choose?

Thinkpads are now Lenovo, not IBM. And MacBooks do run official Unix, so it'd make sense. Plus, he can look cool in a coffee shop :-)

(I love my MacBook, but don't use it coffee shops, as an aside.) Your point about iPads is very true. My wife has an iPad and it is joy to use. I have a Motorola Xoom that I really do love using and find very very useful but the standards aren't the same. I know the Xoom is old (some would say ancient) and is easy to develop for but the iPad truly does rule the Tablet waves.

  Apple isn't dominating any market.

You're obviously going by the number of units sold, not the profit share. And you're not technically wrong. But isn't that a little bit like measuring the number of swings a baseball player takes instead of the number of times he gets a hit?

In the PC market Apple is absolutely destroying all comers: 45% of the profit share in 2012. HP, Lenovo, Dell, Acer and Asus combine for the remaining 55%. (I couldn't find numbers for 2013) http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/04/18/apples-ma...

They're dominating similarly in the mobile market. http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-smartphone-profit-share...

I mean, if you want to say their products are crap - that's subjective and we can't argue that.

But if you don't think they're doing incredibly well in their key markets, that's diametrically opposed to the truth.

Profit share is a poor measure because it's reliant on expenses, and those are notoriously easy to massage - companies do that routinely for tax purposes. Who's to say what's a cost and what's an investment?

If you must, at least attempt to include accumulated value as part of the equation - so that "fake" costs that are actually investments appear as increases in company valuation. Of course, this still looks good for apple :-), but given the volatility of share prices and what that says about how easy it is to determine "value" it should be clear that the one thing these comparisons cant' be is clear.

Judging the success of Apple by its profit share is like judging a baseball player by his salary. I get that if you personally identify with the baseball player and want to see him have a nice life, but I think the most important metric for a baseball fan is the extent to which he helps his team beat the other teams. The only thing Apple wins is the mindshare of relatively wealthy (American) people and an enormous amount of hedge and institutional fund investment. It's an easy buy in an extremely precarious, but bullish, frothy economy and if it tanks it'll 1) start slowly, and 2) you won't get fired, because everybody's doing it.

  The only thing Apple wins is the mindshare of relatively 
  wealthy (American) people and an enormous amount of 
  hedge and institutional fund investment. 

So they're only dominating in terms of profit share in wealthy countries. And also in most if not all customer satisfaction and retention metrics. And also killing it at retail.

But other than that, not dominating at all.

I hope I can achieve this level of non-domination in my lifetime. Seems pretty cushy.

Market share matters.

Apple were doing well by profit share in the PC market in the early 1990s when they were as now a bigger company than MS. But because there were so many more PCs out there software developers and hardware manufacturers targeted MS not Apple and then when Apple machines were poor in the mid to late 1990s Apple almost disappeared.

If Android is, say, 80%+ of the market at some point and it's no longer worth making things for iOS Apple and Apple have a generation or two of stuff that isn't that good Apple could be in the same position as they were in the late 1990s and it's unlikely Jobs will be back again to save them.

While this is true I think there are some differences. In particular, an essential sector of the Mac death spiral was people switching to cheaper Windows PCs as soon as they were a good-enough alternative. For various reasons https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6496030#up_6498257 I think iOS devices have a better chance of sustaining a lifestyle-brand price premium without losing too many users even if the alternative is broadly good enough.

Lambo is dominating the car market by your logic [1]

[1] http://www.lambocars.com/lambonews/lamborghini_among_most_pr...

Wow, no. That is not my logic at all.

Lambo is profitable, evidently, but they have an absolutely miniscule share of the auto industry's profits.

Profits, profit margins, and profit share are related but really distinct things. I hope nobody lets you run a business!

Profit margins != profit share.

I'll get downvoted for this one but they have a similar characteristic as well:

they both catch fire!

I had a 2010 MBP go up in flames and an immediate colleague's one screen went phut and melted. Lambos do this too (google images)

What was the 2010 MBP made from? Do the unibody ones fare better than the plastic models? Were you typing so fast that the keyboard caught fire? Are you Superman?

Answers in order please.

Well mine was made of magic smoke apparently :)

Yeah, the business model sucks, indeed: http://bgr.com/2014/03/17/iphone-profit-share-market-share/

The thing you miss is that lot of people buy shit if it's cheap.

heresy!! Talk badly about apple on HN! people will donwvote you to oblivion!

But really.. Apple is like that competitor that start miles ahead of any competitor, but because of some draconian moves and misteps, they end loosing all of their advantages.. it happen with Microsoft.. now its happening again with Google