[HN Gopher] Apple's Mistake (2009)
___________________________________________________________________
Apple's Mistake (2009)
Author : keleftheriou
Score : 169 points
Date : 2022-02-21 16:47 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.paulgraham.com)
| tharne wrote:
| > An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose
| the ability to win by doing better work.
|
| Yup. That's more or less what's happening or Oracle right now.
| They'll profitability soldier on for a while due to the massive
| amount of legacy servers running Oracle databases at companies
| all over the world. But, every $BIG_CORP out there has on their
| roadmap a long-term plan to either drastically reduce their spend
| on Oracle products, or more often, eliminate it entirely.
| yardie wrote:
| > every $BIG_CORP out there has on their roadmap a long-term
| plan to either drastically reduce their spend on Oracle
| products, or more often, eliminate it entirely.
|
| You can believe this if you want. But $BIGCORP does not have
| the same license agreements that you and I see _. There is a
| lot of momentum to stay on Oracle and companies have had
| decades to migrate away. Some have, most haven 't and I think
| not much is going to change in the next decade.
|
| [_] I'm literally telling a coworker we can't do what she wants
| to do with a Oracle DB server because the license doesn't allow
| it. Then I get an email from a VP that states we have a special
| license that does specifically allow it. I'm left wondering how
| many other companies have special licenses.
| 300bps wrote:
| I agree that every large corporation that uses Oracle
| software has a unique license with Oracle.
|
| And every one I've heard of considers Oracle a predatory
| vendor and they want to stop using them.
|
| They do things like charging you per CPU to run Java and even
| though you only run it on four CPUs you theoretically could
| run it on your entire VMWare cluster so they charge you for
| 10,000 CPUs. Which is ridiculous so they'll give you a unique
| license for their software and they'll bundle it all together
| so it isn't a la carte anymore so even if you stop using 40%
| of their software you pay the same amount.
|
| Oracle's business model seems to me to be to extract every
| nickel from their customers until they can figure out how to
| stop using their software. It's why there are dozens of open
| source Java distributions now and it's why things like
| MariaDB exist.
| usefulcat wrote:
| > And every one I've heard of considers Oracle a predatory
| vendor and they want to stop using them.
|
| Ok, but talk is cheap. If you want to know what people
| actually want, ignore what they say and pay attention to
| what they do. Oracle's revenue and net income have been
| pretty steady for at least the past 5 years. Unless they've
| found some major new revenue stream, it certainly doesn't
| look like their customers are leaving in droves.
| abraae wrote:
| > But, every $BIG_CORP out there has on their roadmap a long-
| term plan to either drastically reduce their spend on Oracle
| products, or more often, eliminate it entirely.
|
| Hyperbole much? I guarantee there are plenty of companies doing
| giant transaction rates happily and stably on their big Oracle.
|
| And plenty of ERP customers who are resigned to staying on
| their Oracle platform for the foreseeable future, even if only
| because the competitors are just as greedy shark as Oracle.
| tharne wrote:
| It really isn't hyperbole. Ask 10 random CTO's about Oracle,
| and the majority will tell you they're looking for offramps.
| It's not just a matter of Oracle being greedy, it's that they
| are also bullying and difficult to work with. And their
| licensing rules are one of the circles of hell.
| cptaj wrote:
| Saying that and actually putting in the effort to do it are
| monumentally different things in some orgs
| rconti wrote:
| And that has been true for 15 years.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The alternatives have been getting better and better.
| With free software, you can just _use an older version_
| if it 's better; with Oracle, the latest version is what
| gets supported, so it can get worse.
| jmull wrote:
| I mean, I'm sure our CTO would tell you they are looking
| for an offramp.
|
| From time to time we start an initiative to do so (i.e.,
| when there is a new set of executives at a certain level).
|
| However, as the awareness of the actual scope and cost of
| migrating away becomes clear, the effort is dropped. It's
| technically possible, but also risky and no one wants to
| practically pause other development while it occurs --
| which makes sense since that would probably be fatal.
| virgilp wrote:
| And you know what tends to happen?
|
| Something comes along, that makes it feasible. It might
| be something surprising. And then, all of the sudden,
| there's no way to respond - because Oracle the company is
| so entrenched in the business model of profiting from
| locked-in customers, that they can't develop a novel
| response to a novel threat.
| krnlpnc wrote:
| Unfortunately I think this is a naive take, because it's
| focused on technical superiority. That's only part of the
| story.
|
| Companies partner with massive vendors like Oracle and jump
| through their hoops to remain in support contracts because it
| enables them to defer some liability and satisfy various
| regulatory checklists.
|
| Think about a database instability scenario for an online
| retailer, and consider if you'd rather be the CTO who is to
| blame for self-hosting, or the CTO who can defer blame onward
| to the vendor. It's an unfortunate reality in many "enterprise"
| environments.
| jamesrr39 wrote:
| sure, there are companies that stay on Oracle, and Oracle the
| company isn't going away any time soon. But other companies
| that were on Oracle have moved/are moving away to other
| enterprise-palatable services (e.g. AWS), and new companies
| rarely pick Oracle.
|
| Self-hosting is certainly not the only choice nowadays, there
| are many other companies offering managed databases/other
| cloud products.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| The interesting thing is that it's not a financial question
| of blame for the CTO, it's a reputation problem.
|
| It's unlikely that even Oracle would pay to make someone
| whole after a data loss incident. But the reality is that the
| ability to blame Oracle or another black-box product from
| some vendor instead of your in-house instance of some open-
| source project (that no one outside of engineering has heard
| of) has real career-altering value to stakeholders. Maybe
| unjustified, but the effect exists nonetheless.
| boldBS00 wrote:
| gumby wrote:
| > every $BIG_CORP out there has on their roadmap a long-term
| plan to either drastically reduce their spend on Oracle
| products, or more often, eliminate it entirely.
|
| Oh, I hope you're right, but am dubious. The F500 (and G500) is
| wedded to legacy systems, for good reasons, a marriage that
| even extends to new deployments.
| techdragon wrote:
| Look, it can be right but sometimes the "long term plan" is
| on the order of a decade or two. "Let's replace everything"
| doesn't happen in a hurry, so it can take a LONG time to
| shift. I've seen projects that are 5 years into approximately
| 10 year transitions off MongoDB and MySQL in favour of
| PostgreSQL because everyone is realistic about the available
| development time to completely reimplement the core product
| while continuing to build new product features to maintain
| customer growth and remain fiscally solvent.
| mohaine wrote:
| This has been Oracle's business model forever. The price you
| pay (off base price that is) is based off off the price they
| estimate you can pay and what it would cost to migrate off to
| something else.
|
| Also, they purchase 3rd party applications at a regular basic
| to make sure new customers/hostages are always coming in the
| front door.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| You say that, but Oracle hasn't changed in any substantive way
| in the last 30 years in this regard and they're still insanely
| profitable. Oracle has the funds to capture key parts of the
| enterprise ecosystem, so if a new one pops up to replace the
| Oracle branded product, Oracle will just buy it if Microsoft
| doesn't first.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Interesting. Ben Thompson's Aggregation Theory is more predictive
| of Apple's domination of mobile applications than this. Perhaps
| this is just porn for developers because it makes us feel
| powerful. The truth, though, is that the developers go where the
| demand goes.
| collaborative wrote:
| Apple gets lots of hate but one thing that's rarely mentioned is
| how the Play Store prevents you from monetizing a successful app.
| They do this by making it impossible to turn a free app into a
| paid app
|
| A normal app goes through these stages: 1- Free. If it's good, it
| will receive good reviews, which will make it more popular 2-
| Paid
|
| The first stage is an investment on the part of the developer. He
| invests his time and effort. But many developers only find out
| that it's impossible to move to (2) once it's too late (reviews
| can't be ported to new apps)
| thenthenthen wrote:
| I dunno, getting you app approved on the (jailbreak) cydia store,
| via like big boss back in the days was equally hard as the
| official appstore. This both frustrated and satisfied me; actual
| people reviewing the work and giving cryptic feedback haha.
| Is/was(?) the bigboss process inherited from the apple appstore?
| daviddever23box wrote:
| File along with Michael Dell's "shareholder value" remark.
| mlang23 wrote:
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Sorry. I should have known better than to try to participate in
| this thread. My apologies.
|
| Carry on.
| smithza wrote:
| So China develops an Olympics app for the athletes and tells
| them they have to have it on their iPhones, yet with only
| cursory reviews third-party security analysts found it has
| malware baked inside. This is a high-profile app, something
| that some high-up in the review process probably was assigned,
| and they gave it the OK? Can you help me understand the "rules"
| that you have come to cozy yourself into?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Can you help me to understand why the nasty? I wasn't telling
| anyone else what to do; simply relating my own experience.
|
| Ah...the heck with it. I should have known better than to
| stick my oar in here. I'm nuking the comment.
| smithza wrote:
| Fair critique, I don't mean anything personal. I was just
| so peeved about Apple's friendliness to China's communism
| that I haven't cooled down yet. I am far outside the field
| of discussion and am only looking in. My question actual
| question is earnest: I don't understand the "rules" that
| Apple decides to follow in the context of China.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I strongly suspect that they have caved, and are actively
| cooperating with the Chinese authorities. It's a really
| big market, and they luvs their munny. I have no
| intentions of developing apps for distribution in China.
|
| I'm not happy, too.
|
| I deleted a paragraph in this response about a
| conversation I had -just this morning- with a friend that
| owns a fairly substantial company, that does a lot of its
| manufacturing in China.
|
| I won't go into it, but China has their own "rules," and
| they have the muscle to enforce them.
| josephwegner wrote:
| Sidebar: am I seeing this wrong, or is PG's website really
| showing a bad SSL cert? Looks like it is serving some cert for
| Yahoo domains?
|
| It also isn't auto-upgrading to HTTPS, which is a smaller issue,
| but just kind of surprising for someone with PG's tech stature.
| whakim wrote:
| I get it, in 2009 smartphones weren't devices that everyone
| owned. But I still find the myopic obsession with "techie"
| approval as a harbinger of success pretty narrow-minded. People
| didn't like the iPhone in 2009 because programmers liked it;
| people liked it because it felt like (and was) a revolutionary
| product!
|
| > They're so attracted to the iPhone that they can't leave. But
| they're looking for a way out.
|
| I know hindsight is 20/20 and all, but there's a much broader
| point that could have been made here about "what happens in a
| world in which entire software distribution chains are at the
| mercy of one or two megacorps?" Now _that_ would have been a
| remarkably prescient gripe, and a much more accurate guess at the
| "mistake" Apple was making (if you can call the current backlash
| a "mistake"?)
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Developers really don't have a lot of leverage in anything we do,
| as much as we like to think so.
|
| Many of us work in such a way that we get summoned every morning
| at 9 to line up and answer "what did you do yesterday that
| justified 10% of your paycheck and what will you do today that
| justifies 10% of your paycheck?
|
| Turnover among executives is considered a crisis. Turnover among
| developers amounts to whining about our disloyalty and companies
| screaming at the government to increase immigration.
|
| We are a commodity. A valuable one and hard to obtain one to be
| sure, but that is it.
|
| Apple understood that and won and developers primarily build for
| Apple now.
| pornel wrote:
| The part about lost goodwill sounds very true. I used to love
| Cocoa, and did my best to write quality apps for it, despite
| Mac's small market share.
|
| But App Store ham-fisted rules made me distrust and resent Apple.
| I've stopped using Apple-only languages and frameworks as much as
| I could, and as a user I'm looking to leave the platform entirely
| (which unfortunately after a over a decade of using, I'm locked
| into and resent that too).
| mikenew wrote:
| So I built a very basic prototype app to explore an idea I had
| using Flutter (imagine something like a time boxing system where
| you track how frequently you get distracted). Spent a couple days
| roughing it out, and then I was able to load it onto my own
| Android device to start testing. Literally just plugged in my
| device to my PC, confirm the prompt on the phone, and then
| `flutter run -d <device_id>`. I also wanted to send it to my
| brother (who has an iPhone) so he could start playing with it
| too.
|
| So I had to pay Apple $100 to open a developer account. Then sign
| a bunch of contracts. Then register an app ID and generate
| certificates. Then bundle the app and submit it to
| appstoreconnect. Then wait for a bunch of automated checks to
| pass and tell me that the app ID is missing entitlements. Then
| figure out what that even means, attempt to fix the entitlements,
| and run through the submission again. Then set up testing groups
| and invite my brother to test the app. Then I have to "submit"
| the app for approval _for testing_. And a couple days later
| finally get approval from Apple so that I can start testing it.
| And that 's the short version; there were a bunch of nonsensical
| Xcode quirks to deal with.
|
| For context, I've been an iOS developer for a decade, and it
| _still_ took me the better part of a weekend to get through it
| all, even though I know exactly what to expect. And this is so
| _one fucking person can try an app for me_.
|
| I hate Apple. I don't know how else to put it. I don't think
| they're evil, I just think they don't give a shit about their
| developers. Did you know their bug tracker is private? I'll find
| some weird behavior with, let's say UITableView or something, and
| spend all day trying to figure out what subtle thing I'm doing
| wrong using their comically poor documentation. And then
| somewhere buried in Stack Overflow I'll find someone saying "oh
| yeah that's a bug in the framework, I submitted a radar 2 years
| ago". So there's some bug _that they know about_ , and I'm not
| even allowed to see that. It feels hostile on their part, and it
| makes me feel hostile on my part. I think Paul Graham was right.
| collaborative wrote:
| Just wait until you have to manually type "what's new" in each
| release in each different language your app supports that
| perhaps adds an invisible fix the user couldn't care less to
| know about. Oh, and appstoreconnect is designed to prevent you
| from automating this. This huge time waster is what really
| makes my blood boil when I think of Apple
| reayn wrote:
| Not to be the devil's advocate here but... that seems fine to
| me? Lots of more technical people complain about terrible
| changelog entries (I've seen quite a few posts on HN about it
| too iirc), so I guess no matter what Apple does in this case
| they'll be a target; just that kind of situation.
|
| Maybe it could be a per-project toggle whether having a
| "what's new" section is necessary (though on second thought
| toggling that off might become the new norm leading back to
| the good old useless changelogs).
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| I don't think Paul realizes how much it doesn't matter that Apple
| realizes how much it matters that it's broken. Or rather, that it
| doesn't matter that it's broken.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I believe you are wrong, and Paul is right, but early.
|
| It take times, years and sometimes decades, but developer love
| is critically important for a platform.
|
| Not matter how broken the App Store was at launch, it was much
| better than anything that was available at the time, smartphone
| business was really messy and completely unfair for devs.
| tw600040 wrote:
| Being right and early is sometimes indistinguishable from
| being wrong..
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| If you are betting on stock yes it might. But if you are
| talking long term, it can at least be discussed.
| bombcar wrote:
| If you can make something really nice for developers to use, they
| _may_ use it - if there are some users to sell to (or, it 's
| orthogonal to the released product).
|
| This is partially why Electon has spread so far I think -
| developers _like_ working on Macs (because it 's basically "linux
| with a nice gui" for all practical purposes) meaning that if
| Microsoft wants developers to use VSCode - and not get used to
| non-Microsoft products - they need to get to where the developers
| are.
|
| But in those case the devs are the users.
|
| A beautiful SDK won't save you, I've heard stores about how good
| the BeOS API was, or how wonderful development for various other
| failed devices/technologies was.
|
| But if you're trying to keep a dying platform alive, you _need_
| to reduce friction, and making a good SDK is a way. And Macs were
| dying for many years ...
| notreallyserio wrote:
| I'm convinced that the UI and more importantly the touchpad is
| what really drives continued interest in MBPs as developer
| laptops. If another vendor makes a solid touchpad Apple might
| suffer a bit. I've yet to find one that comes close.
| treis wrote:
| I feel like I am in bizzaro world with Macs. People say they
| have good UX but my experience has been different. When I
| started work today one of my external monitors was missing. A
| few unplugs/plugs fixed that. Then I was in launchpad and
| accidentally tried to add an app to whatever that home screen
| is called. Somehow that caused the icon to get stuck and show
| on top of all applications. I had to kill the dock to get it
| to go away. And twice my dock has migrated to a different
| monitor and I've had to go into settings to move it back.
|
| Admittedly, it seems like my laptop has a case of the Mondays
| because it's an unusually bad day. But none of that happens
| with Linux on my desktop.
|
| Also, with the M1 chips Docker is excruciatingly slow and
| having to resort to Rosetta is an unattractive alternative.
|
| Personally, I don't get why Linux isn't the standard. But
| then basically every tech company out there is Mac first or
| Mac only so realistically I'm probably the problem.
| fpoling wrote:
| A touchpad on the latest ThinkPad X1 from Lenovo is much
| improved. While it still does not match Apple, a better
| keyboard more then offsets it.
|
| What is puzzling is the screen. Lenovo does not have high DPI
| mate screens and their non-mate screens are way more
| reflective compared to Apple offerings. Why cannot they order
| screens from the same vendor as Apple?
| akvadrako wrote:
| Matte screens are just a coating -- you can get the same
| effect buying an after market film.
| fpoling wrote:
| It is not the same. I have used one 5 years ago on Dell
| XPS 13. It still reflected more then on ThinkPad X1. And
| the whole experience was worse then on MacBook Pro.
| akvadrako wrote:
| It is. Look here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matte_display
|
| _> Matte displays feature a light-scattering
| antireflection layer_
|
| You can turn any glossy screen into a matte one, but not
| the other way around.
| musesum wrote:
| > Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.
|
| Well, not until 2016 when Apple began to offer ads in the
| AppStore -- as though that was a good thing for indy developers.
|
| And a couple years later, when Spotify keeps getting pushed down
| the list:
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/09/technology/ap...
|
| This is why we're going to develop for Spotify's API first.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| >>> Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-iterate out of
| laziness. They use it because it yields the best results. By
| obstructing that process, Apple is making them do bad work, and
| programmers hate that as much as Apple would.
|
| Other than the despotic caprice that one occasionally encounters,
| this is indeed the biggest reason why I hate Apple's App Store so
| much.
| kotrunga wrote:
| I'm a developer, but just to play devil's advocate... think
| about the end user. Having a review process (though, Apple can
| improve theirs, see below) helps protect the end user.
| Programmers, companies, etc. can't just repeatedly push updates
| non-stop, starting with half-baked apps, iterating too quickly.
| How do you have a check process that ensures an app is up to
| standard and "safe"? In addition, the time cost to release adds
| value to a release, hopefully helping it be more thought out,
| bringing more value to the user.
|
| Again though... I think the point is that Apple could have a
| better review process that A) values the developer more and B)
| shouldn't take as long. I agree with that.
| senko wrote:
| As @Apocryphon comments in a subthread, there's a commodification
| of app developers.
|
| With iOS, Apple has crossed the threshold of who needs who. Now
| app developers need Apple way more than Apple needs them.
|
| In many cases, one app to do thing X is mostly as good as another
| app for the same X. There's no bargaining power to be had unless
| you're a huge name.
|
| As a developer, you're not leaving the App Store unless you're
| leaving mobile app development entirely. It'd be commercial
| suicide (for most) to do that.
| BackBlast wrote:
| This remains true for the moment. But discontent among
| developers are cracks in the foundation. The building can
| weather that for a time because it's mighty and huge. But those
| cracks are the beginning of the eventual end. If not cared for,
| will hasten its demise.
| senko wrote:
| Maybe.
|
| The level of control both Google and Apple have in their
| mobile OS' (only Safari engine being allowed on iOS is an
| example) makes it much harder for something else entirely to
| grow outside their ecosystem and them slam them from the left
| flank, like the web did to MS' dominance.
|
| I'm not entering into the debate whether such technical
| restrictions are have good (and benign) reasons, but they
| absolutely keep the control much tighter than it used to be
| the case on the desktop in Windows heyday.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Nah, you can build a PWA that more or less acts entirely like a
| mobile app and get out of the app store game entirely.
| agust wrote:
| Except Apple is making it impossible for web apps to compete
| with natives apps by crippling Safari with bugs and not
| implementing crucial features like push notifications, while
| banning competing browser engines who could do so. So no,
| currently web apps are no alternative to native apps on the
| iPhone.
|
| When regulation comes in to force Apple to lift their anti-
| competitive practices though... Developers and companies will
| definitely flock to the web, for many good reasons, just like
| they did on desktop.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > implementing crucial features like push notifications
|
| Push notifications are a fucking cancer. It's bad enough
| disabling them from native apps but I definitely do not
| want web apps sending them. For every one legitimate user
| of push notifications there are a hundred (conservative
| estimate) spam/junk users.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _not implementing crucial features like push
| notifications_
|
| Thank goodness.
|
| I don't need to add de-cluttering my parents' phones with
| respect to every website they've visited in a year to my
| Christmas tradition of unfucking the family's devices. If I
| want notifications from a website, I'll give them my phone
| number or email.
| Swizec wrote:
| As a consumer I much prefer most app's web version than
| polluting my phone with their native stuff.
|
| The lack of notifications is actually one of the biggest
| reasons. Many app developers abuse notifications so much
| that I'd rather check uber eats tracking screen every 3
| minutes than enable notifications for that app
| jmull wrote:
| It will be interesting to see if that happens or not.
| senko wrote:
| Not as a counter-argument, but I would be curious to find out
| if there are any big commercial successes that targeted
| mobile niche but were implemented as a web app.
|
| I can't think of any.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Amazon's app is made up of mostly web views, and so are a
| lot of others. Apple doesn't give web apps all the features
| (e.g. push notifications) as native apps, so it behooves
| companies to continue using at least native wrappers.
| senko wrote:
| It's still a native app and must play by Apple's rules -
| for example on monetization.
|
| The fact that it uses a subset of web technologies that
| Apple deems acceptable is a technical detail.
| ioblomov wrote:
| The only example I can think of is a recent one: Wordle.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Which is the insightful reason Apple pivoted away from first
| class web apps in iOS' early days. They realized they'd never
| be able to control and tax them as with native. Technical
| pros and cons were ancillary.
| sebastien_b wrote:
| Favorite passage:
|
| _How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug
| in OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they
| had to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a
| month and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn
| 't like?_
| organicpotato wrote:
| As other commenters have already mentioned, it doesn't really
| matter how "broken" the App Store is as long as Apple owns the
| user relationship. Developers follow the user base, which is
| dependent on Apple's hardware and overall ecosystem. Although
| Paul provides a few ad-hoc conversations with frustrated
| developers, it doesn't seem like any of the issues mentioned
| impact the supply of developers for both Apple and its App Store
| in a meaningful way.
|
| Paul suggests that Apple is "evil", as if the company is immoral
| and intentionally aiming to harm a group of people (in this case,
| the App Store developers). I don't see any "evil" intent here,
| and think that Apple intended to develop a feedback loop to
| incentivize App Store developers to improve quality control.
|
| It'd be difficult to obtain, but what would be interesting to see
| is a graph of the following data points:
|
| - The frequency of moderate to high-severity client-side bugs
| released for the same app to Google's Play Store and Apple's App
| Store.
|
| - If there were ever times where Apple has tightened or loosened
| their approval process, the before and after on the frequency of
| client-side issues.
|
| Although app developers have no control over the app approval
| process, one way to mitigate turnaround time risks in fixing
| issues is implementing as much logic as possible server-side (of
| course, there are definitely times where this isn't feasible).
| nova22033 wrote:
| Apple app store revenue from 2017-2020..
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/296226/annual-apple-app-...
|
| woody_harrelson_drying_his_tears_with_money.jpg
| d--b wrote:
| > They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell
| through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you
| want to reach users, you do it on their terms.
|
| Yep, fast forward to now and it seems that they got it right.
| Nobody left. Not the users, not the developers. It turns out we
| really are like musicians
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I've been a developer long enough to have seen the whole
| industry change, multiple times -- Apple may have played a part
| more recently but there have been other forces at work as well
| for a long time.
|
| Shareware rose, fell, rose again, fell again.
|
| Somewhere in the lulls there a developer could publish their
| software either through small ma-and-pa publishers (I have
| experience with Casey & Greene, Inc. if anyone in the Mac
| community remember them) or through AppStore/Steam, etc.
|
| At one time publishing meant boxes, floppies, ads in magazines,
| 15% royalties. A designer at that time, as an example, could
| sell a font for good money. Fonts though became commodities,
| the big players (Adobe) moved in and one thread of an era came
| to a close.
|
| CD's replaced floppies and this too had an impact on the
| industry as well.
|
| AOL and the masses coming on-line obviously had a huge impact
| (and shareware rose again then -- ID Software).
|
| Again the big players moved in: LucasArts, etc. Quality games
| were expected to have cut scenes. Everquest and the world-
| building games that followed required teams of artists such
| that the indie developer once again was in descension.
|
| The iPhone made waves. The AppStore though quickly became a
| race to the bottom (in price) as a new generation of users came
| to expect software to be free (like their Facebook and
| SnapChat).
|
| So I don't know, I don't put a lot of blame on Apple in this
| regard. The industry has been a very dynamic one. One thing I
| have come to expect about the software development ride though
| is to never expect it to be the same ten years out.
| d--b wrote:
| Right I didn't think about before the internet, but yeah at
| that time developers were even more subject to distributor's
| approval (and cut)!
| treis wrote:
| Because the other half of the duopoly treats you more or less
| the same.
| mdoms wrote:
| You all still buy their goofy aluminium laptops and publish on
| their store so I guess Apple wins.
| alberth wrote:
| Given that pg is a VC, it's interesting to take these comments
| into consideration given that in 2009 - Apple's market cap was
| ~$100B and today it's ~$3,000B ($3T).
|
| Getting a 30x return for a company _at scale_ is a phenomenal
| outcome for any VC. Seems like Apple did something right.
|
| https://companiesmarketcap.com/apple/marketcap/
| jll29 wrote:
| +1 for expressing the need for a "50% of the size of the MacBook
| Air" machine. Oh, and with e-paper display, please.
| striking wrote:
| (2009)
| dang wrote:
| Added. Thanks!
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| This post was perfectly on point.
|
| I think it can be argued that Apple has never been developer
| friendly, but these days it is painfully difficult to ignore.
|
| And I think this is a huge mistake, I would not be surprised if
| Microsoft end-up eating their lunch again.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Microsoft bought an entire phone company and still failed in
| the mobile device market. It's hard to identify a future key
| differentiator that's going to be strong enough to overcome the
| iOS (status) and Android (widely deployable) ecosystems.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Well, all big companies have their peak and then fail.
|
| It can be difficult to imagine but even IBM and Coca Cola are
| going do disappear into oblivion at some point.
|
| Apple is not dead from a financial standpoint. But I'd go as
| far as to call it an incredibly healthy zombie.
| setgree wrote:
| An Apple share was worth a little under $7 when PG wrote this.
| Today, it hovers around $170, and Apple is the largest
| corporation in history (which also makes it, in some sense, the
| largest non-governmental institution in history).
|
| What do we think its value would be today if it had been more
| developer-friendly in the ensuing 12.25 years -- higher, lower,
| the same? I truly don't know. But either way, a "huge mistake,"
| from Apple's POV, is something that appreciably affects the
| bottom line. And Apple's insane valuation is face value
| evidence that anything about its corporate strategy that we
| view as a huge mistake is probably not.
|
| Perhaps there's a case that what Apple has done is a huge
| _ethical_ mistake, but we 'd have to make the case for that
| very differently.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| > _An Apple share was worth a little under $7 when PG wrote
| this. Today, it hovers around $170_
|
| And that's after a 7:1 split in 2014 and a 4:1 split in
| 2020... money isn't everything, but they are clearly finding
| some success via software, which is the fastest growing part
| of the company of late.
|
| Personally, I have plenty of my own gripes with Apple, but
| ever since switching to their ecosystem 13 years ago I've
| felt like I hopped off a creaky freight train and onto a high
| speed maglev.
| Kye wrote:
| I'm sure many companies felt the same way at their peak.
| Microsoft certainly lived in its hubris before web and mobile
| forced it to bet the company on making an AWS for its
| existing contracts who hadn't yet moved everything to clouds.
| luckyorlame wrote:
| Yawn
| karmakaze wrote:
| Reading the comments here look like the beginning of a tipping
| point.
| znq wrote:
| Article is from 2009. Nevertheless interesting to go back in time
| and see what has changed. Or hasn't.
| Lamad123 wrote:
| It's gotten much worse, but why should the corp care?
| Shareholders are happy and the sheeple are mostly happy!!
| gojomo wrote:
| I'm personally sympathetic to Graham's points in this 2009 piece.
| He was prescient about the "bummer" it is to be stuck in a
| monopolist's monoculture.
|
| But Apple's growth in market value since - from $175B at the end
| of November 2009, to $2.73T today - at least raises the
| possibility that Apple wasn't making a "mistake", from the
| perspective of Apple shareholders, managers, & employees.
|
| Maybe once you've reached a certain powerful 'commanding heights'
| via other strategy & technology, the optimal enterprise strategy
| is truly to bully developers, & take their lunch money for
| yourself.
|
| Still a drag on human progress & welfare, sure.
| tomxor wrote:
| > But Apple's growth in market value since - from $175B at the
| end of November 2009, to $2.73T today - at least raises the
| possibility that Apple wasn't making a "mistake" [...] Still a
| drag on human progress & welfare, sure.
|
| Basically highlighting the issues of capitalism unchecked.
|
| Initially it can be beneficial to society - I'm confident in
| saying Apple empowered individuals and other companies in the
| early years through to pretty much around the time this article
| was written. For all it's flaws it was an overall force of good
| for society, for humanity... it didn't suddenly stop doing
| that, but changed focus, and started to erode it.
|
| Over time a market winner, or winners are picked, and then it
| seems to be just a matter of time until user exploitation
| starts, without natural pressure to produce the best product,
| with the best experience, for the user beyond basic
| tolerability; it slowly devolves into a venture into wealth
| extraction as the people who originally cared enough about the
| companies original values either leave, retire or die. Finding
| ways to lock in users, creating artificial dependence and
| tricking people into subscriptions are all just optimisations
| on this path to wealth extraction from the average person.
|
| It sounds a bit conspiracy theorist when I read that back, but
| it's hard to say it's not true... this just seems to reliably
| happen to these incumbent corporations.
| draw_down wrote:
| matt_s wrote:
| If we're going to talk about "drag on human progress and
| welfare", there are much bigger fish to fry in the Tech world
| than a 30% surcharge by an App Store.
|
| You could start with any social media company and in my
| opinion, they surpass anything Apple has done as far as a "drag
| on human progress & welfare".
| gojomo wrote:
| Whataboutism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism) is
| pretty boring unless we were specifically trying to create a
| ranked list of the worst things.
|
| Also, without an explanation of why "in your opinion" "any
| social media company" is worse, you're just declaring a
| personal bias - and vaguely, too. (Is social media company
| Snapchat more destructive than Apple's App Store policies?)
|
| If you have some larger grudge against some specific social
| media companies, why not write it up, with reasoning & naming
| names, in an appropriate place? Why only allude to it, to
| make Apple's destructiveness seem smaller?
| CharlesW wrote:
| There are many studies on social media's engagement-at-all-
| costs effects on individuals and society at large, some
| performed (with all positive bits socialized) by the social
| media platforms themselves.[1]
|
| For a balanced view, you could do worse than starting with
| a search for "social media" on Google Scholar. https://scho
| lar.google.com/scholar?q=google+scholar+social+m...
|
| [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/16/fa
| ceboo...
| gojomo wrote:
| Perhaps, but how is that relevant to a discussion of the
| destructiveness of Apple's power & policies?
|
| Does it excuse them somehow?
|
| Are you sure App Store dynamics don't, overall, increase
| the power of the worst social platforms?
| matt_s wrote:
| The parent commenter brought up "drag on human progress and
| welfare" and keeping the topic to Tech companies I was
| pointing out there are far worse.
|
| There are studies that show social media causing mental
| health issues and issues with spreading misinformation,
| many have shown up here on HN. I was stating my opinion
| which should be obvious, but maybe it's not, every comment
| where you type into a comment text box is an opinion. I
| don't have a grudge, just think the contributions to
| humanity by social media companies are far less than the
| problems they cause.
|
| The hypocrisy on HN is funny sometimes, many times
| articles/comments about startups are about monetizing and
| charging customers more, raising capital, etc. and then for
| large companies they charge too much and it's a "drag on
| human progress and welfare"?
| threeseed wrote:
| > Still a drag on human progress & welfare, sure.
|
| The App Store since 2009 has directly resulted in the creation
| of Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, WeChat etc.
|
| Not sure how you can argue the world hasn't progressed since
| then.
| gojomo wrote:
| Where did I say "the world hasn't progressed since then"?
| That's a hallucinatory misreading & misrepresentation of my
| comment.
|
| But also: those successes are attributable to mobile apps in
| general, not Apple's self-serving policies.
|
| Plausibly, all of these should be possible as zero-install
| web apps - but as Apple (& others) have started raking in the
| App Store money, their investment in competitive open web
| technologies that could match proprietary-platform native-
| apps has languished.
|
| Further, the App Store's market power is now being used to
| limit the functionality of such apps - banning competitive
| payment mechanisms, or entire classes of disfavored speech
| and content, or product benefits that compete with Apple
| offerings.
|
| And the App Store plus iOS power is being used to torpedo the
| business models of Apple competitors - as with the changes in
| tracking defaults that have kneecapped Facebook revenues,
| mafia-style.
|
| Does local protection rackets deserve credit for every
| business that manages to pay, & survive, their shakedown?
| afthonos wrote:
| > Plausibly, all of these should be possible as zero-
| install web apps - but as Apple (& others) have started
| raking in the App Store money, their investment in
| competitive open web technologies that could match
| proprietary-platform native-apps has languished.
|
| Worth noting that this was basically what Jobs offered
| developers initially and everyone hated it.
| gojomo wrote:
| Yes, developers wanted more. There were (at least) two
| paths possible: native apps, & upgrading web
| capabilities.
|
| It's good some effort was plowed into both, at different
| timescales!
|
| But currently, the App Store's monopoly/monoculture
| abuses are retarding progress. The App Store deserves
| credit not for creating or enabling the social app listed
| in the ggp - but instead for capturing more of the value
| of those innovations for AAPL owners & insiders.
| PolygonSheep wrote:
| I do think human progress and welfare would have been much
| better off without Twitter and Instagram. I think WhatsApp is
| basically neutral and I haven't used WeChat or Snapchat so I
| can't comment on those.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| These apps / networks have sprung up despite the limitations
| of the app store.
|
| We have no idea what the present would look like if the app
| store was more open.
| ickelbawd wrote:
| That's arguable. Besides the fact that twitter was founded a
| year before the iphone was even announced, mobile, networked
| computers we can fit in our pockets drove the
| creation/adoption of all those things. The app store helped
| facilitate, sure. But can you really argue they would not
| have appeared without an app store? What if phones were more
| like desktops used to be where I can freely install whatever
| I want from wherever I want? It was that environment that
| spawned the host of chat apps that preceded twitter and the
| rest.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Hopefully that was a joke (?)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > Now a lot of programmers have started to see Apple as evil.
|
| Not me (caveat: I worked at Apple). Clumsy is the word that comes
| to mind with regard to their handling of the AppStore. I see
| little or no evil intent
|
| > Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand
| software.
|
| That's a bold statement.
|
| I'll be more nuanced. My impression is that Steve Jobs treated
| 3rd party software on "his devices" as a necessary inconvenience.
| He preferred the software he had a hand in, the software
| developed in house.
|
| To me that is enough to explain Apple's approach to the AppStore.
| amitmathew wrote:
| I agree - clumsy is a great way to describe their approach. In
| my many negative experiences with the review process, I never
| got the sense that there was evil intent. In the end, it's
| clear the business as a whole doesn't care about third-party
| developers - they fulfilled their goals of commoditizing their
| complements and rode that wave to enduring success.
|
| I do wonder how many amazing products and companies never got
| started or failed because of their fickle and Kafkaesque review
| process and their 15-30% revenue cut. For me personally, I've
| had to nix several business ideas and product features because
| it was too dependent on Apple's whims.
|
| But that's just Apple being Apple. What really blows my mind is
| how Google blindly followed Apple. Google could have carved out
| such a valuable market. No developer fees! Clear and consistent
| review process! No taking 30%! Instead they blindly walked into
| the ditch with Apple. Talk about a lack of vision...
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| Yep, Google completely ignored why platforms like the PC beat
| the Macintosh to begin with
| scarface74 wrote:
| Isn't Android the same Pyrrhic victory that Windows was for
| PC Makers? All of the market share but none of the profit?
| No PC maker is making any real money selling PCs just like
| no Android manufactures are making real money.
|
| At least MS made some decent money on Windows. Google has
| to pay its competitor Apple more than it makes on Android
| if you extrapolate what came out during the Oracle lawsuit.
| ido wrote:
| Did they though? Apple is today by far the most profitable
| computer manufacturer.
| intrasight wrote:
| > too dependent on Apple's whims
|
| so why not just make a web app?
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| Web apps cannot use certain features, eg. Bluetooth, and it
| will for sure be less user-friendly and responsive than a
| native app.
| grishka wrote:
| The use of Google Play is at least not mandatory. You can
| fully DIY your app distribution if you feel like it.
| spicybright wrote:
| We call it a ditch, Google execs call it good returns.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| I worked for Google at the time of the Fortnite fiasco and
| challenged the company on why we didn't use our "beyond
| status quo" spirit to innovate the business model. It got
| raised to the top of our all hands dory and the Play store
| director had to come on stage to address the question.
| Scripted response. Scheduled a follow up 1:1 through his
| admin. Sat in a room for 30 minutes while he fed me bullshit.
| Walked away convinced Google culture is dead. No longer work
| at Google
| amitmathew wrote:
| I figured there must be sensible people within Google
| trying to fight the good fight. On the surface, it makes
| business sense to follow the status quo. But I wonder if
| that's true for the long term. Wouldn't the Android
| platform be worth a lot more if they gave developers
| freedom to explore different strategies and business
| models? What if we could get proper demos? What if we could
| properly interact with our customers and do things like
| easily issue refunds? I don't know, maybe I'm way off, but
| I always thought that Play Store revenue should be a lot
| higher than it is now if Google exhibited some leadership.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Wouldn't the Android platform be worth a lot more if
| they gave developers freedom to explore different
| strategies and business models?
|
| Say Google does the right thing. Enables great apps,
| charges 4% instead of 30%, everything goes well.
|
| What does Apple do in response? If they do nothing,
| Android eats their market share. That's kind of the
| point, isn't it?
|
| But that means they can't do nothing. They'd have to
| respond in kind; do the right thing too. Which means it's
| not a competitive advantage for Google. All they do is
| lose the 30% they're getting right now.
|
| Even worse if Apple is foolish and the move actually
| succeeds, because then Android gets a real monopoly
| instead of this duopoly fig leaf they each use to claim
| they have competition.
|
| This why duopolies are just as bad as monopolies if not
| worse. We need real competition and barriers to entry low
| enough that someone without a vested interest in the
| status quo can actually enter the market.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| I dont think the solution is to drop the fee to 4%. My
| pushback on the Play execs was that we need something
| unique, that seems fair and recognizes the value that 3rd
| party and the platforms provide. The 30 / 70 is simple
| and clean but its not "good" or "fair". It doesnt mean
| you cant capture say 20% of app revenue in a way that is
| good and fair
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| If Google went to 4% and Apple stayed at 30%, a lot of
| people would still be buying iPhones and not caring.
| amitmathew wrote:
| That's true, but it would help Google get out from
| Apple's shadow on mobile. From a strategic perspective,
| you want your competitor being forced to make moves
| because of your actions. Then you get to dictate the next
| few steps. But for any of that to matter, you have to
| view mobile as more than another ad platform, which
| Google doesn't seem to.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Wouldn't the Android platform be worth a lot more if
| they gave developers freedom to explore different
| strategies and business models
|
| Android as a platform is completely at odds with Google
| as a business, and will continue to be so as long as
| Google's is only revenue stream is online advertising.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Google doesn't care about Android's experience or the
| Play Store. It came out in the Oracle lawsuit that
| Android had only made Google around $25 billion in profit
| during its existence. Android was already the dominant
| platform around then. Apple makes more from Google in
| mobile by Google paying it to be the default search
| engine than Google makes from Android.
|
| Android is only a defensive play for Google not a profit
| center
| ffhhj wrote:
| Please mark this as accepted answer.
| MajorBee wrote:
| > only $25 billion in profit
|
| Surely there must be a typo in one of these words? I
| can't imagine 25 humongous ones being loose change for
| any business.
| scarface74 wrote:
| For a company the size of Google making $22 billion on a
| product from 2010 to 2016 is a nothingburger.
|
| https://www.engadget.com/2016-01-21-android-22-billion-
| in-pr...
|
| This is their total net income between 2010 and 2016.
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/n
| et-...
|
| They pay Apple a reported $18 billion a year to be the
| default search engine on Apple devices.
| morelisp wrote:
| It's a single-digit percentage of what ads make, without
| much room for growth. I doubt it's a single-digit
| percentage of technical effort.
| quambene wrote:
| Thanks for trying.
|
| Difficult to change a business model if it's working quite
| well (financially). Long-term thinking and short-term bonus
| payments don't align.
|
| Kudos for your decision to leave.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Yes, sadly. Google is operating on a "what can we get
| away with?" attitude vs a "what is possible?" one. No
| single 3P has power to change the system.
| Ruphin wrote:
| Just curious, what does 3P stand for?
| enos_feedler wrote:
| 3rd party developer.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Ultimately, you ran into reality: That no matter what story
| these companies sell you on their mission, a 30% profit
| margin is a 30% profit margin, and not a single person is
| going to stand in the way of that much profit.
|
| The honest truth is Google culture never existed, they just
| had most people fooled for a long time.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| Elsewhere in this thread, someone has suggested that
| Android makes up a fairly small percentage of Google's
| net income. Does that have any bearing on this analysis?
| enos_feedler wrote:
| This is a good point. A project within Google that
| doesn't move the needle next to it's search advertising
| business should not be _driven_ by profit margin. However
| there are a few reasons why I think this happened within
| Google Play:
|
| 1. Lots of pressure for google products and services to
| become standalone businesses
|
| 2. Too much imbalance of power between business teams and
| engineering teams within Google Play. The business teams
| just saw it as copycat App Store and the engineers and
| product leads didn't have the influence to overturn this.
| In some ways this is against what the broader Google
| culture was thought to have. (Eng/prod > bd).
|
| 3. Androids existence as a defense and not as an
| opportunity to create the future. Android has always been
| this and it's engrained culturally.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| There are ways to lie with statistics, but the Play Store
| is a huge cash cow. I play a mobile game where thousands
| of players at least have spent more than a car in in-app
| purchase transactions. Someone told me if you're spending
| less than $1,000 they consider you free to play. One of
| the key items for high level play you can only unlock
| after spending $12,000 on an account.
|
| Imagine if Ford could make 30% profit on selling cars,
| and didn't even have to manufacture the car.
|
| Fortnite alone is worth hundreds of millions to Google.
| There's a reason they're willing to compromise any
| supposed principles they had over it.
|
| Then there are additional effects, like how their control
| over the Play Store impacts their advertising
| opportunities on Android.
| cromwellian wrote:
| There's a difference between the informal culture of rank
| and file employees, how they see themselves and their
| peers, and the upper management. Culture at the bottom
| can get diluted by hiring too rapidly and a high degree
| of churn, which doesn't yield sufficient time for new
| hires to be assimilated into culture, gradually weakening
| it.
|
| But at the top, for a public company, the only culture
| that truly exists is the next quarterly report. Once
| you're on the "must show XX% quarterly growth" treadmill,
| your decisions will be dictated by strategies to further
| that. Unless you have a crazy person at the top willing
| to burn money and investor sentiment (e.g. Elon Musk,
| Zuckerberg, Jobs. Google doesn't have crazy founders
| running it anymore, which is why Google Bets are kind of
| a joke, and why the company continually kills stuff that
| you need to be in the long hall for to make a success
| (e.g. gaming studios, red studios -- they finally got a
| hit Cobra Kai -- and killed it, etc)
|
| That's why some of the earlier comments about
| understanding Apple's App Store behavior as "good
| intentioned" is off. That MAY have been the original
| reason behind Jobs wanting it, to gate keep the platform
| and protect brand image and quality, but it is NOT the
| reason for charging high fees today.
|
| Apple made $72 billion on App Store revenue in 2020.
| Their total revenue was $274 billion, so 26% of all
| revenue came from the App Store. That is the reason for
| the inertia in keeping the Store exactly the way it is.
|
| The App Store's purported benefits to the platform:
| security, quality, etc could all be maintained for a
| fraction of that. Apple is not spending $72 billion a
| year on store maintenance. It's very clear this is about
| money, not high minded principle.
| brimble wrote:
| I've not dug into it, but explanations I've read that
| claim they kinda _did_ have a culture until they reverse-
| acquired themselves with the DoubleClick purchase have
| some ring of truth, just from my casual external
| observation over the company 's lifespan. It lines up (c.
| 2008) with some other things--inline ads going full-evil,
| the search engine anti-spam efforts evidently drying up
| (or, at least, entirely failing from then on despite
| whatever effort they were making), et c.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| If someone, like I was, is curious what a "dory" is in this
| context, I believe this is it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Moderator
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Sorry about using that terminology!
| TomSwirly wrote:
| Funny, I had much the same experience over ten years ago!
|
| Google had an internal product called GoogleBase that was a
| huge "database" of "all products" based on Bigtable.
| Unfortunately, the whole thing had been misrepresented by
| the original managers, who moved to another project, and
| the dozens of engineers on the project were all struggling.
|
| I asked Larry Page about this at a meeting, and he said,
| "We'll get back to you" and someone did and I responded,
| but there was no feedback, and eventually, a hundred person
| years later, it was all cancelled.
|
| It was stressful for me and unproductive.
| xunn0026 wrote:
| That's a very... generous take.
|
| On my 1st London iPhone dev meetup there was a single
| representative from Apple: a biz dev guy! He asked a single
| question, when I commented the review process is annoying
| (compared to anything we had back then).
|
| So, in retrospect, Apple encircled the whole ecosystem from the
| get go and wanted 120% of all the money that could be
| extracted. And they executed on it rather flawlessly.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| > My impression is that Steve Jobs treated 3rd party software
| on "his devices" as a necessary inconvenience.
|
| That feels "evil" pretty fast, for someone trying to get his
| software published. Software that only works on their platform,
| that you could only develop with hardware they supplied.
| [deleted]
| kodah wrote:
| > My impression is that Steve Jobs treated 3rd party software
| on "his devices" as a necessary inconvenience. He preferred the
| software he had a hand in, the software developed in house.
|
| I'd say this is the struggle of every big firm. I like and
| contribute to open source, but I will almost always prefer
| whatever is built in house because the ease to influencing it's
| development to satisfy my needs is orders of magnitude smaller.
| Secondarily, when we build software outside of our host domain
| (as a business) it breeds innovation.
|
| Thanks for layering some context on top of PGs thoughts.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| (caveat: i too worked there) i think what you wrote matches my
| experience, is basically perfectly said.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > Their fundamental problem is that they don't understand
| software.
|
| then in the same breathe, please tell me who understands it.
| burnished wrote:
| That is a direct quote from the article, mandeep, you're
| gonna have to hassle Paul Graham directly to get a proper
| answer.
| mandeepj wrote:
| I was pointing to PG himself with my comment, and not the
| poster.
| bloqs wrote:
| Never assume villany where stupidity is sufficient
| seanalltogether wrote:
| > Clumsy is the word that comes to mind with regard to their
| handling of the AppStore. I see little or no evil intent
|
| The emails between Steve, Eddy and Phil seem to say
| differently. https://9to5mac.com/2020/07/30/internal-emails-
| show-how-an-a...
| [deleted]
| ineedasername wrote:
| _Steve Jobs treated 3rd party software on "his devices" as a
| necessary inconvenience._
|
| That only explains Apple's approach until Tim Cook became CEO.
| They've had more than a decade to evolve behind that mindset.
| The iPhone is more than 5x older now than it was when PG wrote
| this article. Jobs can't be blamed for much anymore. If Apple
| is still stuck in his vision of apps on iOS, that's on them
| now.
| masklinn wrote:
| > That only explains Apple's approach until Tim Cook became
| CEO.
|
| Jobs' decisions (if not necessarily his decision making
| process) are very much part of the company's DNA, pretty much
| all the executives remain Jobsian picks.
|
| Plus it's hardly been a failure in the market, and it's not
| like direct competitors are disrupting the status quo, so
| from a business perspective what's the incentive to change?
|
| > The iPhone is more than 5x older now than it was when PG
| wrote this article.
|
| And it's never been more successful. Apple's market cap's
| grown by more than an order of magnitude since that essay.
| jarjoura wrote:
| I partially agree, evil is such a hyperbolic word. However,
| Apple and its rank and file during the Steve Jobs era believed
| 3rd party developers to be rather incompetent, and 3rd party
| software could never live up to the beauty that Apple itself
| could create. (I also worked at Apple)
|
| If it somehow proved Steve Jobs wrong and some indie company
| made popular beautiful software, Apple would bend over backward
| to acquihire them, sell off (read. kill) the product, and get
| them making beautiful software for Apple. Of course, back then,
| it was a dream for so many to get noticed by Apple and end up
| working there.
|
| Don't try to minimize the bad faith moves from Apple by calling
| them "clumsy". SJ (and proved through documents released from
| the Epic trial) absolutely treated everything as a zero-sum
| game and was exceedingly ruthless in getting what he wanted. On
| the one hand, yes, the iPhone App Store was just an expansion
| of the iTunes/iPod platform they had started and found worked
| well. Yes, it also simplified, what at the time, was an
| insanely complex web of mobile app markets that carriers
| themselves didn't truly understand the potential of. All would
| have been fine if they approached it with an open mind and
| listened to feedback.
|
| The main issue and feelings of "evilness" that so many people
| express about Apple, is that they so quickly used the App Store
| process as a weapon against anything that showed signs of
| stealing market share away from them. For example, around the
| start of the iPad, so many interesting book store startups
| launched, (ie. comic books, out of print books, etc.) and I
| loved it. However, SJ wanted his iBooks platform and through
| draconian changes in App Store policy, shut them all down over
| night. Sorry, but there's nothing clumsy about that that. It
| was very intentional, and very much directed at Amazon's
| Kindle, regardless of who got hurt along the way.
|
| Developers tried, repeatedly, to give feedback about ways to
| improve the App Store, time and time again. Instead, Apple
| closed feedback forums, canceled Q&As at WWDC, and followed up
| with more App Store policies against speaking out and
| essentially made it a privilege to work with them.
|
| I loved woking there, I really did, but we shouldn't minimize
| these feelings of evilness that so many developers express.
| Their intuitions are right and they deserve to get as much
| visibility for their pain as possible. Keep in mind that essay
| was coming from the perspective of a VC who was dealing with a
| lot of his startups struggling with the App Store and him
| trying to get Apple to listen. If that meant being dramatic
| with words like Evil, so be it, but in the end, surprise, it
| didn't really do anything heh.
| TrinaryWorksToo wrote:
| What's the difference between evil and negligent clumsiness?
| elpakal wrote:
| You snuck the word negligent in there
| TrinaryWorksToo wrote:
| I did, and that's why I don't think intent is a difference.
| It's malicious compliance which does have intent, imho.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Intent.
| usefulcat wrote:
| For the party on the receiving end, maybe nothing.
| conception wrote:
| Intent? Someone who's evil probably can't be convinced what
| they are doing is harmful, since they did it out of greed and
| selfishness. Someone who's just incompetent can get better.
|
| Not that I think apple falls particularly in either category
| but there's a difference, the ability to realize and change.
| Kye wrote:
| On the other hand, their Windows software is universally bad.
| The ending of Safari for Windows probably means they recognize
| this to some extent. My guess is they rely heavily on the
| quality of their libraries and tooling to make good software on
| OS X and iOS, and they struggle on Windows since it's an alien
| world.
|
| So maybe it's accurate to say they _do_ understand tooling, and
| that negates the need to understand software as long as they
| stick to a world they control.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| It served its purpose. Back in 2009, iTunes on Windows was
| fantastic.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I think that is not a universally agreed upon statement.
| Checking my receipts, at that time I paid significant money
| to 3rd parties to sync my iPods to PC without iTunes. It
| was massively over bloated for what I needed it to do, UI
| was behind, and once installed it refused to uninstall
| itself.
|
| (and same continues today. My wife has recognized the sound
| coming from my office when, every few months , I try to
| copy photos from my work-mandated iPhone to my windows pc.
| It's a few hours of screaming, then I give up)
|
| It's tricky. If they don't provide key software for Windows
| to work with their hardware devices, they'll be blamed for
| it and called an evil proprietary company (which, fair
| enough. Just let me plug it as USB storage if you want to
| avoid _that_ particular reputation :).
|
| On the other hand, if they make their crucial software on
| Windows half assed, some people like myself at least, will
| be wary of touching anything Apple with 10ft pole. It May
| be that working strictly in Apple ecosystem makes for
| better experience, but that's not my world so I'm not
| tempted to dip my toes in any more than I have to).
| temp8964 wrote:
| I tried to use iTunes in 2012(?). iTunes is the most
| confusing software I have ever used. Maybe it was good in
| 2009? I wouldn't know.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Maybe it was good in 2009?
|
| It was not. Though at least it did the job, which was
| rare enough (then again I've had to use sonicstage, now
| that was some bottom-tier irredeemable garbage).
|
| I'm pretty sure iTunes was at its best when it was
| SoundJam and got worse every time it got touched
| afterwards, until Apple managed to declare software
| bankruptcy... and replace it by something worse than it'd
| ever been.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| It wasn't good then either. Still a bloated mess and even
| worse you were more forced to use it as literally nothing
| else could do something like put a CBZ in a 3rd party app
| unless it happened to support Dropbox or something
| similar. It's just terrible.
| pram wrote:
| I realized this with Quicktime 7 and Quicktime X. X is my
| favorite media player, and yet the experience with 7 on
| Windows was like a time machine back to the shittiest parts
| of the 90s.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| You thought Quicktime 7 was bad? How about Quicktime 4.0
| (released on June 8, 1999)? It took a few versions and a
| lot of hubris to get Quicktime 4.0 Bad.
|
| http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
|
| >Interface Hall of Shame - QuickTime 4.0 Player -
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Ha ha, that _is_ the shittiest part of the 90 's right
| there.
| fnord123 wrote:
| Even on osx. Pages is bad. Numbers is bad. Calendar is bad.
| AppStore is slow and cumbersome.
|
| Safari is quite ok.
| brimble wrote:
| MacOS' "productivity" software is my favorite I know of.
| I'd have to go back to historical (10+ years old) versions
| of similar products to find ones I like better. Their
| quality is _excellent_. They 're light on resources (I can
| forget them in the background), quick to launch, do
| everything I need (even collaborative editing), and have
| good-enough templates for most stuff I'd want to do.
| Preview is best-in-class, as far as I know. Finder may not
| be amazing but it also crashes ~never (which isn't
| impressive compared to Windows Explorer but is compared to
| some, ahem, other platforms) and is lightweight. The
| calculator is great (and I miss a couple very minor, but
| thoughtful, UX things about it when I use others). Digital
| Color Meter is awesome. I wish Notes had export and
| supported Markdown input, but how smoothly and sanely it
| handles things like embedding files, and how stable it is
| and the reliability/speed of sync between devices, makes it
| pretty damn good anyway. The email reader's stuck at some
| kind of local maximum like nearly all other email clients,
| but it's good enough.
|
| The 1st-party software quality is a _big part_ of what
| keeps me around. Possibly the _main_ thing.
|
| [EDIT] Oh, and the Terminal is one of the best there is.
| It's _very_ good. Others may have more features, but it 's
| _far_ from minimal, yet manages to have lower input latency
| than most (which tells me Apple 's got their priorities
| straight)
| danieldk wrote:
| I largely agree. Keynote became a bit bland compared to
| the competition, but I love working in former iWork apps
| (especially since they've added no-frills support for
| equations), Terminal, Preview, etc.
|
| The only thing that I loved, but has become slow and
| buggy is Grapher. Grapher is a hidden gem, very few
| applications come close for quickly visualizing a
| function.
| brimble wrote:
| Whoa, there's one I didn't know about.
|
| I should probably take the time to RTFM for that stuff,
| after more than a decade on the platform. Every time I
| find another little Apple utility, I end up getting
| something out of it.
| dhosek wrote:
| Yeah, it's definitely worth poking around in Applications
| and its sub-folders to find out what the heck is on the
| computer already. Lots of hidden gems.
| brimble wrote:
| It's a case where not having something like the old-
| school hierarchical Windows Start Menu with its
| delightful "accessories" section, is unfortunate. Takes a
| little more digging to find the fun stuff (and even
| there, Windows hides/hid some cool utilities, especially
| system-config stuff, so you're unlikely to find them
| unless you know the name)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I enjoy Apple's Image Capture with my Epson scanner as
| well.
| sizeofchar wrote:
| I love Numbers and haven't been able to find an easy and
| convenient replacement for it since I left macOS :(
|
| It's blended spreadsheeting with presentation in a free
| infinite canvas is the best notebook app I've met.
| Kye wrote:
| Have you tried the web version? I've never used the full
| OS X version, so I can't compare.
| 015a wrote:
| And Music. It's a travesty the degree of a downgrade
| Apples' users experienced going from iTunes to Music. The
| desktop app (and web app, which seems to be some level of
| an identical codebase) is so bad it borderlines unusable.
|
| And Xcode. It's always been bad. Messages on Mac? An
| embarrassment which gets worse with every MacOS update.
| Spotlight? A meme-level failure of a software product,
| which can single-handedly consume hours of CPU time to
| "index" files after every update, then fail to find an
| _application_ , not even some crazy-hidden file, matching
| an exact string text search.
|
| Safari is _ok_ , but in the scope of how reliably fantastic
| modern browsers are, it's still the worst. Not just in
| standards support & standards correctness, but the
| application itself.
| masklinn wrote:
| > And Music. It's a travesty the degree of a downgrade
| Apples' users experienced going from iTunes to Music. The
| desktop app (and web app, which seems to be some level of
| an identical codebase) is so bad it borderlines unusable.
|
| The most impressive part is that itunes was absolute
| garbage, and music managed to be worse. Quite a feat
| really.
| Aloha wrote:
| I quite disagree on Pages, it's a perfect 80% product.
|
| Nothing replaces Excel however - literally nothing.
|
| As has been said before, its the world most widely deployed
| programing environment.
| dhosek wrote:
| Yep. I do X-Y charts like this
| https://www.dahosek.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/10/NewImage-... with Excel and
| Numbers doesn't correctly handle gaps in the date
| sequence or duplicated dates for the vertical lines
| (unless they've fixed this since I last checked) so I
| still keep Office around for that and a few other minor
| UI affordances that I prefer in Word.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > [Excel is] the world most widely deployed programing
| environment.
|
| It's curious to note, then, how utterly peculiar of a
| programming environment it is: it is a first-order (pre-
| LAMBDA) purely functional array dataflow language with a
| sometimes-graphical interface and little to no capacity
| for any kind of abstraction.
|
| Because of the last point, I would perhaps call it half a
| programming environment (if programming = make a computer
| do stuff + assemble simple doings into larger ones, Excel
| only does the first part). This is alleviated by a clever
| choice of basic datatype: a two-dimensional array of
| crufties over which scalar operations (usually) propagate
| automatically; this affords a rich set of operations that
| are not so low-level that the absence of abstractions or
| side effects would be crippling and at the same time not
| so high-level that you'd have an impulse to drill down
| into their inner workings and change something. In
| particular, you _can't_ store these arrays as elements
| inside other arrays: the layering is impermeable.
|
| That this is a clever choice of datatype has been noticed
| elsewhere: witness APL, MATLAB, or even in some sense
| SQL. Among of all of these, though, Excel is
| distinguished by how very little it can actually do from
| a programming perspective (as opposed to a practical
| perspective or even a primitive-counting perspective).
| It's almost like someone sat down and decided to see how
| little programming functionality a practical tool could
| contain to still qualify as programming, ditched
| everything else, then slashed half of the result.
|
| But if it's a shamelessly minimal programming language
| (if it qualifies as one at all), it's quite striking to
| consider how rich of a programming _environment_ it is.
| You get intermediate results. You get visual indication
| of where the values used in the computation came from.
| You get help for every function as you type it in. You
| get to change the inputs, or any other detail, and be
| dropped into an impeccably updated state of your program.
| You get to see your changes propagate, live, without
| messing around with REPLs, reloading notebook cells, or
| restarting hung servers. You get more IDE for your money
| than CLion and Mathematica combined. _On a computer from
| 1997._
|
| I mean, of course Excel is cheating. If you read papers
| on "visual programming", and "differentiable
| computation", and "provenance", and "incremental
| recompilation", and all the official names for all that
| jazz I just described--you'll see that Excel avoids all
| the hard problems the academics are struggling with by
| _not having the respective features_. (It's well known
| that everything gets easier in a purely functional
| language or without first-class functions, for example.)
| It even insulates the programmer from the problems of
| naming and of factoring (and thus avoids having to
| provide attendant features) by not _allowing_ names or
| factoring.
|
| Now, I'm not saying that Excel is somehow lacking in
| features or that it is a pleasant programming environment
| --it both has a tremendous amount of features and is a
| pretty miserable programming environment past a very low
| complexity ceiling. But, for all that is holy, why isn't
| everybody trying to figure out how to cheat _even
| harder?_
| grishka wrote:
| I'm an Android app developer. But, naturally, I have some
| insight into what my iOS colleagues do.
|
| Every iOS developer I know views the app store as an asinine
| hurdle that they have to clear, standing between them and their
| users. They never see it as something helpful. They certainly
| never see it anything like the way Apple's marketing portrays
| it. The process of releasing an update is stressful because you
| just never know whether they'll reject your app over something
| minor that you consider perfectly normal or even intentional.
|
| Oh, you fixed a critical bug? Too bad, we've typed the word
| "sex" into the search field and turned the safe search off, and
| naked people came up. You have to change your ToS to disallow
| that for us to consider approving your update.
| mileskaos wrote:
| This article doesn't hold up so well since Apple has a market cap
| > $1T. Please tell us how they're gonna fail now, Paul. This is
| like Ted Dziuba trying to convince the world in '09 that NOSQL
| was useless and would die soon. Pure genius
| sebastien_b wrote:
| It reflects that Apple is a de facto monopoly on app
| distribution for phone apps.
| TillE wrote:
| > Their reputation with programmers used to be great.
|
| Maybe in a vague secondhand sense? Mac developers have pretty
| much always been a tiny, tiny niche, and I've heard plenty of
| complaints from them.
| api wrote:
| I've dealt with the IRS and with the Apple App Store. The former
| has far better customer service and is much more transparent.
| splitstud wrote:
| It's actually surprising how good it is
| fatnoah wrote:
| Not gonna lie, my one and only call with the IRS required
| waiting about 60 minutes on hold, but once I got to talk to
| someone, they were friendly, knowledgable, and completely took
| care of my problem.
|
| In my interactions with app store review, it's usually resulted
| in a terse response that required some guessing to fully
| understand. In some cases, we simply gave up because it was too
| hard to get real answers from someone.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _my one and only call with the IRS required waiting about 60
| minutes on hold_
|
| Recently I learned that Waiting-on-Hold-as-a-Service is a
| thing.
|
| According to the newspaper (I forget which one -- lots of
| dead trees around my apartment), there are companies that
| hire people to do nothing but wait on hold on customer
| service lines. When the person on hold is next in line, if
| the company has a paying customer, they switch the call over
| to them. If not, the person who's been waiting on hold all
| that time drops the call and dials in again, sort of
| reserving a spot for the next paying customer.
|
| The rate to get straight through to the IRS is $1,000 to
| $5,000. I think it's a monthly subscription. A bargain for
| lawyers and accountants and such.
| howinteresting wrote:
| Accountants and such have specialized needs, but for
| ordinary people, you can just get that for free with a
| Google Pixel.
| reaperducer wrote:
| It's not the same thing.
|
| The Google thing waits on hold for you. But you still
| wait.
|
| These services connect you immediately because they have
| people who have already done the waiting.
| howinteresting wrote:
| Ahh, I see. That's pretty cool!
| ValentineC wrote:
| I'm surprised few others are creating agnostic competitors
| to Google Pixel's Hold for Me feature:
|
| https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/10071878?hl=en
| mdorazio wrote:
| If you can actually contact the IRS at all. I called multiple
| times last year and wasn't even able to be put on hold, just
| "sorry we have too many people trying to contact us, try
| later". If you do actually get a hold of someone, IRS is
| helpful but also outdated (I had to sign up for a fax service
| to send documentation to them).
|
| Apple's responses often leave a lot to be desired, but at least
| you can use support forums and emails with a good response
| rate.
|
| Note that I don't think this is the fault of the IRS at all -
| they are woefully underfunded and understaffed.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The problem is at least partially that companies flood the
| IRS call center with spam calls, for the express purpose of
| "reserving a spot" for people who pay them for expedited
| access to the IRS call queue.
| e4e78a06 wrote:
| I still find it baffling you need to _physically mail_ your
| stock brokerage transactions to the IRS in 2022. And you can
| only do it via USPS! My brokerage already reports all my
| gains/losses to the IRS, why do I need to mail another set of
| the same documents on top of that?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Do you? I never have and I do not see any instructions on
| Schedule D to breakout individual transactions if they were
| already included in 1099-B.
| Kye wrote:
| Context! Remember, they were slammed with more filings than
| usual due to the stimulus on top of the backlog from the
| previous new filings for the previous stimulus. They had to
| deal with this using a reduced staff amid figuring out how to
| deal with a newly remote workforce.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| It's the same in the UK, I've always had good service from
| HMRC.
|
| Mind you I suspect people who fiddle their taxes have a
| different opinion of them.
| blehn wrote:
| Developers have pretty much solved the launch-fast-and-iterate
| problem with server-side updates -- they don't need to submit a
| new build to Apple for every update. I'd argue that Apple's app
| store policies have mostly resulted in higher quality, more
| secure apps than we would have otherwise (and Android apps are
| evidence of that), which resulted in more trust and faster
| adoption from users.
| madmax96 wrote:
| I think the real key is that Apple has recognized that App
| Store delays are a problem and has taken steps to quantifiably
| improve the situation. See https://appreviewtimes.com/.
| Anecdotally, the first version of one of my Apps was approved
| in < 8 hours. On another, more gray area app, it took ~1.5
| weeks. Gone are the days of 4 week update delays. I've found
| that Apple's release process has identified useful problems in
| my apps too.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| While I agree with a lot of the sentiment in this blog post, it
| certainly didn't age well. I don't see "developer love" making a
| lick of difference for how successful the App Store has been
| (which is, phenomenally). At this point the only thing I see
| reigning in the power of the App Store (and Play Store, a point
| pg also got wrong in this post, but I think that was
| understandable in 2009) is regulation.
| kobalsky wrote:
| I think apple is right now where amazon was before everyone
| started hating on bezos.
|
| amazon still reigns, but ppl got the see the pipes pumping
| biomass from the poor souls that have to deal with their ugly
| end.
|
| IMHO, this marked their high point, and the same will happen to
| apple.
| webmobdev wrote:
| > _I don 't see "developer love" making a lick of difference
| for how successful the App Store has been_
|
| Business history is replete with those whose products were once
| at the top and / or dominated the industry and yet are now
| irrelevant.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This blog post is 13 years old, and was written _before_ App
| Store had its meteoric rise. A successful "cautionary tale
| of premature hubris" it ain't.
| btown wrote:
| There's an old diagram (now a meme) of the points where WWII
| bombers were hit and survived to have those hits recorded; the
| underlying theme is that it's the places where hits _weren 't_
| recorded that were actually fatal. Looking at whether the App
| Store was sufficient in its "developer love," and looking at
| what applications were _rejected_... paints over what
| applications _might_ have surfaced if its policies were
| different, but instead were discouraged before they even began.
|
| One of the worst things about the App Store is that there are
| very few "labors of love" there - very few (if any) quality
| free-to-play games that don't try to aggressively monetize in-
| app transactions, very few "shareware" style apps that rival
| paid subscription apps in quality. There's no real way to
| quantify what might have existed, but we do know that there
| were many shareware developers in the early 2000s that wouldn't
| touch microtransactions with a ten foot pole - where did they
| go?
|
| I think, in part, all this is due to the App Store process
| being so wildly unpredictable and exhausting. If you develop
| something useful, it may be rejected on a whim; the only
| developers who _aren 't_ discouraged after that, are the ones
| whose investors pay them to not be discouraged, may reach out
| via backchannels to ensure that rejections are escalated, can
| fund a pivot if necessary, and in turn expect outsized returns.
| And so every app becomes optimized for monetary return - which,
| of course, makes Apple extremely profitable.
|
| It's a really sad situation.
| collaborative wrote:
| Indeed. Myself as an example. I give stuff away for free on
| the Play Store, but charge to breathe on the App Store. And
| the only reason I do it is to offset the mental drag it takes
| to bear with Apple. Else I would just leave
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > I don't see "developer love" making a lick of difference for
| how successful the App Store has been
|
| Therein we see the commodificafion or the mass consumerization
| or appification or whatever neologism of software, at least for
| smartphones.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Well, as much as the business model is untenable, it lasted 13
| years and counting. [0]
|
| The things that _have_ changed aren 't strictly upgrades or
| downgrades. Apple's approval process is much quicker than it was
| in 2009, but instead of sitting on a bug fix for four weeks, now
| they reject you with no explanation while 20 other apps doing the
| same thing Apple is angry about make millions on the store.
|
| >They get away with maltreating developers, in the short term,
| because they make such great hardware. I just bought a new 27"
| iMac a couple days ago. It's fabulous. The screen's too shiny,
| and the disk is surprisingly loud, but it's so beautiful that you
| can't make yourself care.
|
| I feel the exact same way with the 13" iPad Pro I bought last
| year. Amazing hardware, but it feels like computing in a
| straitjacket. Even jailbreaking it only goes so far to fix the
| underlying problem, which is that playing by Apple's rules is a
| genuine roadblock to a lot of pro app developers who are
| accustomed to selling direct-to-consumer.
|
| However, I don't think Apple actually _cares_. The iPad Pro
| exists for exactly one kind of customer, and one kind of customer
| only: professional artists. As far as they 're concerned, people
| who want proper developer tools, the full Adobe or Autodesk
| suites, or what have you can just give up the touchscreen and
| cellular modem and buy a Mac.
|
| >With Apple that seems less the case. When you look at the famous
| 1984 ad now, it's easier to imagine Apple as the dictator on the
| screen than the woman with the hammer.
|
| ...Did Paul Graham consult with Tim Sweeney on #FreeFortnite?
|
| [0] Also, the submission title should probably have a (2009) in
| it...
| tharne wrote:
| > Amazing hardware, but it feels like computing in a
| straitjacket.
|
| That's precisely what drove me away from apple laptops a few
| years back and back to linux for my home computing. I was
| running an (only somewhat) older machine and every update ate
| more hard drive space and hurt performance. And because apple
| made it, it was damn near impossible to upgrade either the hard
| drive or the memory.
|
| But, it _is_ beautiful hardware...
| ghughes wrote:
| "Computing in a straitjacket" - this is wonderfully pithy.
| chaostheory wrote:
| What pg couldn't predict is that there are still no good
| alternatives to the Apple ecosystem. For normal people, there's
| still only two viable alternatives: MS and Google. Both have
| their pros and cont, but neither is significantly better than
| Apple.
|
| Maybe with the coming XR paradigm shift, things will change?
| brimble wrote:
| As an Apple user, I really _wish_ they had competition. I 'm
| a long-time Linux user too, and that ain't competition. I
| still use Windows a little for work, and personally for
| gaming, and wow, is _that_ ever not an alternative to what
| Apple offers. I 'm tentatively hopeful for Fuchsia, but 1)
| It's Google, so will a non-high-effort/high-jank version
| exist that isn't first and foremost a spying platform? and 2)
| Android's not all that good and never has been, though to be
| fair (I suppose) they acquired that.
|
| As it is, when Apple fucks up (which is often!) I survey the
| "competition" and decide that, no, I don't want to take on
| four new problems for every one I avoid.
| chaostheory wrote:
| I agree and I feel that you've summarized the landscape
| better than I did
| brimble wrote:
| I take the state of things as more a strong indictment of
| the rest of the industry, than Apple's being super-duper
| awesome. Turns out pretty-good is, like, _way_ better
| than the rest. :-(
|
| I guess that's what you get with a market of this shape,
| having very few viable options, all mutually
| incompatible, plus all tied in with perverse incentives
| from other parts of their various vertically-integrated
| behemoth-corporations--even Linux suffers from what _sure
| looks like_ some fire-and-motion action from Red Hat, I
| assume aimed at keeping them on top in the support &
| consulting game. Ubuntu tries something similar off-and-
| on, but just aren't as good at executing on those plans
| and have mostly failed.
|
| Really, one of the most remarkable things about Apple is
| that they do a good job of aligning most of their own
| incentives with things that provide _some_ kind of
| significant benefit to users, even if it 's arguably only
| as a side-effect.
| mocmoc wrote:
| Another genius
| draw_down wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Apple 's Mistake (2009)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7344783 - March 2014 (56
| comments)
|
| _Apple 's Mistake (2009)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6329991 - Sept 2013 (8
| comments)
|
| _Apple 's Mistake_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1081514 - Jan 2010 (25
| comments)
|
| _Apple 's Mistake_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950751
| - Nov 2009 (269 comments)
| kerblang wrote:
| Absolutely right, aaaaand... it doesn't matter. People will do
| whatever is necessary to get their app in the user's hands. But
| Apple doesn't have Steve Jobs anymore and that matters a lot.
|
| Anyhow, the question driving everything now is "Security?". How
| do you deliver non-dangerous software to innocent people? What is
| the (un)fashionably libertarian answer on this anyhow? Let them
| eat blackmail?
| splitstud wrote:
| It only matters if Apple doesn't care how many people develop
| for their platform. You say 'People will do whatever...'. Sure,
| some will. Some won't. Some have to. Would you want your
| platform to be skewed in any way towards those that 'have to'?
|
| The libertarian and bog standard answers agree in this case =
| you don't need to know how, we don't need you to be the
| decision maker.
| pier25 wrote:
| When this was written I was an Apple fanboy.
|
| These days, as a dev, I really don't trust Apple at all. I would
| never even think of making a product for any of the Apple
| platforms. As a freelancer I've stopped taking any iOS/macOS
| projects too. It's not the 30% but Apple's attitude of
| controlling their turf like the mafia under pretended moral
| superiority.
|
| As a user I'm as cynical as I've ever been. I use macOS and
| Windows on a daily basis, and for dev work I generally prefer
| macOS over Windows. But I'm always running at least a major macOS
| version behind and never buy any 1st gen Apple product. I simply
| expect their stuff to fail in one way or another. I've been
| bitten way too many times to trust them. Nvidiagate, Radeongate,
| Yosemite, iPad 3, iPhone 4, etc, the list is very long.
|
| Just weeks ago, my wife's Macbook Air (a 4 year old machine)
| started having issues with the keyboard and trackpad
| disconnecting. Apple's authorized repair services* say they want
| to replace almost all the parts (pretty much excluding the
| screen) and the repair cost is almost as much as buying a new
| Air.
|
| * Apple Mexico doesn't really do repairs here like in the US so
| you're forced to go through one of those services.
|
| Or right now, the Apple TV has been suffering issues with Atmos
| for the past couple of months. There's a thread in Apple's forums
| with 14 pages of users complaining which keeps growing even
| though posts are deleted by the mods constantly.
|
| https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253168177
| m348e912 wrote:
| I bought an m1 macbook pro not too long ago and I love it. But
| if I got a job where they offered me a choice between a macbook
| vs a windows laptop for work purposes, I'd take the windows
| laptop. I just find if I need to get work done, PC/Windows is a
| slightly better option.
| wil421 wrote:
| Apple in the US kinda stopped doing repairs. They used to
| replace screens but now they just give you a new iPhone or
| iPad.
| etchalon wrote:
| I don't believe that's true.
|
| Apple has always had a much more wholesale replacement
| strategy than other manufacturers. Even back in my CompUSA
| days, when I was the "Mac guy" in the shop, the other techs
| lamented how much easier my job was. There was a whole range
| of problems that Apple classified as a full system swap,
| where someone like HP would have replaced one or two
| components.
|
| They're still replacing screens, depending on the break. I
| had a screen replacement last year on my 12. It was just the
| screen. I believe they're more conservative about screen
| replacements though, and have a deep enough supply of refurb
| devices the math might just work out that it's faster/cheaper
| to just hand the consumer a new device.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I assume at some point, technology becomes so integrated and
| tiny that it no longer makes sense to do repairs.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| > 14 pages of users complaining which keeps growing even though
| posts are deleted by the mods constantly.
|
| Wow. They're still doing that? They were doing the same to
| hundreds of iMac users with slightly out-of-warranty displays
| going bad ... 16 years ago.
| pier25 wrote:
| Yep. Same happened with the Radeongate of the 2011 MBP 15''.
| nouveaux wrote:
| "It's not the 30% but Apple's attitude of controlling their
| turf like the mafia under pretended moral superiority."
|
| Do you feel the same way with all large consumer corporations
| or just Apple? Another words, how is Apple different from
| Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Netflix, or Adobe?
| pier25 wrote:
| I guess it's a matter of degree, but personally, as a dev, I
| think it's much worse dealing with Apple than Google or
| Microsoft.
|
| Adobe... I don't love them either but I don't think they go
| around waving a moral banner as if they were saving the
| world.
|
| Netflix I don't know, I'm just an end user and I'm really
| happy with their service.
| freedomben wrote:
| I don't mean this as an excuse, but to a big extent Apple
| has been so successful with their policies and the
| propaganda behind why their policies are better for the
| consumer, that it forces Google/Microsoft to copy them.
| Many of the things the big tech companies do nowadays was
| an idea originated and proven at Apple previously.
|
| Edit: sorry, I meant this as a reply to GP question but
| I'll leave it here.
| jmull wrote:
| Focusing on iPhone users and and not iPhone developers probably
| was/is the right thing to do.
|
| iOS isn't a developer's platform and if it were, developers
| probably wouldn't be interested in it very much, since what
| developers want more than any API, tool or system is users.
|
| Not that they couldn't focus on users better, or couldn't support
| developers better w/o impacting users negatively. They could and
| should, IMO.
|
| Apple has pretty much fixed the issue this post is concerned with
| (very slow app review process)... but it took _several years_ --
| checking the internet, it looks like ~2016 was the general
| turning point, so around 7 years after this post. It shows just
| how little the developer experience matters to developers if you
| have users.
| spideymans wrote:
| > Focusing on iPhone users and and not iPhone developers
| probably was/is the right thing to do.
|
| Broadly speaking, I feel that we in the tech community tend to
| erroneously assume that what's good for developers must also be
| good for users. That's not necessarily true. Developers are
| ultimately just businesses looking to extract revenue from
| users --- we should expect the relationship between developers
| and users to be adversarial to a certain extent.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _iOS isn 't a developer's platform..._
|
| It is, in the sense that a reasonably-good iOS developer
| experience is necessary but not sufficient. What Apple does
| prioritize is giving developers a large, vibrant, and engaged
| audience for their work in exchange for a 30% (or 15%) cut.
| fpoling wrote:
| This is even true on desktop with Apple deprecating and
| removing features with new OS releases. The assumption is that
| developers will take care about it.
|
| But for users of niche apps that are no longer supported by
| developers this is rather problematic and requires to stay at
| older MacOS versions.
| wil421 wrote:
| Didn't Apple used to let you run a VM of your laptop? I swear
| I used to run a VM of a 2011 laptop to use niche software.
| fpoling wrote:
| One cannot run 32-bit Intel binary on Apple silicon even
| via VM. I suppose VM vendors may eventually support that
| via emulation, but it will take a while.
| CharlesW wrote:
| You sure can. Parallels has supported this since its
| first M1 version AFAIK. I'd be surprised if UTM/QEMU
| doesn't support this as well.
| terracatta wrote:
| I think it's easy to read this post, then look at Apple's market
| cap and conclude that Paul got this one wrong.
|
| I don't think he did.
|
| As an entrepreneur, when I held the iPhone 4s in my hand ~10
| years ago, I saw only possibilities. In 2022 when I hold my
| iPhone 13 in my hand, I see a known quantity with all the use-
| cases permanently ossified. I don't dare to dream about what is
| possible. Only Apple can truly move this platform forward. I'll
| be a passive observer.
|
| This is not how I feel about the Mac, and I think Paul's post
| accounts for the difference. I really feel if I have a great idea
| and execute I can meaningfully impact the trajectory of the
| platform.
|
| There is no doubt the iPhone and the iPad will continue to be
| commercially successful products. But now, 14 years after the
| launch of the App Store, that feels like such a poor measurement
| of their net-new impact on society. The magic is gone.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| We're just getting old. I used to think the same thing. Then I
| watched a designer effectively scan my home into a 3D model
| with her phone and return it from her assistant's iPad with
| proposed changes reflected within thirty minutes. That wouldn't
| have been possible only a few years ago.
|
| That's a pretty vain example, but there are a lot of
| opportunities opened by having a sensor that can create 3D
| models of nearby surfaces in everyone's pocket. And that's just
| one sensor Apple has added to their phones over the years.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| > Then I watched a designer effectively scan my home into a
| 3D model with her phone and return it from her assistant's
| iPad with proposed changes reflected within thirty minutes.
|
| Curious to know which app she used for that?
| singularity2001 wrote:
| just search for '3D scanner' if you have a Lidar phone and
| forget about it if not.
| etchalon wrote:
| Completely agree.
|
| The difference between then and now is that EVERY use case
| was changing. As smart phones have "mastered" to the common
| ones, the real change is happening at the edges and it's
| crazy what other industries are doing with the platforms.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| The way they crippled AI on the iPhone may make you
| reconsider if it is just us aging.
| brimble wrote:
| Insistence on this site that iOS devices are "only for
| consumption" (or similar) baffle me. The things are I/O
| powerhouses. They're out-of-this-world. The only way that can
| be true is for people with weirdly tiny notions of what
| "creating something with a computer" looks like--like, say,
| using it as a tool to create 3d models of a house on-the-fly
| and produce (create!) new designs for that house, as in your
| example. I can't do that shit with my laptop--not without
| peripherals and a lot more hassle.
| Koraza wrote:
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