
Welcome to Apple: A one-party state - imartin2k
https://members.tortoisemedia.com/2020/01/06/day-1-apple-state-of-the-nation-2/content.html
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SllX
Discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22025181](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22025181)

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kick
I thought this was going to be an incredibly cliché manifesto against Apple's
closed-ecosystem, and while in some ways it was, it was surprisingly good, and
this is an exciting move.

However, there was an error (or omission, to be generous) that I found
somewhat strange:

 _The development of the Macintosh computer, released in 1984, is a revealing
origin story for Apple. Jobs had assembled a crew of “pirates” to build a
computer as he wanted it, which meant attractive design, a symbiosis between
hardware and software, and, most of all, control – of the consumer, by him.

In a hundred small ways, he made the Mac immutable and inescapable. Its
elegant contours were actually hard borders, held together by special screws
so that bedroom hobbyists couldn’t get inside with their regular screwdrivers.
Requests to license out the operating system (so that it could be used on
other computers) were refused or ignored. The Mac would be an ecosystem unto
itself. People would have to buy into it entirely, or not at all.

Jobs was forced out of Apple for his hubris; then reinstalled in 1997, when
the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. With Jony Ive at his side, and
until his death from pancreatic cancer in 2011, he introduced a series of
products that were like the original Mac in spirit yet incomparably more
successful: the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad._

This doesn't note that right after he was brought back from NeXT, he was
pushing the idea of licensing the operating systems to _everyone_ (there were
a few being developed at the same time, but I believe the one he was focused
on was Rhapsody, which later became Mac OS X) _very_ hard. So hard, in fact,
that he dedicated like fifteen minutes replying to an audience question on it
at WWDC.

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braythwayt
Note that Jobs didn’t create Macintosh. Having found himself without a power
base within Apple, he looked around for a project and found Jef Raskin working
away on creating an information appliance designed for “people first.”

Raskin’s vision was that it be low-cost and emphasize the user experience. But
he and Jobs had very different ideas about how to accomplish this. Raskin did
not want to create a computer people couldn’t afford, and his ideas for a new
user experience were based on things like incremental search, not shipping an
expensive (for the time) peripheral like a mouse.

Likewise, a bitmapped display and the cimputing power to make it work added
too much cost for the computer to be an appliance in Jef’s mind, so he
eschewed the kind of things Apple was doing with LISA, based on Xerox’s Star.

However, Jobs may have lost his power in the boardroom, but he outranked
Raskin, and he pushed Raskin out. The Macintosh became another LISA, but
without the overhead created by a design team trying to recreate much of the
richness of the Star.

The Macintosh that shipped was less expensive than LISA, but certainly not
inexpensive enough to be an appliance. They were way more expensive than The
PCs of the day, and might well have fizzled had Aldus not shipped PageMaker
and created a “killer app” for Macintosh the way VisiCalc created a killer app
for early PCs.

The story Apple likes to tell about Jobs creating Macintosh is entertaining,
but the backstory is much more educational for those of us working in mid-
sized or larger companies, with all of the conflicting requirements,
tradeoffs, and yes, politics.

Plenty more of that kind if thing at
[http://folklore.org/](http://folklore.org/)

There’s a collection of stories about Jef Raskin. He was an iconoclast with an
insanely focused vision:

[https://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&ch...](https://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&characters=Jef%20Raskin)

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webboynews
His son is also a UX guru and created the ultimate power tool, enso- a
launcher.

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braythwayt
For those unfamiliar, that’s Aza Raskin:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aza_Raskin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aza_Raskin)

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keyle
What I miss the most from the Steve Jobs/Ive era is the surprise, the push.

They were moving the walls. Now it just feels like they're making the walls.

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pmarreck
Steve Jobs' keynotes were legendary.

MacWorld Expos were legendary (for a time). As a late teen geek demanding to
attend some, the energy at those was absolutely palpable, I will never forget
it. They also apparently had legendary afterparties, but I was on the cusp of
21 just when the MacWorlds were hitting their stride circa 1992:
[https://www.macworld.com/article/2833713/remembering-
macworl...](https://www.macworld.com/article/2833713/remembering-macworld-
expo.html)

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cageface
I'll admit life inside Apple's ecosystem is pretty comfortable these days. But
with every new Apple service I sign up for and every Apple product I buy I
feel a bit more at their mercy. It would be pretty disruptive for me to switch
out of their ecosystem now and that makes me uncomfortable. Their rejection of
the app used by HK protesters recently is a good reminder of just how absolute
their control is when they decide to exercise it.

~~~
Hamuko
I don't feel particularly at Apple's mercy because I still have a pretty valid
alternative in Android. I only switched from Android to iPhone a couple months
ago.

And when it comes to services, that's a big meh from me. Apple TV? Got the
free trial, never watched anything on it. iCloud? Backups and settings sync,
something which I won't be needing if I go back to Android. Music? Not using
it, since I imagine it won't have much of the stuff that I want to listen to
(and even if I wanted to get a streaming music service, Spotify still exists).
iMessage has zero market penetration here, Apple Card doesn't exist here and I
think Apple News also is not here. Apple Pay, something that I actually use
and enjoy, still has an alternative in Google Pay.

Really the only product that I feel at mercy is the Mac.

~~~
cageface
I'd like to diversify but I'm pretty tied in at this point. iPhone, iPad,
Macbook, Apple Watch, Apple TV, big iTunes Movie library, Apple Card, photos,
contacts etc etc. I'm pretty happy with most of these but the switching cost
is legit.

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m3kw9
Looks like the writer found a provocative narrative and wrote it to fit Apple
in that narrative

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CharlesW
That's how it strikes me as well, with the caveat that I worked for Apple pre-
Cook, just before and during the Jobs years.

One could just as easily use the United States as a metaphor — obsessed with
self-sufficiency, a "we're the good guys" attitude, suspicious of systems they
didn't have a hand in creating, etc. The author's choice to use China seems
especially petulant given that Apple is the only FAANG company whose business
model isn't based on farming and selling personal data.

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jasoneckert
This article reminded me of this clip from Iron Sky 2:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEERq5tLiOY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEERq5tLiOY)

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lurcio
“Who wants a stylus?” Jobs asked then. “Nobody wants a stylus”

The stylus is great in the right app(Procreate/Notion/Notability...) and holds
more potential So: 1\. Visionaries also have their blindspots 2\. Ergo, App
developers are a major part of what makes Apple great (FB etc moved away from
this) 3\. Apples ‘walled garden’ is the only platform with the potential to
provide users a wholly unified computing experience, over any Apple device...
a cut back version of Weiser’s vision perhaps.

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sornaensis
Nobody wants a stylus to operate their phone or ipod or what have you.

Styluses were a product of limited technology in those specific devices. And
even modern stylus implementations are lackluster IMO. I had a surface book
for a while I used for note taking and I ultimately just replaced that method
with recording audio and typing out highlights. Styluses are good for very
specific tasks such as literally drawing on a computer or precisely
manipulating 3d objects since they can be much more pleasant than a mouse for
that task, but for general interactions? No way, styluses are awful. And they
can be lost/broken.

So I don't see how this was a blindspot for Jobs. He clearly wanted to create
stuff that was the computer equivalent of high fashion with mass appeal, not
niche hardware.

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threatofrain
Jobs spoke in a historical context but I see the Apple Pencil as a stylus and
its vision as very artist-focused (niche).

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shmerl
Paranoia and lock-in, that's how I'd describe Apple.

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olliej
I am sick of “apple is falling behind in AI because it isn’t stealing as much
user data as google and Facebook”

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yalogin
This reads like a hit job. The writer wrote this with an anti apple agenda.
He/she did not elaborate how Apple different from amazon or google.

Also why is the outside world so obsessed with secrecy inside Apple? If they
have that policy it’s their problem. In fact if it’s an issue, it will be a
problem for them hiring great talent. I don’t get as investors and users why
we have to care about what they do.

