Security is a goal, but the purpose is control. For example, this is different than in Microsoft, where the purpose is security, and more control is sometimes a goal, but mostly comes along for the ride because it's needed (at least traditionally, we'll see how much that continues to change for Microsoft).
This is obvious in all Apple's decisions. Metal/OpenGL, UI changes, custom CPUs, etc. Apple long ago latched onto control as their path to success, and it's worked quite well for them. It's only natural for them to reach for more control wherever they can. Sometimes that doesn't really affect users or developers much, other times it does.
I agree with much of this except for the arbitrary conclusion ‘the purpose is control’.
The strategy is control, most definitely.
The goal is to deliver desirable end user features, security being an essential one of these.
I worked in consumer electronics software development during the early 2000s, when Microsoft was still considered the dominant force.
There were many parts of the software stack where no individual entity had control and standards and features were beholden to consortia and standards bodies which were essentially political bodies, all about capturing leverage over one part of the platform or another.
The result was that the user was simply not in the picture, and obvious ways to improve the user experience just couldn’t be executed because every decision about how to do so was a political battle.
Apple’s strategy of vertical integration allowed them to avoid all of this and simply deliver proprietary features that users wanted.
The problem in this case was not Apple delivering proprietary features.
It was Apple’s competitors failure to cooperate to deliver what consumers wanted.
Android is where it is because it became simply a repeat of that early 2000’s failure, and of course Google was forced to abandon “Open always wins” in favor of progressively trying to take back control.
If we want a more open alternative to Apple’s ecosystem, we need to be honest about why they has been successful, and how the alternatives underperformed.
I think Apple’s continued success is contingent on there being no low end disruption (which is definitely not a given), and would be competitors continuing to fail to create a healthy alternative ecosystem of their own.
My contention is that the lack of a healthy alternative is not due to anything Apple has done.
Apple has been on this upward trajectory for nearly 20 years, and for most of that time they were not dominant.
The problem is that the comparing ecosystems haven’t figured out how to work together to make an alternative yet.
If Apple is failing to allow people to play the games they want, and gaming is an increasingly relevant cultural activity, this is an opportunity for growth outside of Apple’s control.
Just as the music industry and the cellphone industry fell to Apple giving customers what they wanted and what was possible, Apple can fall to a competitor to does understand the value of games.
The arguments about not being able to get people to switch are moot. It’s always true that there are switching costs to overcome.
Competing with Apple would take patience, good management, and a lot of capital being deployed.
There is no shortage of capital looking for a place to invest - there is only a shortage of management talent and imagination.
If we don’t hobble Apple artificially, someone will figure this out, and the whole industry will be better off for it.
Remember Apple’s renaissance began with Steve Jobs saying “We have been thinking that in order for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We need to stop thinking that way.”
> My contention is that the lack of a healthy alternative is not due to anything Apple has done.
Apple absolutely has done things to prevent alternatives to their platforms. Not only can you not make hardware that iOS and MacOS run on (and in rare cases where people have, Apple has sued them[1]).
Can you run something other than iOS on an iPhone? Less and less possible, as they lock the phone hardware (and bootloader) down more and more.
Can you run an alternative app store? Nope, totally not allowed. You seem to think that if enough capital was gathered, you could do so, but you can't. It's completely locked out by Apple, and any way you have to circumvent it is either blocked by EULA, contract, or digital and physical controls. Without legal intervention, this isn't happening no matter how much capital you have, because Apple has specifically closed off all other avenues.
So, is it possible to gather enough capital to compete? I'm not sure sure. You'd have to take a page from Apple's playbook and close everything down to control it, and that's far more expensive now than it was a decade ago, and somehow get enough developers and apps and users in a marketplace that doesn't have anything in it to start. And you have to close everything down to outsiders because otherwise Apple will just support whatever your standards are while not allowing you to interoperate with theirs (look at the history iMessage and XMPP, and why Google eventually had to copy Apple's tactic of a closed IM system).
I think it's important to note that this is, at it's essence, anti-competitive behavior. Apple leverages their control over their system to provide benefit to their users, but they do this in a way that denies competition at all but the highest level, even when working at the lowest level. Again, iMessage is a good example of this. You have to buy into the entire Apple platform, from hardware to OS to App Store and control to be able to send messages across that system, and only to other iPhone/MacOS users, because Apple refuses to develop or provide an API to utilize the system from any non Apple device, while at the same time automatically making SMS messages use the system for iPhone to iPhone communication, forcing their users to use it. Is it better than SMS? Yes. Does Apple give it extra capabilities that other systems can't compete with? Also yes. How is this different than Internet Explorer on Windows back in the day?
The bottom line is that Apple's behavior is anti-competitive (in the true sense of the word, whether or not it meets with the antitrust definition in all cases). They use their control of different levels of the platform to stifle competition on other levels. No piece of their platform can be exchanged for another, so there's absolutely no competition at individual levels, only on the platform as a whole.
I want to be clear here, currently it's not Apple vs Android, it's Apple vs everyone and everything else. There's plenty of Android hardware I can take and load AOSP, or LineageOS, or even a Linux based OS. I can take any of those OS's and run them on lots of different hardware (the limiting factor is what people have bothered to port, not what has been restricted). Calling for enough capital to support another walled garden that can compete on the platform level with Apple in the same manner is not only not useful, it's actively harmful to competition overall as they are only able to compete at the platform level.
I want to make one last note. Have you considered that the reason Apple provides a great product and service isn't because they've leveraged their profit from anti-competitive behaviors to their own benefit, to make it even harder to compete with them? What if instead of a couple hundred billion in cash reserves held at Apple, it was partially spread around to various competing companies in the different segments the platform covers over the last decade? A valid third contender maybe? I don't know, but I have a hard time believing that Apple's been the most efficient steward of all that capital, nor that preventing competition leads to a better situation in the end.
Preventing people using your software on other hardware is not anti-competitive.
It doesn’t do anything to prevent others from developing their own hardware or software.
It’s not as if Apple has a monopoly on good operating systems or developers. Apple’s software isn’t magic.
It’s just well designed and managed relative to the competition. There is no reason it can’t be bettered, except that nobody is trying.
As far as the ‘at every level you can’t substitute other components’ definition of ‘anti-competitive’. That doesn’t work. Every company is like that. The only things which aren’t are certain open source licenses.
At any point where you want substitutable components, one must have agreed interfaces.
As I said earlier, the competitors failed in the early 2000’s because the process of agreeing on interfaces was hopelessly political. At that time the prevailing wisdom amongst VC’s was ‘there’s no money in hardware’.
The only way around that is for competitors (or open source contributors) to establish a truly open platform that commoditizes Apple’s core asset, and then for them all to realize it isn’t in their interest for anyone to seize control of it. That, or someone to just outdo Apple with low end disruption.
I’d like to think that this is what Google will do with Fuchsia, but anyone else can do it.
I actually agree with you that it would be good to have competition at levels other than the platform.
I believe that over a time it’s possible that such an ecosystem could be better for consumers than Apple’s ecosystem.
I do not believe that you can create such an ecosystem by forcing Apple to open certain arbitrarily selected parts of their system.
If anything, I think this would prevent the emergence of a new model indefinitely.
I also don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that it would be better - only that it is a possibility.
As for the cash reserves. Those look quite wise in the present situation. At Apple’s scale, geopolitical risk is real. China as a last resort in the trade war with Trump could easily make it impossible for them to continue to work there. Trump could do the same.
$200B seems like a reasonable hedge against needing to rebuild their supply chains without Chinese cooperation.
It’s also just a concentration of wealth.
Look at all the other players with concentrated wealth who could just as easily be funding a competitor, and actually have a business interest in doing so.
If your argument is that Apple should be funding its competitors, surely that same argument should apply to anyone with enough money.
VC funds, Hedge Funds, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.
The part we agree on is that someone should be funding serious competition against Apple.
There is plenty of capital outside of Apple which could be doing this.
The reason it hasn’t been doing so is that there have been much quicker and easier ways to make money. Advertising engines, Ride share services, Office building scams, etc.
Any way you look at it, building a giant company slowly over decades is a bad way to make money compared to a quick investment in a Unicorn which never even becomes profitable.
> Preventing people using your software on other hardware is not anti-competitive. ... It doesn’t do anything to prevent others from developing their own hardware or software.
Actually, since they also provide the hardware, in the truest sense of the word, it is. They are preventing alternative hardware for their software (they've sued over this), and preventing alternative software on their hardware. No competition is allowed in these areas, to compete you have to replace both.
If you then consider that they lock down what apps can run on their software, that extends the link to software able to run on the device. That means to actually compete on an App level with an Apple app on iOS, you need to not just write a better app, but provide an OS of comparable quality and hardware of comparable quality means they have artificially prevented competition at those levels, since there's no reason that they have to be linked. It provides some small benefits, but there's a large difference between not supporting their OS on other hardware and actively preventing it from running on it, and not providing any softawre except their own for their hardware, and locking it down so no other software will boot. That difference is why those actions are anti-competitive.
> I do not believe that you can create such an ecosystem by forcing Apple to open certain arbitrarily selected parts of their system.
And yet the only reason we don't have that competition is because Apple has closed certain non-arbitrary selected parts of their system/platform. I'm not sure why preventing them from closing those to competition wouldn't help spur more competition in them.
> If anything, I think this would prevent the emergence of a new model indefinitely.
I'm not even sure "model" means in this context. What do you suspect preventing arbitrary removal of competition, which is what Apple does, would somehow prevent a new model?
> $200B seems like a reasonable hedge against needing to rebuild their supply chains without Chinese cooperation.
Having a few full years worth of profit stacked away so they can replicate their entire manufacturing infrastructure needs of a nation that specializes in manufacturing is ridiculous. The comparison to Japanese Zaibatsu was apt before, but you're actually saying it's a good idea if some conditions are met here. Those are known to have outsize negative effects on economies.
> If your argument is that Apple should be funding its competitors
No, my argument is that they have too much control over their platform, with allows them to be anti-competitive. This makes them more money, but at the expense of their users (who do not benefit from that competition), and most likely some ceompetitors, unless you believe Apple would still provide a much better solution, in which case it's just he users that win.
> The part we agree on is that someone should be funding serious competition against Apple.
The fact that you think VC is the answer is part of the problem. Right now VC is the answer, because it's almost impossible for anyone to compete without huge amounts of money, but that's because of Apple's arbitrary barriers to compete.
You say it’s ‘ridiculous’ for Apple to have money in case they need to rebuild their supply chains.
Ok, what do you think they should do if China starts to interrupt their manufacturing there?
I’m saying the risk is obviously real, and that it’s obviously reasonable for them to make contingencies.
What would you do in their situation, and how much would it cost?
The rest of your argument is based on the idea that the only way to compete with Apple is by using either their software, or their hardware.
That seems like an extraordinarily claim, which you need to justify.
At face value it is obviously false given that most phones do not use Apple’s software or hardware.
As for the comment about VC. I didn’t just say VC. I listed a range of people who might be interested in investing in competitors to Apple.
It seems like a weird argument to suggest here on Hacker news, that competing with the world’s largest corporations shouldn’t require investment.
This is a very bizarre assertion.
I’d seriously like to live in a world where it was true - e.g. where we had UBI and hackers could get together to collaborate on an open solution without having to make a living. I’m not saying this as a rhetorical maneuver. I am quite serious.
However, solving that problem has nothing to do with Apple.
As for the ‘model’ question. What you are talking about - where there is competition at every level of the stack, is known as a modular approach.
Generally modularity is possible when the components are commodities. People agree on standards and then innovate in other areas.
If we want the competitive environment you are proposing, what we are talking about is a modular approach to personal computing.
Apple’s approach is an integrated one, where modularity is not part of their offering. M
One way to attempt a modular environment would be to seize control of apple and have a committee dictate how they open up parts of their system to competition.
This is what you are proposing.
Another way would be for a group of people who believe that a modular approach would yield better consumer products to create a modular platform.
I believe that this is what Google originally wanted to do with Android.
The reason they failed and reversed course towards an integrated approach is that we simply are not at the stage where software can be treated as a commodity.
The pace of change in how we build
software is still rapid.
I agree with you that a modular landscape might potentially be better, but I believe that we can only know if it is by building a modular platform that produces better consumer experiences than the integrated ones.
Again, I don’t think this has anything to do with Apple.
I see no reason why for example, WASM couldn’t be a vehicle for a more modern, modular approach to software creation.
Of course you can argue that Apple will hobble it, but that doesn’t matter over time. Their platform will become expensive to develop for compared to the others, and stop being people’s first choice.
If it yields a faster path to better software, the open platform will win. We just need to build it.
But if we just dismantle Apple by force, it will not.
> You say it’s ‘ridiculous’ for Apple to have money in case they need to rebuild their supply chains.
> Ok, what do you think they should do if China starts to interrupt their manufacturing there?
Choose another manufacturer in a different nation? China is not the only one on the market. Saving up enough monety to create a new one from scratch instead of finding a new one "just in case" is ridiculous. That's like you renting and saving up enough money to buy a house "just in case" your landlord evicts you, even though you're perfectly happy renting. There are better uses for that money than sitting as a contingency plan you're better off not doing anyway even if that case happens.
> The rest of your argument is based on the idea that the only way to compete with Apple is by using either their software, or their hardware.
No, my argument is based on the fact the only way to compete with Apple is on the whole platform level, because they've erected barriers to make it impossible to do otherwise.
You can't create better hardware for Apple OS software. You can't create a better OS for Apple hardware. You can't create a new App store for their OS, and you can't even compete on a specific App they don't want you to. You can compete on these specific items of their stack only if they allow you to, and at this point that means you can create apps. Usually. Hopefully.
> Generally modularity is possible when the components are commodities. People agree on standards and then innovate in other areas.
It doesn't take modularity to allow competition. I can buy a Ford automobile and put another engine in it. Because I can do that, I can sell engines that work in Fords. I can also buy Fords and alter them with new engines, and any other new parts I want, and then re-sell them. This is how Shelby American created the first Shelby Mustangs.
If Ford were to take a page from Apple's book, they would both create custom screw and bolt sets for all items in the car, and only sell under a contract that says you aren't allowed to disassemble any parts they don't give explicit permission to, and you're only allowed to use certified Ford parts, except they can't because those are consumer rights protected under law.
> One way to attempt a modular environment would be to seize control of apple and have a committee dictate how they open up parts of their system to competition.
> This is what you are proposing.
No, I'm really just proposing that consumers have more rights over the devices and software they buy. That gets tricky because we don't "buy" our software anymore, we lease it, but we sure as hell buy our hardware, so why is it okay for the manufacturer to use a technical block to thwart a right we are already guaranteed under law?
> I agree with you that a modular landscape might potentially be better, but I believe that we can only know if it is by building a modular platform that produces better consumer experiences than the integrated ones.
Every one of these platforms is already modular, because that's the only way we know how to build software this large and complex. Modularity is not the problem, it's the coordinating updates between components and explaining of the interfaces Apple doesn't want to deal with, because it allows them to provide a smoother user experience. That's nice, but Apple wanting something does not, IMO, excuse the anti-competitive practices used to achieve it. They could easily sign all the components they provide and always show whether you're running official or non-official components not care at all about third parties knowing how to interface with them, and as long as they didn't actively prevent third parties, we'd still be a thousand times better off than we are with regards to choice and user control.
> I see no reason why for example, WASM couldn’t be a vehicle for a more modern, modular approach to software creation.
WASM runs in the browser, iOS only allows for one browser runtime, so they control what capabilities are allowed from WASM code. Again, everything is locked down from Apple as much as they want. They could, arbitrarily, decide tomorrow that only WASM signed by an Apple Developer account and certified by them would run in Safari, and nobody could do a thing about it. Will they? Very unlikely, but the fact there's absolutely no user recourse in that case means WASM fundamentally is no different than something from the App store, even if right now it seems less constrained in some ways and more constrained in others.
> But if we just dismantle Apple by force, it will not.
Nobody is saying dismantle Apple. They would survive just fine if they were forces to provide a mechanism to allow a different App store, or a new OS on their hardware. Since only a very small amount of people would do so, the only difference is they would be slightly less profitable, which is still immensely profitable.
This is obvious in all Apple's decisions. Metal/OpenGL, UI changes, custom CPUs, etc. Apple long ago latched onto control as their path to success, and it's worked quite well for them. It's only natural for them to reach for more control wherever they can. Sometimes that doesn't really affect users or developers much, other times it does.