First, analysts have told Apple they should do something else for ages and Apple rarely followed their advice.
Second, I don’t feel there is any difference between Apple and its sole competitor on smartphone operating systems. Factually, smartphone buyers only have the choice between Apple and Android with Google in western countries. Google appears to have the same approach to captive services as Apple does: there is a google drive, google photos, google music and video and a store for apps. All have paid options.
In iOS and Android/Google, there are third parties for these kind of services, e.g. dropbox for files, spotify for music, etc… I see no difference.
The only difference I can see is that:
Android allows alternative stores or to install .apks. I don’t think this makes much difference in revenue, as very few users actually do that.
Apple does not force you to use their cloud system for your data. You can still keep all your data in iTunes. I am still doing that.
What is definitely better is Android without Google, i.e. a combination of Lineage OS and free software from F-droid. But that is a very small portion of the market and installing Lineage OS is becoming more and more difficult.
Analysts will always point at the option which generates the most revenue in the short term. That is “monopolies”. Once you have a monopoly, you can impose a walled garden, surveillance and regular fee increases.
The problem with smartphones is rather, in my opinion, that development and maintenance of an OS are horribly expensive. In turn that means:
monopolies or duopolies (the actual situation), as alternatives are too expensive to create and maintain (Firefox os, Ubuntu for phones, Jolla, and a few I forgot)
necessity of a continuous revenue stream and therefore offers of pay services: music or video subscription, clouds, etc…
I’m a long time Apple loyalist – there are 4 other Mac laptops in the room I’m sitting in, not counting the work one I am typing on. I’ve put up with years of Apple casually obsoletifying my peripherals (ask me about my Firewire HD museum), then deciding that I don’t actually own any of the software I paid for (how many people have an iOS game from 8 years ago that they love but quite simply can’t download and play anymore), and now essentially deciding that it’s illegal for you to try to fix your broken stuff. I’m this close to done with them, and it’s only the effort of translating a decade’s worth of beautiful, meticulously-crafted classroom Keynote presentations into some other format that has me hanging on.
My computer has an optical drive so I can rip DVDs. I have a stack of optical disks that no longer get used for anything whatsoever except for bootable firmware updates (which often come as an ISO) and for burning an OS distribution on it in the event that I don’t have a spare thumb drive to put it on (or I discover that putting the OS installer on a thumb drive doesn’t work as perfectly as putting it on a disk).
Revenue was up across the board. Sales were flat for phones but down for macs and ipads, both categories where there had not been a hardware refresh this past fiscal year. (citation below)
Apple is the biggest, most profitable public traded company in the world. Its stock is chronically undervalued in comparison to its revenue. This creates an environment where scads of investors, investment analysts and tech journalists who are also investors post stories full of bullshit about the company in an attempt to manipulate the stock price so they can either sell short or buy low. Any story about Apple that characterizes the company as doing poorly is pretty much guaranteed to be bullshit disseminated with the intent of manipulating the company’s stock price.
Apple has taken to touting its services income as a way to distract its shareholders from complaining about the lack of growth in unit sales for phones. There’s no growth in phone sales any more because Apple has run out of people on the planet who have enough money to afford to buy new iphones on a regular basis. Stock market investors have a hard time understanding the concept that there are hard limits to growth, so Apple is forced to wave shiny things in front of their faces to keep them happy.
Next year, Apple will be trying a new strategy of no longer giving out sales figures and instead just talking about the size of their user base (which continues to grow).
A huge chunk of the growth of services income is actually from the ever growing fee Google pays Apple for keeping Google as the default search on IOS devices (citation below). The rest of it is from Apple’s cut of IAPs for freemium IOS games. Rent-seeking services income (fees for cloud storage, fees for streaming music services) continues to be a rounding error on their balance sheet.
Services income and rent seeking gives investors a massive hard on. However, for Apple to actually transform their business model to have rent-seeking as a major component of their income would require a complete transformation of their corporate culture, internal structure, and business model, something that isn’t going to happen, certainly not within the brief time frame that Goldman Sacks analysts are used to thinking about. So yeah, I have good reason to characterize the linked story as bullshit.
eta:
100% this. Every time @doctorow posts something inaccurate, he erodes a bit more of his credibility with readers. If you go off half cocked too often, eventually some people will decide that you’re almost never right and rarely have anything valuable to say.
This ‘macs don’t/didn’t have right click’ is one of the few things that still sends me into an frenzied rage.
And, just in case it’s needed, you can still run any app you want in OS X. Also, not enabling right click by default was expressly designed so that there would be no functionality hidden behind menus ^#%@#@#$!!!.
Now, I’m off to smell some scented candles and do some breathing exercises.
Wow! I do owe you an apology. Now that I’ve reread everything, I realize that I was really way off base. Usually, my brain works better than that. Even I’m impressed with how off track I was. I’m of that age where friends are starting to show signs of dementia. Let’s hope this is just ordinary stupidity and carelessness on my part, not part of something harder to correct.
I’ve been using macs professionally for something like 25 years and have been right-clicking without any difficulty the whole time. Well, possibly with the exception of the original iMac ‘hockey puck’ mouse, but nobody kept that thing around.
Using a mouse that has two buttons, right click works on every mac I have ever used. IIRC it works just fine as far back as OS8 on the original Imac.
With an Apple-made mouse, you can control-click to get a right click. With trackpads, you can tap with two fingers to right click. Furthermore, modern Apple mice and trackpads notice where you press to click and a press on the right hand side invokes a right click. Finally, for those laptops of a certain age that still had a physical clicking button below the trackpad, clicking the button on the right hand corner invokes a right click, clicking it in the middle or left invokes a left click.
Oh my yes. “Sample” implies you sampled from a larger population or group. What you have is an exception selected to hang a narrative on.
So Apple is no different from any other computer company, then?
Neither do I. I just buy their hardware. (Hackintosheers forget the time it takes to make it work in the first place, and I can’t afford that.)
I love taxonomy analogies, because taxonomically, if you accept Reptilia as being a monophyletic group, birds are also reptiles, and I will never stop pointing this out.
Penguins are also reptiles.
I can’t believe this still comes up. It’s like claiming you can’t “undo” on a Mac. Actual users will know that person has never actually spent any significant time on one.
Ohhh, the hockey puck mouse is another item on my rage-inducing list.
(It’s not a small list that I keep)
(( I’m not sure if I’m misreading the replies, but I mean the misconception that they don’t have right click is what makes me hulk-smash. Not the absence of right-clicking. Unless it’s that puck mouse, then I smash to fine dust! ))
Figured as much. I guess I would have rather figured out an infinitely customizable os on my own than try to relearn another predefined way someone else wanted me to. Thats probably a personality trait of mine. id rather conceptualize every way the wheel could work, than make it do so the way someone wants me to, even if my way is more work- because it means I have more freedom ultimately
Penguins are birds, which are theropod dinosaurs; dinosaurs are reptiles, and birds are dinosaurs, so all birds are therefore reptiles.
Penguins are never considered mammals by any real biologist. There is nothing taxonomically mammalian about a penguin.
Mammals are descended from a group which predates what is considered to be reptiles. Mammals are (distantly) related to reptiles, but both are separated by quite a bit of time and evolution.
I like facts. Yeah, it’s weird.
The point you were making about operating systems seemed dependent on some … very odd taxonomy, meaning your analogy seems as comprehensible as using colors. Is it important? Probably not.
I never got to own one, but I actually knew someone who used it to paint in Photoshop with. Rather competently, I might add. I always found that to be impressive, given how hateful I thought the puck was.
Consider this a life lesson: When you presumptuously make some great proclamation that amounts to making a ridiculous value judgement about people on the very forum you’re posting on based solely on the computer brand/system they choose, you’re going to come off like an asshole to a lot of said people.
Now, I’m not sure about you, but I have had the great joy of being to work in the tech space for all of my professional life, and be around computing technology really since I was a small child about 35 years ago. Let me make a (more nuanced) proclamation:
• Linux is great at many things. It’s often not the ideal choice for many types of users on the desktop. It should probably be running almost all of your back-end systems, unless you’ve made the jump to serverless and are sort of post-OS. The most popular smartphone platform by install base is Linux, which is pretty neat. It’s also in a ton of embedded systems, usually for the right reasons.
• Windows finally, finally, does not totally suck. For many typical client-side users, it will work OK, mostly. If you are a creative professional, it has definitely become a viable option, and is certainly the one that will allow you to maximize use of client-side computational resources. It is certainly not perfect, and the typical user will simply need to deal with more computing annoyances like awfully-written driver installers, as well as ongoing security concerns.
• People who like macOS and iOS and Apple’s products, actually, you know, have some totally valid reasons for this. There is a reason why almost every designer will not stop using a Mac, even if it has totally fallen behind in terms of performance. If you don’t understand why macOS makes more sense for more users than Linux… well, there are many things in life that I’m sure must confuse you.
I just find this so utterly… interesting, frankly, coming from the guy who has sort of made it his mission to work security concerns and high-tech big-brotherism into his life work. I would love to see you and Jon Gruber on a panel discussing why you use your relative platforms. Hate to say it but… I think he has a better set of data on his side. But again, it would be interesting, and I would certainly give the Cory side an open listen.
Oh, and for clarity, I say this because as an Apple user, you are Apple’s customer. As a Google user, you are Google’s product. I dunno about you, but I find being the product a lot more cyber-dystopian freaky given these are devices that have access to every single facet of our lives, than being the customer of the manufacturer of said device.
Yeah, the biggest difference between the two companies:
Apple: here’s some hardware, and to help you use it right away we made some services and software as a baseline. After all, we want you to keep buying our hardware!
Google: here’s some services like search and mail, and to keep a sort of entry level we make some reference devices like phones and Chromebooks. After all, we want advertisers to keep buying ads on our network!
Um, I have had no problem with Dropbox or with Google Drive. I also know people who still prefer using Azure. Hardware-wise, there’s no real reason to use iCloud.
The hardest test was when my company went all Google, so I decided to stick with that on my work phone (an iPhone SE—I like the small size) and have noticed no problems. Sure, I needed to install Google Drive, GoogleDocs, Google Sheets, and so on, but those are apps. That is merely a matter of convenience, and a trivial one at that.
