Looking forward to reading this! I’ve been thinking that mainstream platforms are going to become less and less desirable for tinkerers and innovators who aren’t interested in specifically developing for those platforms - and as I see it, platforms like Linux and OpenBSD have everything to gain and nothing to lose from this change.
Mac OS is the most interesting example of this. It was traditionally a platform for creators. They were front and center. The UNIXey parts were even a part of that. Then, the likes of iPhones and iPads made consumer market immensely profitable. At some point, they let Mac OS and hardware stagnate a lot like it didn’t matter versus the billions they made on consumer offerings. They forgot their creators were making the things creating those billions. That it was worth investing in their general-purpose platform that fuels and should be closely tied to their ultra-profitable, locked-down platforms.
I’m not sure if that ever changed since I mostly just follow the comments of Mac users rather than Apple itself. People still gripe about them. Makes me think this was a huge, blind spot for them. With Microsoft’s layoffs of QA people, Apple could also invest in high quality/reliability as a differentiator on top of Mac OS’s existing strengths. They’re really screwing up for a company that was otherwise really, really, really succeeding.
Overall MacOS still feel great and is one of more reliable/usable systems out there. But perhaps that’s because the system had such a huge head start to begin with. Certain parts (e.g. Safari) surely look dilapidated.
Would be helpful to put a date in the submission title.
Done, sorry!
Looking forward to reading this! I’ve been thinking that mainstream platforms are going to become less and less desirable for tinkerers and innovators who aren’t interested in specifically developing for those platforms - and as I see it, platforms like Linux and OpenBSD have everything to gain and nothing to lose from this change.
Mac OS is the most interesting example of this. It was traditionally a platform for creators. They were front and center. The UNIXey parts were even a part of that. Then, the likes of iPhones and iPads made consumer market immensely profitable. At some point, they let Mac OS and hardware stagnate a lot like it didn’t matter versus the billions they made on consumer offerings. They forgot their creators were making the things creating those billions. That it was worth investing in their general-purpose platform that fuels and should be closely tied to their ultra-profitable, locked-down platforms.
I’m not sure if that ever changed since I mostly just follow the comments of Mac users rather than Apple itself. People still gripe about them. Makes me think this was a huge, blind spot for them. With Microsoft’s layoffs of QA people, Apple could also invest in high quality/reliability as a differentiator on top of Mac OS’s existing strengths. They’re really screwing up for a company that was otherwise really, really, really succeeding.
Overall MacOS still feel great and is one of more reliable/usable systems out there. But perhaps that’s because the system had such a huge head start to begin with. Certain parts (e.g. Safari) surely look dilapidated.