Our Changing Relationship With Apple

The really distressing thing for me, seeing Apple crumbling like this, is that it's lowered the ceiling for quality in the entire computer industry. Because macOS in 2010 *was the ceiling*. That was the best experience computers had to offer, in terms of power, usability, and choice.

It's all been going downhill since then, and nothing has emerged that comes even close to replacing it. And I just don't see how we can get back there again given the resources involved in making a modern operating system and all of its supporting software -- much less a good one -- and given the entrenched powers who are all diligently working to ensure that it never happens and everything sucks.

The only possibility, and it's a very remote possibility, is Linux, but it just doesn't seem possible. There's too many cooks stirring that particular pot, and most of them aren't looking to cook up something as palatable as 2010 macOS, or would even know what it was if they tasted it.

I think at this point we're stuck on one trajectory:

1. Everything keeps getting shittier and shittier
2. It eventually reaches the point where doing even the most basic tasks with our everyday computing devices becomes unavoidably frustrating and unhelpful
3. Something new comes along that can only do a fraction of what was possible in 2010, but actually does it well
4. People become willing to abandon old platforms and give up the capabilities they once had in favor of something much simpler and basic, but that actually works
5. This new thing eventually grows into something bigger, getting us back to where we were fifteen years ago, and hopefully in a way that's stable

Steps 3 and 4 are certainly not guaranteed, to say nothing of step 5. I think steps 1 and 2 are locked in, though.

It's a little weird to respond to the largest company in the world cozying up to Trump by: not using beta OSes, not filing feedbacks on bugs and APIs, not participating in forums? I kind of get the through line, but in the age of the *second term* of Trump, we've seriously got to think wider.

In light of Apple's relationship with the current administration, wildly escalating prices on their phones which have *marginally* better features than ones from 5-10 years ago, Apple's complicity in exacerbating climate change by buying into the bullshit hype that is "AI" that produces LITERALLY BROKEN features, Apple's complicity in causing worldwide conflict via their extraction of rare earth minerals (e.g.: Congo), and Apple's continued roughshod run over developers and refusal to open up their platform, here's what I think is a better response:

Stop buying new Apple products, and keep using your old Apple products until they literally break down. Don't even buy from Apple's official refurbished store, if you can. Buy from reputable third-party resellers, and only buy Apple products that are at least 2-3 years old. There's quite literally nothing that you need from the new products. And recommend to everyone around you that they do this. There's no real ethical consumption under capitalism so you can't get away from participating, and Apple's products arguably seem to still be marginally better than most other computer manufacturers. You can go to other brands if you really think it's necessary, but I don't think other brands are that much better policy-wise than Apple.

So I've been getting stuff from OWC and iPowerResale since the pandemic started, and it's been great. I haven't had any problems with the stuff I get, and I've gotten some wild deals (including an M1 MacBook Air with 1 TB of storage and an existing AppleCare+ warranty, for around $700 off the original price). And I still have my 6th generation iPad which is going strong at 7 years old. I'm still using my iPhone 12 mini which is over 4 years old now. I was even still using an old 2009 27" iMac until the power supply finally broke last year.

Just stop buying as much as you can, and use/repair the stuff you have. We don't need the new stuff anymore.

Congratulations, the lefties finally figured out what the rest of us "facists" knew from the beginning: any interactions you have with Tim Cook Inc, or even using your device to do what you want are gonna be in "hard mode".

At best, you're a "bother" to them no matter what "team" you're on. Oh and BTW "X" is still rife with lefties, I don't even know why y'all went to "Dead Sky."

I think there are two responses that are actually going to move the needle: boycott Apple's products (difficult, I know...) and/or support regulation against Apple with your votes, donations, and outreach. The only thing that seems to worry Cook these days is when the EU makes regulatory noises in Apple's direction.

I’m the loudest Apple fan in my community, yet I’m also its most vocal critic. Without going into specifics, Apple’s product vision has lost its focus. The cracks were tolerable for a while and I attribute that entirely to the solid foundation laid by Steve Jobs. Tim Cook and his team are still riding on his coattails, but the cracks are now too significant to ignore.

Those protesting for political reasons I don't think have a leg to stand on. Apple investing $500B into American manufacturing is so great.

Also, X rules. Come back friends.

Agree with the Under the Radar podcast in that my circle has not changed... but the world's has, and as a result it seems that most youngsters have very different views. Presumably that's how people experience being "old".

I also agree with Bri. Well put. It sucks that things stopped progressing and are (IMHO) now degenerating. The enthusiasm I remember in the early days was something I miss... and of course would like back.

I agree Michael, Apple will just do its thing. It would be nice to just ignore the problem, but Apps are becoming necessary for many real world tasks, like parking, and it's hard to find customers whose equipment isn't controlled by Apple, Microsoft or Google. The more control these behemoths arrogate, the less space there is to just sit in your corner with your community and concentrate on making your customers happy.

Is there anything else that can be done about this? Seemingly small things, like societal views, have incredible impacts on what that that society then does... and I think that today's Apple is a reflection of today's societal views. You'll notice there are only 2 players left in the x86 space, unlike the 5+ there were in the 2000's. Same story here. After all, there's a reason the word "enshitification" was invented recently.

As a median-age geek I can't really see what age has to do with it. But as a former x86 geek at "2 players", that outcome is completely because of hard facts like laws of scale and the exponential complexity of shrinking circuits each cycle. Sure, those are indirectly supported by softer facts like "nobody intervened to stop that from happening" but that is not a policy so much as a default setting that over time always takes us here. It is certainly not "a reflection of today's societal views", which recently favor more intervention than we have been doing historically (but certainly not enough to overturn natural laws of scaling which are very powerful).

Actually, age has one thing to do with it: the older generation was faced with a historic computing monopolist and they organized politically in very shoestring ways, by way of example the young FSF. Unfortunately these organizations have not kept up with new and modern concerns, nor have they ceded the ideological highground to the shoestrings of newcomers that do. The result is the monopolist is "opposed" by a fractured opposition that spends most of its time infighting, and under those terms arguing about boycotting feedback assistant is the closest we can get to a real opposition.

I agree with Michael and Bri — the peak was probably 2010. And that was 15 years ago and that’s frankly, distressing.

But what I think about a lot is that it isn’t just Apple. So many of our experiences are worse than they were a decade ago, or even two decades ago. I miss my TiVo experience from two decades ago (as a teenager even), compared to the process now, for finding and managing content to watch. Although the screen technology has marginally improved (tho not in really meaningful ways in about decade), the e-book experience across providers is worse. The business model changes around free to play (which was spurred on by mobile) has made video games, regardless of whether it is console/PC/mobile worse. There are still great games being made but we probably reached peak game about a decade ago. Web search and information capture is worse than it was 15 years ago. Significantly worse. Social media is too, and not just because of the toxicity; the toxicity is an effect of the different incentive structures.

And that’s the one commonality in so much of this. Incentive structures have aligned and been optimized around things that ultimately don’t care about the user or the experience, but exist as a way to maximize revenue and profits. I realize this sounds like an anti-capitalism screed but believe it or not, I’m not an anti-capitalist, I just resent how the consolidation of corporate power and these misaligned incentives have reached a point where everything feels worse than it did.

But I don’t know if we do fix this. There will be a breaking point. And the moment empires doom themselves is usually only knowable in hindsight, but I do think much of the old guard is ripe for disruption.

The optimistic part of my brain says, “good, bring on the disruption” - sometimes you can only get the newest innovations when the old guard retires or dies off. And with some of the AI companies, I could see a world where the next general computer interface or OS is developed by an AI company without any aspirations to replicate or match what we used to have on macOS, but what might bring innovative ways forward and give us experiences better than what we’ve had before.

But there is another part of me that just worries that the rot will continue and that the next generation of innovators won’t be focused in trying to make things better (which regardless of how they operate now, was the onus of the tech companies in the pre-web, Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 eras), but instead how to optimize even further. And because we’ve collectively accepted this decline in experiences and user respect, we’ll suck it up and take it as long as web search improves based on the baseline of where we are now.

I hope for the optimistic outcome, but I’m worried this will all continue to decline.

@Drew: given the fact the best tech today is provided by 3rd party foundries (TSMC, Samsung), I would have expected more competitors in the x86 space than during the 2000s. Back then, it was difficult to access foundries to make competitive chips. Intel had an incredible lead in terms of chip process. Nevertheless there was But there was Intel, AMD, NexGen, Cyrix, Rise, Centaur, Transmeta, and some others, not all known to the public, all competing. And I don't see such a vast gulf in terms of complexity versus what we did back then to agree with you.

@Michael Even if as I suspect you're primarily motivated by the tech, the problem really is that the way we experience that tech is indivisible from Apple's priorities and interests. I have no doubt that if it were possible to extricate ourselves from the high-impact gore that is present-day macOS UI paradigms, for instance, there wouldn't be quite so much complaining and bellyaching. Peoples' emotional attachment to Apple is of course well worth reality-checking (albeit, IMO, not without some legitimacy), but I'm afraid the issue really is that in a tech landscape dominated by shite, Apple are the least shittiest of them all.

And I agree that 2010-2015 were peak Apple in many ways, including ironically on iOS and in the iOS App Store which was running over with new and innovative ideas. This is not to deny many good and necessary (and, to my mind at least, gratifyingly utilitarian) changes that have happened since then, like APFS or Apple Silicon. But unfortunately these have largely been concessions motivated by business interests rather than a direct benefit to the end user, and in the case of APFS, for instance, it's arguable that the transition from JHFS+ never actually completed because HDDs are now essentially useless as boot devices. I think it's notable that the biggest trial run of APFS was actually done on iOS devices, actually. Apple's business priorities have loomed larger and larger over time, to the point that the user and developer are being excluded unless and until they directly bolster Apple's bottom line. I just don't think that's how past Apple saw its obligations to its committed stakeholders. And I've only been a full-time Apple product user since 2008 or so.

I will say that I wish people were more willing to try other things. Not here to moralise, I do it myself, but if we are prisoners of our laziness or unwillingness to give things a fair shake then we can't hope to even begin to plan for the day we need the parachute. Keeping other OSs around, say in a VM or on a spare box, is a great way to settle in and learn the highs and lows, and as you'd expect there are places where macOS is better and places where it's worse. I do think the *combination* of macOS and Apple Silicon makes it difficult for me to jump to Linux or Windows full time, but I'm pretty sure it won't be long before we have general-purpose and open ARM hardware that will compete with Apple's in various segments and then the game is on again for your preference of OS on commodity hardware.

In terms of the Apple ecosystem of hardware, apps and iCloud I've been very satisfied. 2010? 2015? No thanks. I've gotten great value out of my iPads, iPhone, AirPods and iCloud.

All that said, I'm no longer satisfied with the ethics of Apple. I've had issues with them for awhile but I tolerated it because, capitalism. Lots of bad choices, lot's of ethical choices I disagree with. But it's all just becoming intolerable in the context of deepening oligarchy in the US. And in that context, I just recently decided it was time for me to migrate away from Apple. I have relatively new Apple hardware that I'll be using for at least 6-7 years. An M1 Mac Mini that I use as a server, an iPhone 13, and M2 iPadPro should all last a good long while. I was going to replace my Series 4 Apple Watch this fall. Not anymore.

I dug out my old "backup" Mac, a 2012 Mac Mini and installed Linux Mint, my first time using Linux. Over the past week I've transitioned about half of my freelance workload (web development, maintenance of client sites) to that old Mac. I'd been bumping up against my storage limit in the 200GB iCloud plan and was considering an upgrade to the next tier. Instead of that I'm now on the cheapest paid 50GB plan. I moved all my files and photos from iCloud to my local network cloud. Everything is safely and securely under my control with proper back-ups. I work from home so file access from my devices is no problem over the local network.

For me the point of all this is to at least make an effort at taking more responsibility for my personal computing experience. I refuse to be subject to the dictates of Apple or any other multinational corporation. I'd already quit Facebook 10 years ago, deleted Instagram and Threads a couple months ago. I'll keep my personal blog/website and an account on Mastodon.

I'll be stuck using Apple services as well as Google but I've reduced my use of both to the minimum and will reduce any remaining dependencies as I'm able. But with just a bit of effort I've been able to move almost everything to that would have formerly been stuck in an Apple app/iCloud is now free. The only exception are the Affinity suite of apps that I use for about 50% of my workload. That's the primary reason I'll retain a foot in the Apple ecosystem.

A last note: the experience I've had with Linux Mint on the old Mac has been way better than I expected. To be honest, I've thoroughly enjoyed the experience of getting it set up and already feel comfortable in the new computing space.

@Old Unix Geek I understand on the one hand the cocktail-party-napkin logic that adding more competitors would increase competition. But on the other hand, we live in an observable reality in which we have the 3rd party foundries with their historically weak competition. So we know for sure the napkin is wrong.

The reasons why it is wrong are difficult to squeeze on a napkin but the main one is scaling laws are way bigger than napkin arguments. On the one hand, my geekbench scores rise polynomially every year and on the other hand, TSMC was founded once in 1987. This kind of stuff is a constant-time approach to a polynomial-time algorithm and even if your constants are pretty big it doesn't work.

A better napkin model for the foundaries is they're your kidneys. You don't want your kidneys attacking each other because that would kill you. Competition happens at the organism level – and there aren't any other organisms because you have the two kidneys.

@Drew: I don't understand what you are saying.

My view is that no one is funding new x86 startups. There are a few startups for Risc-V and for AI chips, but many markets seem to be frozen: x86's, new OS's, new Word-processors, new phones. Such things are not frozen in China but are here in the US. So we have AMD and we have Intel.

Intel is suffering, just like Boeing is suffering from too many marketing types and not enough engineers... it's systemic in most places you look.

I presume the reason these things aren't being funded in the West is because the risk/reward isn't sufficiently succulent to investors. Risk because doing things like developing an x86 requires actual engineering ability. Reward because people make more money on things with less capital investment like web-apps or crypto.

The amount of money pouring into LLMs also demonstrates that there is a lot of money looking for the same trendy thing as everyone else. It should be surprising since progress in LLMs has somewhat stalled, and they're not making money, but investors are bewitched by the prospect of replacing every white collar worker. This has real impacts. A cool robotics company I knew folded because its investors thought "AGI tomorrow" would result in higher returns. Net result: the Chinese have probably overtaken us in robotics too. Oh well.

“For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

Audre Lorde

@Old Unix Geek @Drew — When it comes to chipset competition, especially in a fabless context, we can’t discount the importance of Arm here. Much easier to become an Arm licensee (even if you still have to clean room some of the designs) than deal with Intel’s bullshit.

Cyrix, Transmeta and so-on died in no small part because of legal challenges from Intel. Even AMD, who had a contract with Intel to license their chips had to eventually build their own designs (even after they won in court) and buy NexGen and DEC’s Alpha team to build the first Athlon (K7), which ultimately became one of the first lines to truly challenge Intel in the 2000s. Then Intel surged ahead with Core and it took AMD another decade to catch-up (and surpass) with the Zen architectures.

Meanwhile, Arm slowly but steadily became more powerful and the designs of its instruction set had always made it much more applicable for mobile processors, an area Intel royally fucked up by not investing enough in, but by the time we get to the late aughts, we start to see really interesting Arm chips from Texas Instruments, Nvidia, Samsung, NXP, Marvell, Mediatek, STMicro, the big kahuna Qualcomm, and most importantly, Apple (PA Semi is the best corporate acquisition of all time after NeXT). If you’re going to run on a fabless model, Arm makes a lot more sense than trying to make your own x86 chips — unless you happen to be the one company (AMD) that had a partnership of sorts with Intel, has the capital to actually make your own designs and the connections to get fab time at TSMC or another fab.

And if we look at it through that lens, there are far more competent Arm competitors today than there ever were for x86. Yes, the two primary players are Qualcomm and Apple, in terms of sheer power, but the nature of the design architecture means that there are dozens of smaller and more niche companies that can create their own chips for specific markets.

So I don’t know if I agree we can blame the lack of x86 competition on enshittification. I think the companies who wanted to get into chip design simply pivoted to where the future was going to be (mobile), rather than trying to compete against the behemoth (Intel) who was stingy and litigious and required clean-room reverse engineering. It made sense to give it a go in the 90s and early 2000s when Windows and x86 drove everything but that made a lot less sense in the mobile era, especially in a time when Linux was robust enough to serve as a foundation for customized OSes.

Heck, at this point, AMD is an Arm licensee and although I don’t think they’d abandon x86, their own chip designers noted that the modular nature of Zen would make that possible.

Meanwhile, Intel is the only corporate behemoth that has had a worse decade than Boeing, and they’ll be lucky to keep their fabs at all.

Christina Warren "I realize this sounds like an anti-capitalism screed but believe it or not, I’m not an anti-capitalist,"

The way I see it (and many others as well) is that capitalism is the system where money == power. Open markets were around well before capitalism, and are in no way dependent on capitalism for their existence.

So maybe you could consider yourself an anti-capitalist after all?

Has there been posts from developers pondering over the fact that developing for Apple platforms gates their creations from poor people? (I guess it wouldn't be as viral.)

As a web developer outside the US, seeing you lot talk about cherishing inclusivity makes me perplexed.

@Christina

Yes... although Arm was actually a competitor back then (Intel StrongARM). AMD became an ARM licensee pretty soon after. And yes, I'm very aware of Intel's strong arming its competitors... and keeping secrets about some 586 instructions' behavior (Appendix H). That was one reason 3rd party x86 developers had to used a Fab "cross-licensed" with Intel. AMD was freer in that it had its own cross license because IBM didn't want to single source x86's from Intel.

But again, if you want to consider architectures in the 1990s/2000s: PA-RISC, Alpha, x86, 680xx, PowerPC, ARM, SPARC just to mention the ones I've coded for, plus MIPS, EPIC... Today? RISC-V, ARM, x86. I see a shrinking world. And it's not as if there aren't interesting ideas out there (e.g. Mill computing) but they're not taking off.

Basically most advances in the last decade or so are due to better mastery of physics (processes (TSMC) and things like surface mounted memory), not due to better CPU architectural ideas. It's like the "bitter lesson" in AI but for chips.

Of all the things to “boycott”* Apple for, being only on Twitter is the dumbest one. It still THE largest and most varied platform on the world, with the highest mainstream and developer reach. But oh no, Elon bad, let me throw tantrum on Apple, while using only Apple devices and driving a Tesla.

I put “boycott” in quotes because everything here is ridiculous. Oh no, you won’t open issues on Feedback, how will Apple engineers go on with their days? You won’t post on Swift forums? Say it ain’t so. It’s all a joke. Real boycott is learning to develop for other platforms and abandoning Apple. Let them really see what it means to lose valuable software. But that, of course, is not on the menu. Instead, some silly virtue signaling. Elon bad.

@Alexandre Dieulot

I think you misunderstand the “inclusivity” virtue signaling. It’s only inclusive when it’s nonsense some blue haired tiny percentage of wokeh care about, like “latinxxx”. Poor people, ewww. How will those afford all the subscription pricing schemes that all these virtue signalers are peddling? Yuck, poor people.