[symlinkk]

The author seems to praise the vendor lock-in that Apple imposes upon its customers as being a good business move and a sign that Apple has "matured", without really offering any hard facts to back it up.

I'm going to offer an opinion of my own without any facts to back it up. Vendor lock-in may be successful in the short term, but interoperability is successful in the long-term. The internet would have never took off if it wasn't for the fact that every website author had access to the same APIs as every other one.

It's bullshit that I can't tell Siri to play music with Spotify instead of Apple Music. It's bullshit that I can't change my browser from Safari, and therefore can't use any Progressive Web App features like push notifications because Apple is afraid of web apps cannibalizing App Store sales. It's anti-competitive and a scummy business move. Android is weak in a lot of areas but at least they got this part right.

[endemic]

> Android is weak in a lot of areas but at least they got this part right.

Try using an AOSP ROM without Google Play Services.

[scarface74]

How much of a "longer term" view is needed than 40+ years? Apple has used this strategy since day one.

[cmrdporcupine]

That is not at all true. That was certainly not the philosophy on the very successful Apple II series. And it was not how Apple operated in the non-Jobs Mac years in the late 80s and early 90s.

And it's not how they operated for the early part of the 2000s when Apple went on a major open source / standards binge: adopting the standard Intel/PCI architecture, using Unix as the foundation of their OS, open sourcing their kernel, using open source WebKit, etc. etc. Hell, the first version of the iPod even did it right and was basically an external USB hard drive.

But there's been a major turn to the proprietary as the iPhone business has eaten Apple. They've locked that platform down in a big way, and they've failed to embrace the web and cloud in a functional way. There's less and less open standards embrace there, and more lock-in style in both hardware and software.

In a way Apple has always had two hearts -- a Wozniak (the open Apple II) vs Jobs (the closed Mac), long after those two have left the company.

[scarface74]

Apple announced support for PCI in 1993 with their original PPC road map. The first gen of PPC Macs were Nubus for backwards compatibility but the second gen in 1995 were PCI. Apple allowed third party Mac clone makers to make hybrid Nubus/PPC Macs.

The first generation iPod was FireWire not USB and always had a proprietary file system for actually adding music and forced you to use either iTunes or MusicMatch (Windows) to add music.

Apple is no different than Googke or Microsoft. They use open source when it suits them but none of the major companies outsource their Crown Jewels.

But even if you go back to 1984, all of the other computer makers that made non generic clones are out of business except for Apple. So that's still 35+ years of Apple going thier own way.