[Aachen]

> interoperability with subpar user experience

I keep seeing this being touted by Apple users (and only by Apple users, whose vendor has been telling them this for decades now). Genuinely wondering if you have any source for this besides Apple saying so. Are there any examples of this? Where a better experience was explicitly possible because of a vendor lock-in? Or where one company, that competes in e.g. the market for watches or headphones while already controlling a large share of another market (like phones), was forced to open up their system and give competitors the same access, and then the market-controlling party's product somehow got worse by giving competitors the same access?

[kmeisthax]

Let me rephrase Apple's argument: "If we can't make the Apple Experience™ exclusive to Apple products only, then we will actively harm that user experience so our competitors can't ride our coat-tails."

You absolutely can make interoperability a good user experience, it's just work Apple doesn't want to do. Apple wants you to think their competitors are scary; they want the Internet to be a slum so that their walled garden looks safer.

[refulgentis]

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool kool-aid-drinking Apple fanboy, and think you're being too kind: it's a shibboleth, cargo-cult thinking, a thought-terminating cliche: most simply, utterly irrational and meaningless as rendered.

I'm more than happy to entertain it when there's specifics, but it's most kindly described as lazy, the way I see it deployed these days.