[msgodel]

The problem with Apple's platforms is they can't choose to wait until they have it right like they did with IE vs Safari. The walled garden means their approach is the only one available to users.

If the mac worked the way the iPhone does the mac just wouldn't have a browser until after the .com boom was over. That's why I'm shorting them. Their inability to give people an escape hatch so their users can actually do useful things with what they build is killing their platforms.

[api]

I don't disagree but you're just talking about iOS. I run third party AI stuff on Mac including ollama and https://boltai.com which gives you a common interface for both local and remote models.

iOS devices are just consumer devices for consuming content. They're almost a completely different platform.

As for integrated AI, I kinda like that Apple is trying to get it "right" in the sense of being on device in many cases (or at least capable of it) and secure (privacy respecting).

Their models are behind though. If they were really serious they would buy Anthropic or Mistral with all their cash. Anthropic might not sell but Mistral seems like something they could bulldoze with cash if they wanted, and they'd get better models and a better model-making team.

[msgodel]

People said similar things about Blackberry near the peak. They're setting themselves up for disruption and decay.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

How much revenue does Mac bring in compared to iOS devices? Apple's success is entirely due to iOS/iPhone. The Mac is irrelevant

[api]

More than a bean counter analysis would show. It makes them the dominant PC platform for developers and many forms of "serious work." Abandoning or ruining the Mac would, over time, relegate them to one of the "other" ecosystems from a developer POV. As everyone knows the "other" ecosystems are the ones that get less attention.

[bigyabai]

> It makes them the dominant PC platform for developers

In my 12 years of employment in this industry, I have yet to encounter a MacOS build server. "Serious work" doesn't happen on MacOS by design; it's not a deployment platform. You don't put Mac instances on your K8s network, most of the time your customers aren't using a Mac either. Even big companies like 1Pass have realized what a waste this is, and started porting their Mac software to Electron. Apple couldn't dominate developers if they systematically murdered every other POSIX-compliant OS.

The more time you spend as a development studio optimizing for a runtime you never use, the more capital you waste to achieve the same end-goal. It's not a real thing outside the comically capital-intensive SV culture.

[msgodel]

I do "serious work" from a mac and the only software I use on it is OpenSSH, Safari, Webex, and Outlook. Everything actually serious gets done on a Linux VM in a datacenter.

[WorldPeas]

I can't agree more. I hope a more convergent os (and hopefully an open and private one at that) is over the horizon, the problem being that as it stands, linux is lacks accessibility and the commonality factor that would make using it as a developer worth it.

[msgodel]

VTEs are incredibly accessible and language models I think mean using languages will actually be the most accessible UI to non-technical users going forward.

I'd argue GNU-style CLI and libinput based tools are actually more discoverable than GUIs now that smartphones killed CUA and friends. Is pressing tab twice really worse than "reverse three finger pinch?"