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Apple Platform Lock-Ins, A 3rd Party Dev's Opinion
Iftekhar writes "Wil Shipley, of Delicious Monster fame, has written a very candid essay on what he perceives as Apple's growing trend toward platform lock-ins. He writes: 'Why is the iPhone locked to a single carrier, so I can't travel internationally with it? There's really only one viable reason: Apple wanted a share of the carrier's profits, which meant giving AT&T an exclusive deal. Which meant, we get screwed so Apple can make more money. It's that simple. [...] As Apple gets more and more of its revenue from non-Mac devices, they are also getting more and more of their revenue from devices that simply exclude third parties. Consumers suffer from this. We suffer from increased prices and decreased competition and innovation. We suffer so Apple can make a few more bucks, when Apple is clearly not hurting for money.'"
Apple is a company that's trying to maximize its profits? Wha????
What an astute essay! Of course, it's about 20 years late, but hey, better late than never, huh?
Apple has been actively engaging in hardware/software lock-in for 20+ years. Nothing has changed other than this one particular person has started to remove his head from his ass. Yippee.
I don't respond to AC's.
It does sting a little... we've got a lot of Macs between us and consider ourselves loyal Apple customers... oh well.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Apple when dealing with third parties loses some control over the experience of using their devices.
They want to minimize this. It's bad enough they have people perceiving the iphone to have problems because of cell service outages, ridiculous billing from at&t, awful customer support at AT&T, etc. Imagine if they were having to fight that battle on more than one front?
It's silly, because it's not apples fault, but everyone (average consumer) will relate the bad experience to apple even if they are one of the more clear thinking ones.
Since their inception, they've kept control of their hardware, ensuring a consistent and good experience on their computer. This is their strength over microsoft. This is their strength over Dell. They can give you a good experience and manage it. They don't have anyone else to blame!
'Nuff said.
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
Oh, Lord. Please point out to me the place in the U.S. where it's easy to buy an unlocked phone and take it from carrier to carrier, cause I'd like to live there. Then maybe I could cancel my contract without an early termination fee and sign up to another carrier without signing a contract. Look, Apple does some stupid shit, but blaming them for the terrible and non-competitive state of the U.S. cel phone industry is just plain stupid. We have, IMO, a de facto telecommunications monopoly in this country, and the reasons for that are a whole lot more complicate than 'Apple is teh sux0r!' The whole essay reads like someone who lives a fair distance from logic. And then there's this:
No, the view among a small percentage of Slashdot posters and some people with blogs is that Apple's screwing up. The view of most rational people is they're doing just fine. Why didn't he just call the essay "I Hate Apple"?
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
As Apple gets more and more of its revenue from non-Mac devices, they are also getting more and more of their revenue from devices that simply exclude third parties. Consumers suffer from this.
I wouldn't refer to anyone that can afford a $600 phone as "suffering".
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Apple maliciously wants to keep all the money from their products to themselves, instead of giving some of it to me, the struggling developer. Those filthy rich bastards.
Look, every purchase, be it a loaf of bread or an iPhone, is an exercise in weighing potential benefits of the thing acquired against the sum of money needed to acquire it. If for you the lock-in is a deal-breaker, don't buy. When enough people do that, Apple will listen. Before that - I wouldn't bet on it.
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
It's called roaming, and you certainly can with the iphone.
You mean the company's first priority is to make money? Say its not so! All this time I thought Apple was around to make people feel all warm and happy inside.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Wait...
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Because.... ???
Look. Go whine somewhere else. You've made your bed, go lie in it.
Deleted
If you don't like it, don't buy it. If you're a 3rd party developer, then don't develop applications for it. Vote with your wallet. Nobody is forcing you to buy the iPhone. Go buy a different smartphone that allows 3rd-party apps.
"Consumers suffer from this. We suffer from increased prices and decreased competition and innovation."
This might actually make sense if this were a necessity of life, but this is a luxury item we're talking about. I give this a big fat "SO WHAT?" What Apple decided to do with the iPhone was a business decision. Business decisions are made based on the potential to make the company money, either in the short- or long-term. Making customers happy is only important to a company when doing so will help the company make money. If a company makes its customers happy but doesn't make a profit, its competitors will drive it into the ground. This is the whole basis for capitalism: if you don't like one company's product, take your money elsewhere. Besides, everyone was warned well in advance that the iPhone would be closed to third-party apps. There was no surprise. Now, if the iPhone had originally allowed 3rd party apps, and then through an update removed that ability, then you would have a cause to complain.
But the whining I hear day after day about "oh no, the iPhone doesn't do [insert pet feature]! Woe is me!" has long passed the point of "annoying". Face it, even if all the current complaints about the iPhone were resolved, we'd find something else to complain about.
The instant I heard "We suffer so Apple can make a few more bucks, when Apple is clearly not hurting for money," the article lost all credibility. Nobody is making you suffer. And so what if they have money? Do you know where that money goes? Let's see...it goes to paying all the people who work for the company. It pays the CEO a big fat paycheck, which he then spends on yacht, which creates jobs. Or he invests it, which means that the money goes to fund some other project or initiative which gives other people jobs. Money sitting in a pile does a company no good.
Help find a cure for cancer. Join the [H]orde
That was pretty much my reaction to it as well.
If you want freedom, go with open source. Write code for linux phones, support that ecosystem, make them better. But don't whine about Apple being what it is.
On powerbooks and macbook pros the wireless card is locked to channel 1-11. This is fine for the US but, unlike other cards, there is no way to unlock it when you go to Europe (where channels up to 13 are used). This can be a major PITA on a customer site... but at least a spare wireless card is cheap, unlike...
Apple are about the only company that ship the very restricted form of DVD drives. Most will let you read the _data_ from an out-of-region disk, meaning that you can use VLC or another libdvdcss2 solution to play the DVD. The drives that ship with Apple laptops (since late revision powerbooks) totally block reads for out-of-region disks so VLC won't work.
This sucks as it means that my legally purchased region 2 DVDs won't work. There is now a RPC1 de-region crack for macbook pro drives but it requires a copy of Windows to install.
So much for it just works. You would have thought their testing would have involved taking one over the pond for a week of business travel.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
As an iPhone owner, you are not Apple's customer. You are the product. The iPhone is a device that uses a shiny interface to deliver subscribers to AT&T, who is Apple's true customer in this deal. I've been an Apple user since 1986, but this time I think I'll pass.
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
You know what? I'm sick of this sort of thing. Guess what guys, Apple is in it for the money!
The problem is there's a lot of Apple fanboys who are slowly coming to that conclusion, though fighting it tooth and nail. These people believe Apple exists to make them happy, not to make money.
AccountKiller
It's not about Apple making money. We all know Apple is a company, and companies like money, and I don't think many here would claim that's a bad thing. The point is how Apple is going about it. I use a Mac, and a large part of the reason for that is code written by Wil Shipley and his former employees. Without OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner, I would have a lot less reason to use a Mac. OS X is nice, but it's third party software that makes it really superb. Take that away, and you have a much less useful platform. The more Apple locks down their devices, the less useful they are. My Nokia phone lacks a few features, but I've been able to get third party software that makes up for that. If I replaced it with an iPhone and found it lacked features I need (actually, the iPhone lacks pretty much all of the features I actually use on a phone beyond making phone calls, but that's not the point), then I have no way of adding them. This means that I will not be buying an iPhone, irrespective of how shiny it is. This means that Apple has lost a potential sale due to their lock-in policy.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I mean, just because Apple makes a product, that doesn't mean you need to get one. If the iPhone provides what you need better than the alternatives, and you don't need what it doesn't provide... go for it. If it doesn't... get something else.
There's no "platform lock-in" to the iPhone. If there was an iPhone SDK, there would be, but as it is if you don't have an iPhone you can get another phone that can still use all the same third-party content you could if you had one, and if you do you aren't locked into it. This is a different kind of lockin-in, and it's got nothing to do with developers.
On the iPod...
Now we see that iPod owners who upgrade to a newer iPod must re-buy the games they've already bought, because the new iPods are incompatible with the old. No credit given for having already bought an identical game.
Is he talking about games produced by Apple, or games produced by third parties? I don't know, I never bought games for my iPod. I never even considered buying games for my iPod. Why? Because it was obviously a closed system from the start.
But I did buy some software for my Palm, and had to re-buy some of it when I got a newer PalmOS device, because the older games didn't handle the new screen size. That's not Palm's fault, and I don't blame them for that (and not just because there's enough well-earned blame landing on them as it is).
And I'm certainly not going to *create* a platform lock-in for them by buying an iPhone and crack into it.
What should Steve do? Well, for starters, give up on trying to control everything.
Oh, I can only agree, but Steve isn't going to do that, so my recommendation is to stick to the Mac, ignore the 'appliance' products, and have an exit strategy so you can jump ship if Apple decides they're going to get serious about making the Mac an appliance again. That way we'll never have to put up with 1984 being just like 1984.
In the meantime, be picky.
Apple needs to be able to say, "Look, NBC, you want to be dumb-asses and try to sell people crap they don't want, fine -- we're still going to sell iPods that'll play your programs, we just won't sell your programs on the nicest internet store in the world. Your loss, suckers, call us when you change your mind."
I don't think Apple can say that. Because you will only be able to download those videos to your iPod on Windows: We're Sorry the requested download is unavailable. Downloads are only available to users located in the United States that have a Microsoft operating system and Internet Explorer web browser. Please check back soon for other offers.
Now *there* is your *platform* lock in.
I don't write programs for Apple because I worship Apple. I write programs for them because they have the best development environment
Don't write programs for Apple. Write programs for Macintosh. You can't write programs for Apple's appliances.
I agree with you, they should make it possible, it wouldn't even be that hard... it'd just be another target option for XCode.
But Apple's decided they're not interested in selling iAppliances to me, so I'm not going to get one.
And, as for where the personification of Linux is, sadly those commercials were not shot in someone's parents' basement.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
I'll support Linux phones as soon as FOSS figures out how to design a good UI. I'm serious, instead of getting some halfway-decent Photoshoppers to make your icons, why don't you involve some real usability specialists? I really despise the attitude that some FOSS supporters have - the whole "well, the button's right there, n00b" mentality is what keeps Linux an arcade black box that no mainstream user will voluntarily touch.
Linux needs to stop being feature upgrades and start becoming more cohesive. Why is it called "Synaptic" when it can be called "Package Installer"? In every distro I've used the OS has always felt like components glued together. This doesn't help Linux marketing, especially when a mainstream new user is supposed to magically supposed to figure out that "GIMP" = "Image Editor", and every freaking app has a "K" attached to its name. While I appreciate the need to allow developer freedom for each component, Linux will not be usable until there is a unifying body that can dictate UI design guidelines, icon design guidelines, etc, etc, for all parts of the OS.
Given how this thread has become an anti-Apple bitch fest, as opposed to an anti-iphone bitch fest:
.Net. There are OSS versions of both (Mono and GnuStep), but neither are of production qualiyt which means that in realiyt, if you want to do cross platform stuff you either go with C++, Java or one of the scipting languages like Python.
I have three Macs, one PPC Powerbook laptop with Adobe CS2 on it for compatibility with work, where they still use CS2 and two Intel Macs with all my development tools and my Adobe CS3 suite. My Macbook dual boots into Windows where I have Office 2003 pro for compatibility with our customers. I also have a Windows machhine at work with XP, Adobe CS2 and a host of other stuff that is very modern, but which I am using less and less.
Why? I personally am happy with and use Windows, Linux and OSX, so why do I go with the most expensive option?
Mainly, because OSX is, in our design business, the easiest to use, has the least downtime and is technically optimal for certain things. In terms of ease of use, Mac OSX is very simple compared to XP (or Linux). The configurational options are much easier for the majority of our workers, most of whom are designers, compared to Windows. There are many things in OSX that make a designers life easy, such as the Expose feature, the Zeroconf networking, drag and drop in almost every application, built-in spell checking in all text apps, decent built-in font managment and color sync. Added to that is that fact that modern Intel macs run Windows just fine for those of us who need it for office use or 3D work, and Apple's workgroup servers are many more times easier to use and configure than Windows or Linux machines.
Another thing is OSX' memory managment and multi tasking. Linux is excellent in this respect as well but Windows really suffers when RAM is almost full, and page swapping begins, and multitasking in Windows is much less smooth than it is in OSX.
Another thing is that almost all of our fonts are still in the old resource fork format, and although we have some very good font conversion utilities, those fonts often don't work properly on Windows.
I really prefer Windows XP for smaller tasks as the application startup time and general responsiveness of that OS is generally better than OSX in that case.
Winodws Vista, however, is a non starter at the moment, even though it improves many issues, including color synchronisation. Its terrible responsiveness on brand new hardware reminds me of OSX back in 2001. It has a whole load of a way to go.
Linux is still, sadly, a non option in a design agency. Inkscape, the GIMP, Scribus, Blender et al are improving, but until CMYK and color handling are integrated and synchronised, there is no way that they will be of much use there.
If I were doing anythng else, however, I would probably be using Linux and Windows, although even in major development houses, OSX is starting to become mainstream. Apple's Cocoa/ObjC tools are just as propietry as Microsoft's