Unfortunately, the empty weight of many passenger planes is already higher than that at the max, and carrier operations try to avoid that anyway.
That's just a scale problem. They don't fly 747s off of carriers for two good reasons: 1) they don't need to, and 2) carriers aren't big enough. Airports don't have this problem: they have huge runways.
The real question is how much maintenance they needed for that. Turnaround time is important.
Military jets are known for needing lots of maintenance, but I seriously doubt structural issues are part of that. Most likely, the planes are designed to handle those stresses from the outset and it's just not a problem.
No, the main problem is building the catapults. EMALS still isn't quite ready
They're already using it on the Ford. It's due to be delivered any day now, though it still has to go through sea trials I believe. But even if they used seam catapults (seems unlikely since airports don't conveniently have nuclear reactors colocated), it wouldn't be hard to design them for a certain acceleration profile, just as they did with carriers. The main problem would probably be lack of flexibility relative to EMALS: a catapult capable of launching a 747 on a 5000ft runway would probably delver too much acceleration to a 737 (or worse, some commuter jet). Something electromagnetic would probably allow selecting profiles much more easily.
Yes, it's regressive because poorer people spend virtually all their income on consumer purchases (aside from rent and food), whereas richer people can afford to invest theirs, or spend it outside the country.
Think about it this way: you need to buy a toothbrush. *Everyone* needs toothbrushes, whether they're rich or poor. But when a poor person buys a toothbrush, they have to pay sales tax on it, which now affects their quality of life because they have that much less to spend on other things, or to put in savings or to invest to try to get out of poverty. When a rich person buys that same toothbrush, the sales tax to them is inconsequential. So why are you punishing the poor person for trying to take care of their teeth?
You might try making exemptions for things like this, but now you're just hopelessly complicating the whole system, and making more work and expense for merchants, which results in higher prices, plus having to pay an army of government workers to manage the complexity.
Instead, just dump sales taxes on everything except maybe big-ticket items (which only rich people buy anyway) and things you really want to curtail (like tobacco) because of excessive societal costs (smoking->bad health->bigger healthcare bills for society; alcohol->bad health and dangerous driving->dead people on the road). Replace it all with an increased income tax, which of course is progressive (as they already are). Then poor people don't get taxed much if any (depending on the lower threshold) and can buy their toothbrushes without penalty, and rich people pay more, and you only need one big enforcement agency and complicated set of rules instead of two, which lets you reduce the size of government overall and not need to pay so many government workers.
Just because Europe does something doesn't mean it's the most optimal way. Europe is known for a lot of bureaucracy and poorer class mobility than the US. They get some things right, like healthcare (though this varies from country to country, but it's generally better than the US in all of them, but to differing degrees), but other things they don't. Try being an entrepreneur in Europe: it's probably not as easy as in the US.
The Navy does catapult launches with rather large AWACS aircraft, not to mention F/A-18s. It seems to work out just fine for them, and the F-14 had a service life of about 4 decades before they finally retired those. The AF doesn't do it because there is a trade-off and they don't need to, and also because the AF is worried more about things like being able to drop forces into an area where there's no airport at all, and have them construct one on the spot (out of dirt). Notice that most large USAF planes have very heavy-duty landing gear, much more than what's needed for landing on tarmac.
You may be right about the trade-off still not being worth it for commercial airplanes, but I wouldn't be so sure. Also, at a commercial airport, you don't need to catapult the plane to lift-off velocity in a couple hundred feet; you have at least 3000 feet of runway you could use for takeoff, so you could use much lower acceleration on your catapult. You wouldn't want to replicate a carrier catapult anyway: passengers wouldn't be too happy being accelerated that fast. But if you built a catapult which approximated the acceleration provided by the existing jet engines during take-off, that'd be no different than current take-off forces as felt by passengers, while saving a lot of fuel and probably also allowing you to downsize the engines a bit. The main problem would be the structural reinforcement at the towhook.
Yeah, but these sound like problems common to many RTOSes (esp. the many-eyes problem). They just aren't widely used, and there's tons of them. They do work well for mission-critical environments though, especially avionics and military (which has a huge crossover). I worked in one 6-month job in that industry and it was interesting; they have a very rigid process for producing designs and code (heavily reliant on Rational software, namely DOORS). The code isn't very efficient, but that's not the goal, reliability is. But they weren't using QNX either, they were using an extremely small RTOS developed in-house with cooperative multitasking. I also worked at a company using Nucleus RTOS and did some work with that.
I think one big factor in small systems like the above is that the company making the system has total control of all the applications running on the device, so the whole thing is tested as a system. Users can't add anything, and 3rd-party software definitely isn't allowed. That prevents a lot of problems you see in general-purpose OSes, where the OS cannot trust the applications. In an RTOS, you can because it's all put together by the same team.
That's a pretty good point: why don't they use catapults for airports? Probably inertia at this point: it'd require all the airports to install them, all the airplanes to be redesigned for them, all the pilots to be retrained for them, etc.
You would need these batteries to charge very fast while on the ground, have long life-spans and cycle-count ratings for it to be economically worth it.
No, you don't need fast charging rates. With an airport, you have dedicated ground crews handling the preparation of the planes between flights, employed by the airline. So instead of refueling the plane, they just need to swap out some battery packs while the people are unloading. It should be entirely possible to build a fast-swap battery module into the underside of the fuselage, or thinner modules into the wings.
There are probably things we need to do better to the electric motor to produce that kind of horsepower
Huh? We already have electric motors driving aircraft-carrier-sized cruise ships and pulling massive trains. Electric motors are a solved problem and have been for ages. The power in huge power plants is all created by enormous electric motors (called "generators"). This isn't a problem.
But yes, charging airplanes in flight is a silly idea. It's cool on a research project like this, but on something that carries 500 passengers it's infeasible because the actual solar energy incident on the plane's surface would be far too small to even bother with.
Most of the energy in a gallon of jet fuel is wasted as heat. You're correct about planes losing mass as they fly, but the inefficiency of turbine engines and of anything Carnot-cycle-based probably more than makes up for that. Electric motors, OTOH, are well over 95% efficient, and there'd be more losses in the batteries themselves.
So yeah, we definitely need a significant increase in battery energy-density before electric planes become feasible, but not nearly as much as you claim. Probably more like 10x-15x.
Exactly. Look at the Apollo moon landings. We haven't made traveling to the moon a reality for consumers, and we basically did it just because we could. But in the process, we came up with all kinds of spin-off technologies that were a huge boost to the economy.
The lessons learned in flying a solar airplane around the world might not just help with other aircraft, they could have benefits for many other not-that-related industries as well. The Apollo program provided a big boost to the electronics industry, for instance.
Please Microsoft, keep pissing off users and administrators. Soon since everything will be "in the cloud" and all apps will be web based we won't have a reason to use your shitty OS anymore.
Yeah right. People have been complaining about MS for decades and threatening to leave, but they never do. A small minority of us switched to Linux at some point, but most people will continue to just sit in the pot and be boiled alive.
Unfortunately the frog (read populous) has been in the pot too long and it is now almost too late for them to jump out although there are now a few brave ones doing so.
Very few are, though, so it's actually very amusing to sit back and watch all these loudly-complaining frogs bitch about how hot it is.
Yeah, but the repositories are all free! In a true app store, I have to pay for each and every app. Everyone knows that the quality of something is directly proportional to how much you paid for it, so Linux will never work as long as it doesn't have an app store with every app costing $$$.
WTF are you talking about? MS is doing great, they're not fucking up at all. Their job is to make more profit, and that's what they're doing. If that involves screwing over their customers, then so be it. Their customers aren't going to jump ship, so Microsoft is correct, and has every right to fuck them over to the maximum extent allowable by the law. If you don't like it, then stop doing business with them.
Yep, and too bad. That's what they get for making themselves reliant on Microsoft. Hopefully MS will make life even more miserable for these SMBs soon with more policies like this. I really enjoy seeing MS screw over their customers, and their customers continue to bend over for them. It's amusing, in a dark way.
Wind energy doesn't use rare-earth minerals, it's just a big fan with a motor.
And at least with solar, you only have to dig it up once and make the panel once, and then it produces power for decades. And you can then recycle it afterwards.
With fossil fuel, once you burn it, it's gone, into the atmosphere, and you have to keep digging more out of the ground and burning it.
Oh please, that assumes that everyone worldwide is equally wealthy, which obviously isn't the case. How much of MS's revenues come from the US? A billion villagers living in mud huts in Africa aren't viable customers for MS. (And the Africans' economies are improving and they're becoming more technological, but even so, they, along with most 3rd-worlders, are skipping PCs for the most part and going straight to mobile devices, which don't use MS software. And the people who do use PCs are using pirated software.)
Where are these booth babes you refer to? I thought they got rid of those at conferences in recent years (though I did see them a lot when I used to get sent to conferences in 2000--those were the glory days!!!). I'll happily go chat up some booth babes. I'm not going to buy their shitware though.
I really wish I could go back to 1995-2000; times were better then. Booth babes, no Metro-like flat-UI user interfaces, houses were cheap, computers were actually fun, Linux was ascendant and hadn't gone off the rails with Gnome3 and general malaise, the only thing that sucked was the music (though newer music isn't any good either, but at least in recent years we've had a lot of classic rock bands return to the stage).
The problem here is that you only have a few actually viable solutions to improve the situation: 1) don't use the software, 2) lawsuit, or 3) government regulation. Begging the companies to stop being dicks isn't going to work, no matter how much some naive people may think that it does.
But the problem is that the government in the US sure as hell isn't going to do anything about this stuff (they haven't before now, the closest we've seen was the MS antitrust trial of the 90s and that wasn't even a slap on the wrist in the end; Apple does not have a monopoly so antitrust law doesn't apply here). That leaves lawsuits, but these companies have been doing this stuff for ages to some degree and they've never lost a lawsuit. Heck, has anyone ever tried suing Microsoft for their crappy software? Of course not. Good luck suing a company that size unless you have a real slam-dunk case and lawyers ready to take it on contingency. EULAs have already been upheld in court, so I don't think you're going to get far with that. And as others have pointed out, the user had the option to change this (even though the option wasn't well advertised and not the default), and the music wasn't completely deleted, they still have access to it in "the cloud".
That leaves #1: stop using these companies' crappy software.
So, if you have any better suggestions besides "it's a complicated problem" and some other vague hand-waving, I'd like to hear them. I've offered the only viable solution I see here and have backed it up with evidence and logic.
Well in Google's defense, I will say that they do work to make their office software (Google Docs) compatible with MS Office file formats. There might also be some kind of work to make Google Calendar compatible with Outlook/Exchange, I'm not sure.
MS doesn't bother to make their software compatible with anyone. They really are the worst as far as "playing well with others".
Wow, you'd think that general common sense would dictate to find a new vendor when you have a bad experience with something. At least with computers you can fall back on the old "95% of everyone uses Windows and all the software runs on it" excuse. But for cars and appliances, it's just plain stupid to keep buying crappy brands because there's no shortage of competition there (even with the consolidation in appliances). With cars, there's about a dozen mainstream high-volume carmakers now (Ford, GM, Chrysler, Honda, Mazda, Toyota, Subaru, VW, BMW, Mercedes, Volvo), not counting all their extra brands. And even in appliances there's several different brands (Frigidaire/Maytag/Whirlpool, Samsung, LG).
I really like how Apple simplifies user interfaces so a monkey could use it. But this has to be backed up with the ability for users to easily drill down and change options if they want. This "one size fits all" attitude which has become the mantra of many Apple fans after Jobs introduced the iPhone (any size screen you want, as long as it's 3.5") is pure poison.
This "one size fits all" attitude pervades the software industry. It's even infected the Linux world; see Gnome 3.
And exactly what is your proposal for fixing this problem? Beg Apple to stop doing this stuff? (And beg Microsoft to disable GWX while you're at it?)
These vendors don't care about users' needs; the only way you're going to avoid these problems is to stop patronizing these vendors.
As for a workstation dying, that's a dumb analogy. Hardware fails from time to time, because everything physical wears out at some point, not necessarily because some corporation decided to do something nefarious. If your workstation's power supply dies, you go buy a replacement and your data is still where you left it. But intentionally deleting a user's data, or forcibly "upgrading" his OS, or spying on him, is nefarious, and these vendors are going to keep doing it as long as users let them get away with it. The only way to stop them is to stop using their products.
And yes, Apple is some sort of exception. They go out of their way to be stupid. They refuse to "play well with others" or "see the big picture". They assume that they are off in their own little universe and that they don't have to deal with anyone else or risk stepping on their toes.
While I don't disagree about your assessment of Apple, I fail to see how this is an exception: Microsoft is exactly the same.
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Unfortunately, the empty weight of many passenger planes is already higher than that at the max, and carrier operations try to avoid that anyway.
That's just a scale problem. They don't fly 747s off of carriers for two good reasons: 1) they don't need to, and 2) carriers aren't big enough. Airports don't have this problem: they have huge runways.
The real question is how much maintenance they needed for that. Turnaround time is important.
Military jets are known for needing lots of maintenance, but I seriously doubt structural issues are part of that. Most likely, the planes are designed to handle those stresses from the outset and it's just not a problem.
No, the main problem is building the catapults. EMALS still isn't quite ready
They're already using it on the Ford. It's due to be delivered any day now, though it still has to go through sea trials I believe. But even if they used seam catapults (seems unlikely since airports don't conveniently have nuclear reactors colocated), it wouldn't be hard to design them for a certain acceleration profile, just as they did with carriers. The main problem would probably be lack of flexibility relative to EMALS: a catapult capable of launching a 747 on a 5000ft runway would probably delver too much acceleration to a 737 (or worse, some commuter jet). Something electromagnetic would probably allow selecting profiles much more easily.
Are you sure about that 1GWh figure? Remember that most of the energy in jet fuel is just wasted as heat; only maybe 25% or so does any useful work.
Yes, it's regressive because poorer people spend virtually all their income on consumer purchases (aside from rent and food), whereas richer people can afford to invest theirs, or spend it outside the country.
Think about it this way: you need to buy a toothbrush. *Everyone* needs toothbrushes, whether they're rich or poor. But when a poor person buys a toothbrush, they have to pay sales tax on it, which now affects their quality of life because they have that much less to spend on other things, or to put in savings or to invest to try to get out of poverty. When a rich person buys that same toothbrush, the sales tax to them is inconsequential. So why are you punishing the poor person for trying to take care of their teeth?
You might try making exemptions for things like this, but now you're just hopelessly complicating the whole system, and making more work and expense for merchants, which results in higher prices, plus having to pay an army of government workers to manage the complexity.
Instead, just dump sales taxes on everything except maybe big-ticket items (which only rich people buy anyway) and things you really want to curtail (like tobacco) because of excessive societal costs (smoking->bad health->bigger healthcare bills for society; alcohol->bad health and dangerous driving->dead people on the road). Replace it all with an increased income tax, which of course is progressive (as they already are). Then poor people don't get taxed much if any (depending on the lower threshold) and can buy their toothbrushes without penalty, and rich people pay more, and you only need one big enforcement agency and complicated set of rules instead of two, which lets you reduce the size of government overall and not need to pay so many government workers.
Just because Europe does something doesn't mean it's the most optimal way. Europe is known for a lot of bureaucracy and poorer class mobility than the US. They get some things right, like healthcare (though this varies from country to country, but it's generally better than the US in all of them, but to differing degrees), but other things they don't. Try being an entrepreneur in Europe: it's probably not as easy as in the US.
The Navy does catapult launches with rather large AWACS aircraft, not to mention F/A-18s. It seems to work out just fine for them, and the F-14 had a service life of about 4 decades before they finally retired those. The AF doesn't do it because there is a trade-off and they don't need to, and also because the AF is worried more about things like being able to drop forces into an area where there's no airport at all, and have them construct one on the spot (out of dirt). Notice that most large USAF planes have very heavy-duty landing gear, much more than what's needed for landing on tarmac.
You may be right about the trade-off still not being worth it for commercial airplanes, but I wouldn't be so sure. Also, at a commercial airport, you don't need to catapult the plane to lift-off velocity in a couple hundred feet; you have at least 3000 feet of runway you could use for takeoff, so you could use much lower acceleration on your catapult. You wouldn't want to replicate a carrier catapult anyway: passengers wouldn't be too happy being accelerated that fast. But if you built a catapult which approximated the acceleration provided by the existing jet engines during take-off, that'd be no different than current take-off forces as felt by passengers, while saving a lot of fuel and probably also allowing you to downsize the engines a bit. The main problem would be the structural reinforcement at the towhook.
Yeah, but these sound like problems common to many RTOSes (esp. the many-eyes problem). They just aren't widely used, and there's tons of them. They do work well for mission-critical environments though, especially avionics and military (which has a huge crossover). I worked in one 6-month job in that industry and it was interesting; they have a very rigid process for producing designs and code (heavily reliant on Rational software, namely DOORS). The code isn't very efficient, but that's not the goal, reliability is. But they weren't using QNX either, they were using an extremely small RTOS developed in-house with cooperative multitasking. I also worked at a company using Nucleus RTOS and did some work with that.
I think one big factor in small systems like the above is that the company making the system has total control of all the applications running on the device, so the whole thing is tested as a system. Users can't add anything, and 3rd-party software definitely isn't allowed. That prevents a lot of problems you see in general-purpose OSes, where the OS cannot trust the applications. In an RTOS, you can because it's all put together by the same team.
That's a pretty good point: why don't they use catapults for airports? Probably inertia at this point: it'd require all the airports to install them, all the airplanes to be redesigned for them, all the pilots to be retrained for them, etc.
You would need these batteries to charge very fast while on the ground, have long life-spans and cycle-count ratings for it to be economically worth it.
No, you don't need fast charging rates. With an airport, you have dedicated ground crews handling the preparation of the planes between flights, employed by the airline. So instead of refueling the plane, they just need to swap out some battery packs while the people are unloading. It should be entirely possible to build a fast-swap battery module into the underside of the fuselage, or thinner modules into the wings.
There are probably things we need to do better to the electric motor to produce that kind of horsepower
Huh? We already have electric motors driving aircraft-carrier-sized cruise ships and pulling massive trains. Electric motors are a solved problem and have been for ages. The power in huge power plants is all created by enormous electric motors (called "generators"). This isn't a problem.
But yes, charging airplanes in flight is a silly idea. It's cool on a research project like this, but on something that carries 500 passengers it's infeasible because the actual solar energy incident on the plane's surface would be far too small to even bother with.
Wrong.
Most of the energy in a gallon of jet fuel is wasted as heat. You're correct about planes losing mass as they fly, but the inefficiency of turbine engines and of anything Carnot-cycle-based probably more than makes up for that. Electric motors, OTOH, are well over 95% efficient, and there'd be more losses in the batteries themselves.
So yeah, we definitely need a significant increase in battery energy-density before electric planes become feasible, but not nearly as much as you claim. Probably more like 10x-15x.
Exactly. Look at the Apollo moon landings. We haven't made traveling to the moon a reality for consumers, and we basically did it just because we could. But in the process, we came up with all kinds of spin-off technologies that were a huge boost to the economy.
The lessons learned in flying a solar airplane around the world might not just help with other aircraft, they could have benefits for many other not-that-related industries as well. The Apollo program provided a big boost to the electronics industry, for instance.
Please Microsoft, keep pissing off users and administrators. Soon since everything will be "in the cloud" and all apps will be web based we won't have a reason to use your shitty OS anymore.
Yeah right. People have been complaining about MS for decades and threatening to leave, but they never do. A small minority of us switched to Linux at some point, but most people will continue to just sit in the pot and be boiled alive.
Unfortunately the frog (read populous) has been in the pot too long and it is now almost too late for them to jump out although there are now a few brave ones doing so.
Very few are, though, so it's actually very amusing to sit back and watch all these loudly-complaining frogs bitch about how hot it is.
Yeah, but the repositories are all free! In a true app store, I have to pay for each and every app. Everyone knows that the quality of something is directly proportional to how much you paid for it, so Linux will never work as long as it doesn't have an app store with every app costing $$$.
(/s)
WTF are you talking about? MS is doing great, they're not fucking up at all. Their job is to make more profit, and that's what they're doing. If that involves screwing over their customers, then so be it. Their customers aren't going to jump ship, so Microsoft is correct, and has every right to fuck them over to the maximum extent allowable by the law. If you don't like it, then stop doing business with them.
Yep, and too bad. That's what they get for making themselves reliant on Microsoft. Hopefully MS will make life even more miserable for these SMBs soon with more policies like this. I really enjoy seeing MS screw over their customers, and their customers continue to bend over for them. It's amusing, in a dark way.
-1 Stupid.
Wind energy doesn't use rare-earth minerals, it's just a big fan with a motor.
And at least with solar, you only have to dig it up once and make the panel once, and then it produces power for decades. And you can then recycle it afterwards.
With fossil fuel, once you burn it, it's gone, into the atmosphere, and you have to keep digging more out of the ground and burning it.
Oh please, that assumes that everyone worldwide is equally wealthy, which obviously isn't the case. How much of MS's revenues come from the US? A billion villagers living in mud huts in Africa aren't viable customers for MS. (And the Africans' economies are improving and they're becoming more technological, but even so, they, along with most 3rd-worlders, are skipping PCs for the most part and going straight to mobile devices, which don't use MS software. And the people who do use PCs are using pirated software.)
Where are these booth babes you refer to? I thought they got rid of those at conferences in recent years (though I did see them a lot when I used to get sent to conferences in 2000--those were the glory days!!!). I'll happily go chat up some booth babes. I'm not going to buy their shitware though.
I really wish I could go back to 1995-2000; times were better then. Booth babes, no Metro-like flat-UI user interfaces, houses were cheap, computers were actually fun, Linux was ascendant and hadn't gone off the rails with Gnome3 and general malaise, the only thing that sucked was the music (though newer music isn't any good either, but at least in recent years we've had a lot of classic rock bands return to the stage).
The problem here is that you only have a few actually viable solutions to improve the situation: 1) don't use the software, 2) lawsuit, or 3) government regulation. Begging the companies to stop being dicks isn't going to work, no matter how much some naive people may think that it does.
But the problem is that the government in the US sure as hell isn't going to do anything about this stuff (they haven't before now, the closest we've seen was the MS antitrust trial of the 90s and that wasn't even a slap on the wrist in the end; Apple does not have a monopoly so antitrust law doesn't apply here). That leaves lawsuits, but these companies have been doing this stuff for ages to some degree and they've never lost a lawsuit. Heck, has anyone ever tried suing Microsoft for their crappy software? Of course not. Good luck suing a company that size unless you have a real slam-dunk case and lawyers ready to take it on contingency. EULAs have already been upheld in court, so I don't think you're going to get far with that. And as others have pointed out, the user had the option to change this (even though the option wasn't well advertised and not the default), and the music wasn't completely deleted, they still have access to it in "the cloud".
That leaves #1: stop using these companies' crappy software.
So, if you have any better suggestions besides "it's a complicated problem" and some other vague hand-waving, I'd like to hear them. I've offered the only viable solution I see here and have backed it up with evidence and logic.
Well in Google's defense, I will say that they do work to make their office software (Google Docs) compatible with MS Office file formats. There might also be some kind of work to make Google Calendar compatible with Outlook/Exchange, I'm not sure.
MS doesn't bother to make their software compatible with anyone. They really are the worst as far as "playing well with others".
Wow, you'd think that general common sense would dictate to find a new vendor when you have a bad experience with something. At least with computers you can fall back on the old "95% of everyone uses Windows and all the software runs on it" excuse. But for cars and appliances, it's just plain stupid to keep buying crappy brands because there's no shortage of competition there (even with the consolidation in appliances). With cars, there's about a dozen mainstream high-volume carmakers now (Ford, GM, Chrysler, Honda, Mazda, Toyota, Subaru, VW, BMW, Mercedes, Volvo), not counting all their extra brands. And even in appliances there's several different brands (Frigidaire/Maytag/Whirlpool, Samsung, LG).
Hahaha! Good luck with that. I'd really like to see you sue Apple over their EULA.
I really like how Apple simplifies user interfaces so a monkey could use it. But this has to be backed up with the ability for users to easily drill down and change options if they want. This "one size fits all" attitude which has become the mantra of many Apple fans after Jobs introduced the iPhone (any size screen you want, as long as it's 3.5") is pure poison.
This "one size fits all" attitude pervades the software industry. It's even infected the Linux world; see Gnome 3.
And exactly what is your proposal for fixing this problem? Beg Apple to stop doing this stuff? (And beg Microsoft to disable GWX while you're at it?)
These vendors don't care about users' needs; the only way you're going to avoid these problems is to stop patronizing these vendors.
As for a workstation dying, that's a dumb analogy. Hardware fails from time to time, because everything physical wears out at some point, not necessarily because some corporation decided to do something nefarious. If your workstation's power supply dies, you go buy a replacement and your data is still where you left it. But intentionally deleting a user's data, or forcibly "upgrading" his OS, or spying on him, is nefarious, and these vendors are going to keep doing it as long as users let them get away with it. The only way to stop them is to stop using their products.
Sometimes I really wish I could go back to the days when the Apple ][ was current.
And yes, Apple is some sort of exception. They go out of their way to be stupid. They refuse to "play well with others" or "see the big picture". They assume that they are off in their own little universe and that they don't have to deal with anyone else or risk stepping on their toes.
While I don't disagree about your assessment of Apple, I fail to see how this is an exception: Microsoft is exactly the same.