> Apple's most valuable intangible asset isn't its patents or copyrights – it's an army of people who believe that using products from a $2.89 trillion multinational makes them members of an oppressed religious minority whose identity is coterminal with the interests of Apple's shareholders.
Maybe this was true in the era of “mac hipsters” somewhere between late 00s and early ‘10s, but I have zero idea what the article author is on about if they are talking about the current state of things.
Heavy majority of people around me use macs, and I have never noticed that vibe. Even online, it isn’t really a thing anymore for almost anyone. For most, macs are just their workhorse machines. People don’t rave about macos or anything like that, people just use it. Some number of them also have gaming PCs too, so it isn’t really even a topic of discussion. Ffs, even my mother these days uses a mac (m1 air), and she is not even really tech literate.
I remember there were those passionate “PC vs Mac” flamewars back then, but these days it feels like most just found what works for them, and anything else or what everyone else is using is not something they care about at all.
The only times i even hear people having some strong personal opinions about macs these days, they tend to come from people who don’t actually use them.
The Mac hipsters[0] are still very much around, they're just diluted. They will, however, come out of the woodwork on literally any article that makes Apple look bad.
As you noted, most people buy Apple because it works and does what they need it to do. They aren't aware of the anticompetitive bullshit Apple pulls, but they'll absolutely criticize the shit out of it if it's brought to their attention.
[0] I'm resisting the urge to call them Mac Objectivists. They program in Objectivist-C, naturally.
> I'm resisting the urge to call them Mac Objectivists. They program in Objectivist-C, naturally.
I don't know what you've seen, but as an Objective-C programmer myself, and one who knows quite a few others, we tend to be disgruntled against Apple now rather than fanbois.
I've found some still have a weird tendency to defend bad UX on apple products, even if it's obviously bothering them. I've heard similar sentiments as in the article too, especially about the app store, but it's not something people go around announcing to everyone anymore, like they used to.
If you buy a product that's more expensive, you'd be a fool if it's not superior to other products, so it's hard not to get personally invested in the idea that they are.
Every time an OS upgrade disrupts some UI paradigm or process I've got deeply ingrained into my mental model of what I do with my computers, I marvel at how my mother has kept doing her own thing without giving a fuck about _any_ computer interaction paradigm† from our Macintosh SE to her current M2 Air.
She's by far the least tech-oriented close relative I have. And she has the longest Mac-only usage and ownership streak of anyone I know in meatspace, too.
† Except for dark patterns, because even the ones that don't give a fuck about computers can be quick to notice when things change for bamboozlement reasons instead of mere vanity or tool complexity increase.
I think that's just down to the fact that she's always having to relearn the interface anyhow. I have tech illiterate family members who always manage to do whatever they intended with the device, just in the most insane ways because to them there are no conventions and habits, only whatever they figured out.
I agree with you, but at the same time I find myself having to relearn interfaces all the frigging time anyway.
I get it, I can't expect to get into "the zone" without investment into detailed and up-to-date knowledge of my current environment, and any relearning is at best merely incremental and at worst a brand new trend that is (or will become) widespread enough to be unavoidable.
But I can't stop envying the superficially "naive" stoicism of those waning generations who only wanted some kind of glorified typewriter and anything else they've got along the way is still gravy on the top.
There's less of that in the Mac space I would agree, but in the mobile space there's a large percentage of iOS users that turn their nose up at Android users.
- I cannot stay happy with a WM/DE config on Linux. Most of then can’t even render a desktop at a reasonable size (or even consistent across all apps)
- I like the hardware and I’m not particularly price sensitive
Now I can add the performance for local AI to the reasons to do so again.
I almost entirely use open source software though, and I don’t think I use anything Mac specific except Alfred.
As far as I can tell, there is no viable alternative for people who are simultaneously very demanding of their tools and unwilling to spend half their life fiddling with configs.
Agree. I also use an iPhone. I have a Pixel running Graphene (I refuse to do Googled Android, or Chrome) and I want to like it, I really do, but I always go back to the iPhone. I don’t feel like a cult member (that’s what they all say…).
I’ve realised that while I consider my laptop a computer, to which I need full access and control, the phone for me is basically an appliance. It’s like my washing machine but for messaging, web browsing, and ordering shit. Conceptually I want it to be unencumbered and open source, but in reality I try not to spend all day staring at it and when I do have to I just want it to work. (I get it, that’s how they get you! I’ll donate money to fixing that, but I don't have the time, patience, or energy to use the alternatives in their current state.)
Does “everything works” mean that for you, close to zero effort will be required over the next 6/12/18/24/36 months?
Because my problem isn’t finding a way to be happy with a Linux setup at a point in time but finding a way not to have to do a bunch of work every so often just to keep stuff working.
And 48/72/120 months (I've only just replaced my Dell Inspiron that has been happily running Linux since 2010). Security updates are pretty slick now, I don't expect them to break anything. Upgrading to the next Mint major version can be a touch tricky sometimes, but same with MacOS.
Once something works (and only WiFi didn't work out the box), it keeps working.
I dug into the hash key thing - of course the US Mac has a 'hash key' as SHIFT+3. However the UK Mac (from 2015 anyway) replaces it with the £, requiring SHIFT+ALT+3 (or something like that) for #. This was mind mindbogglingly annoying for software dev.
As an Apple user and developer, I don't disagree with the gist of the article, but I do have two criticisms:
1) "But that's not the only bad outcome. Some lucky service providers are able to pay the Apple Tax by gouging Apple's customers, raising prices to pay the danegeld. That's the second effect."
This is a common but unfortunately gross misunderstanding. The App Store actually devalued software, creating a race to the bottom, and the main reason is that the App Store directly cloned the iTunes Music Store, which itself devalued albums and was designed to sell 99 cent singles. It's a terrible model for selling software. I've written about it before here: "App Store is neither console nor retail but jukebox" https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/jukebox.html
As an indie developer, my biggest problem isn't Apple's cut (which for me is only 15% now); rather it's the expectation of cheap software that the App Store has created. I would be happy to pay 30% or even more if I could charge pre-2008 prices, and if Apple would actually do my marketing for me, as some people ignorantly claim. You can't "make it up in volume". Musicians couldn't make it up in volume either. There are a billion possible customers, but turning possible customers into actual customers is actually very hard, and also expensive.
> A full 84 percent of the apps in the App Store pay nothing to Apple when you download or use the app. That’s not discrimination, as Spotify claims; it’s by design
As a software developer, that statement makes me wince. It's an open admission that Apple intentionally devalued software and created the expectation among users that they shouldn't have to pay for it.
2) The title of the article is unfair. Mac users are not the problem, because the Mac is more open than the iPhone — for example, you can install software from outside the App Store — and there are 10x as many iPhone users as Mac users.
Agreed on 2, and I would even go further: While I think there is definitely something odd to the behavior on display here, dramatizing that as a cult is perhaps too far (though I don't know for sure how I would put it myself).
Good thoughts on 1. It does make you wonder how different things would be if apps were priced more similarly to desktop software from the beginning (maybe smartphones would never have caught on?). We're in so deep with 99 cent apps that it's easy to overlook that or take it as a given even though it didn't have to be this way.
99 cent pricing wasn't a done deal in the first year of the App store. I wonder what would have happened if Apple (and/or Google) had mandated a price floor for games and if Apple had allowed free, time-limited demos.
I greatly prefer "paid" mobile games without obnoxious monetization schemes. Conveniently someone on HN made a web directory for them:
I'm not entirely sure that the anti-fanboy rant is completely misguided, but it ignores the fact that Apple's products - iPod, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods, etc. - transformed their respective categories. Cult-like followers and marketing weren't enough to turn iPod Hi-Fi or AppleTV into huge successes.
The mobile software market seems like a nightmare, while paid desktop software seems to have been largely replaced by web apps and monopoly subscriptionware. I'd like to hope there are some opportunities, since I'm greatly turned off by mobile monetization hell and bloated and unresponsive web/electron/etc. apps, and the only software I'm even slightly tempted to subscribe to is Apple Arcade.
(For games I'd rather pay $30 for a game without gacha microtransaction hell - that's why the Switch is my main gaming handheld; I'm also annoyed that many of my purchased, not-exactly-cheap iOS games are no longer playable due to Apple's complete comtempt for backward compatibility.)
I've always thought StopTheMadness looked great but I'm part of the problem since I can't bring myself to pay for it. I also have trouble convincing myself to pay for any Safari extensions on macOS.
Article skips one of the major reasons why Apple is so popular: actual physical Apple stores.
Any maintenance is dealt with at the store, no stress, no need to call customer support, or to find an authorized shop.
I love my Lenovo laptop with Linux, but their customer experience is dreadful both to purchase equipment (that website! why?) and to get any sort of maintenance.
I wouldn't buy a Mac, but dismissing Apple's dominance as human folly is a bad take.
Of course it skips that! There are obviously plenty of good things Apple does with its products, and it is not on the article to qualify each of them before moving on to a criticism. The "human folly" is the susceptibility to advertising, which absolutely does work and was 100% leveraged heavily by Apple to great success. Pointing that out and the negative consequences of it as the article does is not "dismissing" anything else about Apple.
Oh I just realized this was Cory Doctorow, who I generally like. I suppose the rant is on brand, though I think he gives too much credit to Tim Apple's[1] alleged mind control powers.
I'm just glad more people are beginning to see through the veil of the "privacy focused" Apple's bullshit and peek at the monopolistic data-slurping monster building its ad empire behind.
It used to be not long ago you'd get downvoted into oblivion (on HN and elsewhere) for just daring to hint that Apple might not be the good guys their PR department is working hard to portray them as.
That is in part the point of the article, I think. Ultimately this comes down to personal preference. Apple, Microsoft, Linux, everything has ups and downs and it shouldn't be more than personal preference. What becomes an issue is when fans of one group unconditionally defend or deny the flaws of their choice to the point that it's to their own detriment and enables their preferred company to be extremely predatory to their users. That is a phenomenon interesting enough to be worth looking into even if you can sidestep it by just not using Apple, because at the end of the day yes, it is as simple as just choosing your preference.
Maybe this was true in the era of “mac hipsters” somewhere between late 00s and early ‘10s, but I have zero idea what the article author is on about if they are talking about the current state of things.
Heavy majority of people around me use macs, and I have never noticed that vibe. Even online, it isn’t really a thing anymore for almost anyone. For most, macs are just their workhorse machines. People don’t rave about macos or anything like that, people just use it. Some number of them also have gaming PCs too, so it isn’t really even a topic of discussion. Ffs, even my mother these days uses a mac (m1 air), and she is not even really tech literate.
I remember there were those passionate “PC vs Mac” flamewars back then, but these days it feels like most just found what works for them, and anything else or what everyone else is using is not something they care about at all.
The only times i even hear people having some strong personal opinions about macs these days, they tend to come from people who don’t actually use them.