I worked on the team in charge of improving iOS (13) perf at Apple and IIRC there was no dedicated macOS “task force” like the one on iOS.
Luckily some iOS changes permeated into macOS thanks to some shared codebases.
It's not surprising. Macs are less than 10% of Apple's revenue.
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/04/30/apple-2q-2020-earnings/
Without Macs for developers and other content creators that other 90% doesn’t exist.
If the Mac revenue was separated out on its own, it would be about Fortune 120, that is higher than Kraft Heinz. With plenty more space for growth. Apple only has 100M Active Mac users. There are 1.4B Windows PC.
They are risking their entire empire because (apparently) someone at Apple has an axe to grind with macOS's Unix underpinnings. And until they start getting real consequences (developer's leaving in huge numbers), it doesn't seem like it's going to stop. The tragedy is, if they ever do reach that point, where developers are leaving in huge numbers, it'll be too late. Platforms are a momentum game, you're either going up, or you're going down. And once you're going down, you're as good as dead.
Maybe it's not related to revenue per se, but clearly since iOS became their main thing the Mac has suffered tremendously.
Perf changes are too numerous to mention, I’d recommend watching last year’s WWDC keynote describing the iOS 12 v/s 13 perf advancements.
To me, the idea that an OS is mostly finished is completely bananas. There's so much room for improvement and hardly any of that potential was tapped into in what's starting to feel like a decade.
And if Apple had invested into a successor for Cocoa, there might be a larger gap between native apps and (Electron) web apps, leading to some lock-in. Instead most new stuff is not native and for good reasons (and I do dislike the way they don't adhere to Mac conventions, but still).
I think ultimately the problem is Tim Cook. He's too attached to Apple's stock price. I think that's the one metric that he believes rates his performance. But inertia is a bitch. Like in politics, the effects might hit hard only once he's out and it could be too late to fix by then.
If I think about how much this impacts the economy overall (i.e. make millions of knowledge workers a little bit less efficient) then I can only hope that I'll see more sophisticated organizational structures in my lifetime that prevent such erosion.
And I'd wager that some iOS games are released without the developer ever touching XCode: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UnityCloudBuildiOS.html
It took longer than expected. I even intended to buy put options, but someone I trust told me otherwise and to invest in equity instead, which I did, because I know that most buy decisions are not made rationally.
But it looks like the time has come now? On the other hand, I have been off by several years before. People are crazier than you think, especially when it comes to status and association with brands and self-confirmation of past decisions. They might well put up with Apples moves for a few more years.
No. A special directory can be created at the root of the file system called /AppleInternal. Then, if you work at Apple, you can put some special files there that do stuff. I've read somewhere that they are able to easily disable all of this privacy protection crap and other annoying stuff.