Apple's Shifting Differentiation

Apple is also working against itself in that department. As far as I know a webapp does not need to be approved by Apple to go live.

I think you're confusing the Mac with iOS. Native Mac apps don't have to be approved by Apple unless they are on the Mac App Store.

Apple has made publishing apps without their approval significantly harder during last couple of years. With pretty much mandatory notarization there were several app developers who just stopped developing macOS software due to increasing amount of restrictions and process involved.

Very fair comment. I guess that most developers don't see it as a huge issue though (I've not seen any issues with Apps that I use on Catalina). Direction of travel is towards more onerous Apple involvement.

It looks like Apple is pushing towards having a single app store, see the news about the new macs being able to run iOS apps. I can definitely see them eventually moving to only allowing apps from the iOS store installed on macs, the same as how ipads and iphone are now.

The assumption that Apple wants to approve all apps is wrong.

Apple sees App Store apps, and web apps as having different advantages, and it is in their interest to have the best platform for both.

It’s not just me saying this, they keep saying it too, and proving it by investing in making web apps run better.

I wonder if the next step after that will be Apple dictating what new apps are desirable in the app store and then a bit further Apple making apps themselves and only outsourcing the support or signing franchise deals. Once the hardware could only be repaired by Apple, they could move completely into a subscription model where you could subscribe to e.g. Office or Streamer package that would include a laptop for two years and a predefined set of applications.

> Apple sees App Store apps, and web apps as having different advantages, and it is in their interest to have the best platform for both. It’s not just me saying this, they keep saying it too, and proving it by investing in making web apps run better.

The method to pin a webapp to the home screen is substantially worse than it used to be.

There was a period where javascript running in Safari ran significantly faster than javascript running in a webapp opened from the home screen, or in any other app opening a web view. Is that still the case, or did they decide to share that function?

And yet they've completely nerfed PWAs on iOS. So they can say what they like; I don't believe it.

To the contrary, most apps I have to install from outside the App Store now aren’t signed and need the workaround (right click, Open, OK the scary dialog, open again) to run.

It hasn't been the case for years.

Are you really ‘scared’ by the dialog?

Why would anyone subscribe to that?

Agreed but I think it's stretching it a bit call it a 'workaround' when it essentially tells you what to do :)

Do you not think we're moving towards a future where both platforms converge into just iOS?

Think we can't ignore that the iOS install base has been larger than the MacOS install base. Start looking at it that way and the iOS way of doing things is the norm in the eyes of Apple and MacOS is the odd one out.

You will find that many people would pay for having their worry about choosing the right laptop and software completely removed. They also won't have to worry about repairs etc. as long as any damage would be accidental or from a manufacturing fault.

That’s already why people buy apple and AppleCare.

What you are describing is taking this even further in the direction of an information appliance.

I am unconvinced that there is any benefit that your model provides that Apple does not already.

You can already just buy a Mac with AppleCare and install MS office from the App Store.

People may want their choices to be simplified, but they are also going to need to be able to use whatever important new thing comes along. E.g. Zoom or Slack.

You make this sound like a new problem. You have had to do that for unsigned apps for years and at least in my experience the majority of apps that come from outside the App Store are unsigned. This has been a thing for so long that I almost instinctively right click, Open the first time I run an app I downloaded from the internet

Not everything they do will fit your view of how they should support the web.

Believe whatever you like.

But this means you are also choosing to ignore absolutely enormous investments at every level of the stack that they have made to increase web performance, adopt standards and improve web user experience.

> Do you not think we're moving towards a future where both platforms converge into just iOS?

Could be, but as far as the new cross platform frameworks are shaping up right now it looks like their strategy is slightly different. Apple is seemingly creating a developer ecosystem to loosley describe interfaces and share them between platforms while they ultimately decide how your UI is rendered. Maybe you're right and one day that means flicking a switch and everything is unified. I also look at something like iPadOS for instance which started as extremely similar to iOS and has now diverged and become it's own thing, different to both the Mac and iPhone.

Safari is known among many web developers as the worst browser to develop for.

It's hard to square the claim that they've made enormous investments when you compare feature support against budget. Apple's operating budget is 200x Mozilla's ($85B vs $0.45B), and yet Safari lags significantly behind Firefox in features (and for some the use cases, in performance as well).

Disclosure: I work at Google on JS libraries, and at one point was in the Chrome org, but my opinions are my own.

If think more people would buy a subscription instead of forking out few grand at once. It will be like a finance instead you won't own the laptop. I also understand this is quite stupid, but I feel that this is the direction Apple is going to go to extract even more money from their target audience.

It's reasonably clear that Apple's main focus for Safari is on memory, power use and performance rather than features so that doesn't in any way disprove that they are investing heavily in it.

You'll probably know better than me but Apple's work on Webkit was presumably worthwhile enough for Google to fork it into Blink (no problem with that but maybe worth acknowledging that fact).

I think it highlights a distinction between Apple's past work and their recent work.

Google forked Blink because for whatever reason they were unsatisfied with the state of Webkit -- nominally because they wanted to take a different approach to multi-process, but there may have been other technological and project direction/pace disagreements. Since then, a number of browsers have switched from Webkit to Blink/Chromium as their engine, and arguably Safari is falling behind on new features and overall quality (weird quirks that require web devs to work around).

Don't disagree on features and some aspects of quality but I think it's a mistake not to recognise that the overall user experience also depends on other factors.

If Apple's focus is on getting better power consumption and memory use (esp on mobile) then that's still investing and arguably that does as much if not more for users and the web than adding more features.

PS Let's not forget that Apple are still standing behind WebKit when Microsoft have given up on their own rendering engine so let's give them some credit for helping to avoid a Chrome only web.

Leasing the hardware makes sense - basically like the iPhone upgrade program but extended to macs.

I know people who upgrade their Mac every time there is a speed bump and just sell the old one. They would presumably be candidates for this.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see this.

I just don’t see any reason Apple would tie the leased hardware to a limited software bundle.

Google has a strategy to destroy other platforms and replace them with Chrome.

It’s hardly obvious that this is best for users in the long run.

I point this out not to say it’s wrong for them to attempt this, but because it makes no sense to use Google’s strategic decisions as evidence of Apple’s intentions or investment.

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."

There should be limits on this. It's sad to be the baby outside the window, drenched in bathwater.

I think the bathwater is the least of the defenestrated baby's problems. :)

I would agree if us poor souls didn't have to still support ie11.