Apple's Shifting Differentiation

> Sketch, to be sure, bears the most responsibility for its struggles; frankly, that native app piece reads like a refusal to face its fate.

Ben can write paeans to this new "cloud" business model. But at the end of the day, the question for us, the users is simple.

Do we own what we buy?

When I buy a Mac (and I've bought several), I am buying a computer. A general purpose computational device. And by selling it to me, the company is selling me a general purpose computational device.

What right does the company have to stop me from installing/modifying my device in any way that I see fit? Sure, they may refuse support/warranty, that is their prerogative, but what gives them the right to stop me from having someone else repair it? Or, to boot into Linux? Or, to open my own computer?

I have a MacBook Pro from 2016. Recently, I wanted to give it a thorough cleaning. So I took out my speciality screw driver and unscrewed the screws for the bottom plate.

It wouldn't budge.

It was then I realized that I needed suction cups and strength to move the plate downwards to unlatch something inside to make it "pop".

This design serves no engineering purpose. It exists to make it harder for me, the device owner, to access the device I've purchased without sacrificing dollars at the altar of Apple.

And this was their most "open" product. Prior to the M1 announcement, you couldn't boot into another OS - or significantly alter - your iOS device. And now we can't do so with our Macs. We seem to have collectively decided to blur the line of ownership.

A device we buy isn't ours even after purchase. No, we must continuously give our money to the corporation for the benefit of their revenue projections.

Which returns us to this,

> Sketch, to be sure, bears the most responsibility for its struggles; frankly, that native app piece reads like a refusal to face its fate.

With Sketch you own your data, and thanks to the open format, you can port that data to other mediums.

With Sketch you own a copy of the tool that allows you to do your job.

With these other, less powerful but "collaborative" software, you don't truly own your data or the tools to access it. You merely rent it.

Should there be an event where Figma is acquired or goes out of business, then (in all likelihood) every user of this platform will lack the ability and the choice to preserve their work for future generations (and for their business).

What are the odds of Figma staying as it is, in the control of founders, chugging along as a profitable business a year from now? 5 years from now? A decade? Two decades?

I do not wish to single out Ben, but this post is an exemplar of the shift in thinking being pushed by the current crop of tech cognoscenti. They have made a growing argument that the future is one without ownership. Where it's one where you don't own your devices, you rent them. And they assure us that's the future, and because that's the future, it's going to be amazing.

But that sounds like dystopia to me. It is one thing to have a tradeoff between accessing all the songs in the world and owning a few on vinyl to having the tools of your trade be abstracted away.

Spotify and Netflix aren't essential services to me. My computer is. My vector design software is. My ability to write code is. My ability to make things is.

They argue that there are benefits to "collaboration" with the "cloud", but that doesn't need to be so. The only reason why they're operating in the browser is because the tradition of web apps started within them. There is no reason why every other application can't collaborate natively, with combined local + server-based data storage with other apps across the world.

Video games do it all the time! Games like counterstrike etc are in some ways far more collaborative than a Figma file. The state of what occurs in the world depends on every other person in the world, with the context being time sensitive, and the state being additive. And it works beautifully.

If it can work for non-essential entertainment, why should we accept the reduced paradigm for our essential tools? Why should we buy into crippled software that is limited by the fact it runs in the browser? Why should we buy into the abusive business model of having to rent our ability to do work from another company? Why should we buy into the idea that we don't own the fruits of our labor? And that we don't get to have a copy of our work nor access it without paying the toll?

Bohemian Coding, if you ever read this, don't go down with this ship. Add support for Windows. Or, Linux. It will save your company.

The repairability of the hardware really has nothing to do with software ownership. You can buy a Dell with soldered in components. Android phones are glued together similarly to an iPhone. There is very clearly an engineering reason for this: old laptops were heavy and bulky. Old phones had tiny batteries and simple functionality while a modern phone is trying to pack in as many features per square mm as possible.

You can run open source software on iOS or macOS. There’s nothing in these operating systems preventing apps from working with local files and having options to export and import data. There’s nothing preventing the author of a web application from doing the same (though it’s hard to see a lot of motivation for someone selling a saas subscription to do so). There are self-hosted open source collaboration tools like NextCloud, OnlyOffice, and Gitlab. The fact that VSCode is web based doesn’t change how it’s open source and completely open to tinkering.

What you’re doing here is confusing business model with technology.

And I think what you’re failing to do is look at this software from the perspective of enterprise customers.

A business isn’t worried about the things a consumer is worried about. They have access to their data ensured through a contract. They have legal assurances that they won’t be left out in the cold.

Software is, essentially, business logic. And often, what’s valuable about software isn’t the code itself, it’s the people who are supporting, patching, and improving that code. To a business, a software purchase often feels a lot more like a consulting contract. Businesses could run on 100% free software, but what they really need is someone else to spend the time working out issues and making it “just work.” They need to waste as little of their employees’ time on cost centers, because labor is the highest cost. Ownership doesn’t matter to a business because the only thing a business needs to own is its own core products and services.

You compared this situation to video games - interestingly enough, on that subject, the majority of game consoles have been 100% locked down for almost 4 decades now. Video games are almost entirely closed source. Modded games are mostly banned from online play. Nobody cares that they can’t open up their Xbox to upgrade/replace the components because it’s simply not a priority. Video Games are essentially media content, art, not business logic.

IMO this argument blurs the line between two separate concepts.

I think it's fair to say that a company shouldn't be allowed to sue you or have you arrested for doing whatever you want to a device that you have purchased. For example, see the John Deere lawsuits where they are trying to DRM repairs to tractors and make it illegal to work on them.

What I think is less fair is arguing that a company has a requirement to make it easy or possible for you to work on your device. You're entering the world of engineering and end-user trade-offs and starting to talk about forcing companies to add or remove features that might be in the end-user's best interest.

Would a screw with a proprietary screw-head be ok if the company could argue that it made assembly easier? Would you require that they prove there is some tangible engineering benefit to all decisions? What's the line between "general purpose computing device" and "electronic toy"?

You could probably write a law that made it illegal to add restrictions whose sole purpose was to prevent the user from modifying or repairing their device but the only way you'd ever be able to enforce it is if someone was caught writing incriminating emails. Pretty much anything could have some imaginary engineering justification behind it.

If you can crack a proprietary protocol or re-create a proprietary screwdriver then more power to you, you shouldn't be arrested or sued. But telling a company they're not allowed to use a proprietary screw-head is a messy road to start down, and that's what you're saying when you're asking for companies to be forced to allow you to do what you want on your device.

Vote with your wallet and if the choice you vote for doesn't win then you're free to go create your own. But don't outlaw business models or legislate engineering choices. You should have a right to repair, you should have a right to get your data, you shouldn't have a right to tell me what my engineering choices need to be.

> "...this post is an exemplar of the shift in thinking being pushed by the current crop of tech cognoscenti. ...they assure us that's the future, and because that's the future, it's going to be amazing."

it's good to remind ourselves that stratechery is a marketing vehicle for consulting services, not an inquiry into truth. these blog posts are examples of standard strategic analyses learned in any decent MBA program. absent relevant experience, these analyses may seem oracular, but they're not. they're decent and competently researched, but not amazingly insightful--by design: why give away the real crown jewels (if there are any)?

it's pretty clear that the trend in software has been toward subscriptions (renting software) for the last decade or two, and that subscriptions are more advantageous for profit-seeking businesses, so connecting two very well-known dots provides all the "insight" here. a third well-known dot, that apple has a lead in this regard, provides context.

Thanks for your comment. I hope that all of this "computing" under restricted and profitable for megalithic corporations trend will end soon. But the problem is that majority of users cannot comprehend the damage. General Users are like kids in a candy store, they will grab everything shiny and sweet without thinking twice. My other concern is cancel culture in new developer/designer/engineer generations. They simply don't care. Critical thinking is something from the past. Apple ideas for future of computing are "give us money". Suddenly everything thats important is iOS and vertical integration. This strategy was evident when they postponed making of Mac Pro for years. As a designer I have only one problem: I don't like Windows at all. I can live happily with Linux desktop but I need graphical software as good at least as Affinity Designer. So I have a big request: If someone here is close to Affinity management, take a note I will pay the price of current Affinity Designer x2 for a chance to run it under Linux. :)

If Ben is using Stratechery to market consulting services, he's the worst marketer in existence, as I can't find any evidence he does consulting.

He's not giving away the Crown Jewels, the vast majority of his writing is behind a pay wall, and, to my knowledge, he's full time and only funded via that pay wall to write Stratechery (https://stratechery.com/about/ indicates this as well).

The free articles are an example of his writing to generate traffic to maybe convince folks to sign up and pay him for the rest of the content (which is pretty good, consistently).

> “...pay him for the rest of the content (which is pretty good, consistently).”

having read this free piece and a number previously posted here, the analyses tend to be fairly average in comparison to mba-level work. perhaps you can enlighten me—who pays, and why? who has interest but also doesn’t otherwise have access to mba-level analyses or analytical tools?

a solid position, line of reasoning, or conclusion is difficult to draw from this article. he seems to want badly to say something, anything, insightful about apple’s new silicon to not miss the short window of opportunity afforded by the recent announcement. but what did he say other than repeat some numbers from anandtech and sidetrack onto sketch vs figma?

apple‘s strategy isn’t new or surprising, and this chip is one (comparatively small) part of jobs’ original vision of ubiquitous consumer computing, with apple at the center of it. the switch to arm isn’t even a strategic surprise. they wanted ever smaller and more powerful chips (which intel could have owned but f-ed up) to drive that ubiquitousness and be at the profitable forefront of it (that’s also why they’re so obsessed with thinness). apple has always wanted to own consumer computing. that’s it. that strategy is not that hard to make sense of. but somehow this article badly flubs that low hurdle.

First define for me what you mean by 'average in comparison to mba-level work'? What analytical tools are you referring to?

As to who pays? People who have things to do, and don't have the time to do the 'mba-level' work it takes to track all these different trends and such, and want just a short overview of 'whats important' and "who's moving where".

And your 'obvious' take is not obvious if you look at where apple is spending money, effort and hiring, etc.

And another aspect of this is that he's been talking about some of this stuff for many years, which isn't at all obvious from one of his pieces stand-alone. The weekly updates blend together and consistently reference stuff he's previously discussed, and he also has no problem calling out where he's gotten it wrong.

it's average in comparison to the many similar papers i read (and wrote) during my mba program. he's doing the same thing, except instead of turning papers in to professors, he's blogging about them. some are better than others, but this one is certainly below average. any manager for whom such information is critical will either have an mba, or have access to similar (and likely much better) strategic analyses (e.g., the strategy group at any mid-size or larger company).

You still haven't given me an idea of what you think is 'lacking' in these 'strategic analyses' that would be appropriate for something like this writing?

As to strategy groups, I've worked with strategy teams from a big chunk of the Fortune 100, did time at a Big 4, and I think your expectations of levels of critical analysis are ....overshooting reality :)

Ben's definitely not some strategy messiah, no question - I doubt he'd even claim to be in the top percentage. But he's consistent, thoughtful, and lets me just not think chase tons of other sources on a regular basis.

in this particular case, it'd be great if there was a recognizable thesis and supporting points backed up by discernable research (even cursory).

i'm not suggesting he's a crank, but that adoration should be tempered. we humans tend to get wrapped up in popularity rather than substance. the evaluation of analytical stances should be heavily tilted toward substance.