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.