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Apple's Shifting Differentiation

(stratechery.com)
292 points kaboro | 1 comments | 11 Nov 20 13:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.95s | source
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darksaints ◴[11 Nov 20 14:36 UTC] No.25058726[source]▶
I really wish Apple sold its hardware independently from its software. They make amazing hardware, and their latest silicon releases practically make me want to buy their computers again.

Their software is shit though, and their walled garden, and insistence on using apple programming languages and IDEs for development, practically ensures that third party software will either not exist or be shit as well. There are only a handful of software shops that make decent software for apple, and they are all fully specialized on apple and therefore do not make software that plays nice with collaborators on other computers, nor used on a cloud server, etc. And if there actually exists better software from third parties that competes with apple software, you can forget about it ever being fully integrated. "Hey Siri, navigate to city hall using Google maps". Yeah right.

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amelius ◴[11 Nov 20 14:41 UTC] No.25058759[source]▶
Yes, they should break up Apple in a software and hardware company.

Same for NVidia.

It's the only way to actually own our hardware.

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johncolanduoni ◴[11 Nov 20 15:56 UTC] No.25059376[source]▶
How would that work in NVidia’s case? You buy a card that the company is not allowed to ship in a state where you can actually use it, and then buy a driver from the other company? I guess that’ll solve the Linux driver issue by tanking NVidia accross all platforms and giving AMD an opportunity to get ahead.
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amelius ◴[11 Nov 20 16:17 UTC] No.25059573[source]▶
It would work the same as when you bought an IBM clone in the old days. You couldn't use the hardware without running software from another company (Microsoft's MS-DOS).
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1. johncolanduoni ◴[11 Nov 20 16:34 UTC] No.25059783[source]▶
Yeah but the IBM clones were only produced after painstaking reverse engineering of the BIOS. So basically nouveau, which already exists, but with much more work put in due to there being a greater upside. Though I think this analogy is a bit strained, for the most part the drivers aren't running on the device you're buying, hence the Linux driver being an issue at all.