Apple's Shifting Differentiation

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.

> practically ensures that third party software will either not exist or be shit as well

I don’t see this at all. The Mac has long had a culture of extremely dedicated developers who have fully acculturated themselves into a design-oriented, performance focused culture that presents a stark contrast to the cultures of Windows or Web development. Third party software in the Mac has generally been extremely thoughtful and well designed.

There is plenty of shitty software on iOS, but that has a lot more to do with the amount of shovelware thrown into the store than anything inherent to Objective C.

Third party developers have done significantly better than Apple themselves. The core design and reliability of MacOS seems to get more half baked with every update.