Apple's Shifting Differentiation

> it is possible that Apple’s chip team is so far ahead of the competition, not just in 2020, but particularly as it develops even more powerful versions of Apple Silicon, that the commoditization of software inherent in web apps will work to Apple’s favor, just as the its move to Intel commoditized hardware, highlighting Apple’s then-software advantage in the 00s.

I think Ben is missing something here: that the speed and specialist hardware (e.g. neural engine) on the new SoCs again give developers of native apps the ability to differentiate themselves (and the Mac) by offering apps that the competition (both web apps and PCs) can't. It's not just about running web apps more quickly.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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).