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.

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.

But I want their integrated ecosystem much more than I want to "own my hardware". If you take that away, I lose instead of gain.

Why not buy a phone with software apples integrated ecosystem preinstalled? There are lots of solutions like that already, just that they all suck. If software apple existed then you would have more options for properly locked down phones without sucky software since now you could put it on hardware from other manufacturers than hardware apple.

> Why not buy a phone with software apples integrated ecosystem preinstalled?

I can already do that. There's a company called Apple that makes exactly that hardware.

So why would splitting Apple up hurt you? Just buy hardware and software from the two Apple companies and you are set.

However I am pretty sure a lot of people with less money than you would like to buy a cheap phone and put Apples software on it.

I have an iPhone, and iPad, multiple Macs, and a watch. They all work together in a myriad of interesting ways as a seamless unit, and all I have to do is set up one device with my iCloud address.

This is made possible due to Apple being in control of the hardware and software. If there's a way to do this as easily with a mix of Linux, Windows, and Android devices, I haven't seen it.

Linux laptops can't even do something as seemingly simple as sleep and wake reliably because it's actually not simple, and the hardware and software people don't talk to each other to make it work.

This is the kind of stuff I don't want to lose.