Comment by alexey-salmin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexey-salmin | Hacker News Reader

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>> it’s a company that I feel has lost its alignment with me and other long-time Apple users and customers.

> When OS X debuted there was a daytime radio talk show in my area called “The Computer Guys.” They capably covered all sorts of computing topics, but were clearly long-time Apple dudes. And they spent weeks complaining about what a disaster OS X was. The Dock was useless and violated Apple’s HIG. The Finder made all the same mistakes as Windows did. And a text terminal? Like DOS?? Who the hell is ever going to want to use that on a Mac?

I kind of see it differently. That is, Apple did in fact lose the alignment with the Classic MacOS fans but Apple did it on purpose. Objectively, by 2001 standards MacOS sucked and you wouldn't want to align with people who think otherwise. As the result Apple broke out of a small stagnating niche and won a big market.

This is different from today's situation where it feels like Apple breaks the alignment not on purpose and not by innovation but rather just slowly drifts out.

There's a theory in the comments that they want to align with "people who want the best camera array and have money to burn". This could be true but even then it doesn't look like a good strategy to win a big market long-term. More like a retreat back into a small niche that may stagnate in the future, like "people who want the best publishing software and have money to burn".

Pre MacOS X was a 90s style OS and had major limitations that were a problem for every user, starting with no real multi-threading, and I think no protected memory.

Where it was great was in the simplicity to the user. If you wanted to install or uninstall a driver or functionality, all you had to do is move an extension file in or out of the extension folder and reboot. That simplicity was lost in MacOS X. That made simple users dumber. (and iOS went back to the simplicity)

Locking down the OS so you can't install or uninstall functionality at all is not simplicity.

It is if Grandma keeps downloading scams and installing them.

You mean there are no scams in the famous "we're protecting you from all those internet evil guys by charging you app subscriptions" app stores?

Of course not, but Grandma is very cost sensitive and doesn't subscribe to any of that.

No, even then it still isn't. A device should not protect you from making bad decisions. It should be an aid in making good choices, not a nanny keeping you safe because you can't be trusted to do better.

So, turn off your firewall if you don't want to be protected.

Do modern OSes have services listening on external IPs without explicitly told to still?

I think to the parents point, everything should be wide open, all the features possible, and let him configure. By not listening, isn't that 'over-simplifying', let the user decide.

Grandma has a tablet these days.

So because "Grandma" keeps doing stupid things with tech she doesn't understand, that now means the rest of us have to suffer for it?

All the downvotes are really missing the point of Apple.

Simple exactly does mean less features. That is what you are buying into. Less features, easy to find, no 'ambiguity'.

If you want a ton of feature and flexibility, you go elsewhere.

But don't criticize Apple for being locked down, when that is exactly what they are selling.

It kinda is, though.

Its an exchange in complexity

> Pre MacOS X was a 90s style OS and had major limitations that were a problem for every user, starting with no real multi-threading, and I think no protected memory.

Technically, the last “classic” Mac OS had memory protection and a fully preemptive scheduler.

The very serious caveat was that all “classic” Mac OS applications ran in a single process, and, within it, were scheduled cooperatively.

It was possible to create fully preemptively scheduled threads from within such applications, but they couldn’t write to the screen. I don’t remember whether they could do file I/O.

> Objectively, by 2001 standards MacOS sucked and you wouldn't want to align with people who think otherwise.

I see, so like "Don't think different"?

By 2001 the Classic MacOS wasn't really "different", it was largely the same as the System 7 release from 10 years ago.

The NeXTSTEP on the other hand was quite different. Different from MacOS, from DOS/Windows and from proprietary UNIXes. I would argue that switching to NeXTSTEP was more aligned with the original spirit of "think different" than getting stuck in the old ways.

Like another post says, "The Mac was a philosophy". I bought a series of them but stopped around the year 2000 because they threw away the philosophy in favor of innovation. I think things were going south already around 1998. Remember Sherlock? On system 8.5 it would regularly interrupt the user (sending games from full screen to windowed) to display a dialog to say that it was indexing files. This couldn't be turned off except by disabling the Sherlock extension altogether.

That says that Sherlock's mission wasn't to help the user do user activities, but to get the user out of the way of Sherlock's activities, while keeping the user informed about the magnificence of Sherlock. This attitude became really popular with every OS that was competing to be innovative, and we're still stuck with it today. Shut up user, pay attention, look at my features!

That was because MacOS classic couldn’t multitask

Sure it could, it had cooperative multitasking. Inside Macintosh instructed programmers on the importance of politely giving way to other processes.

https://archive.org/details/inside-macintosh-1992-1994/1992-...

WaitNextEvent (hmm, a Windows call has the same name, but functions differently I think).

Multitasking via mandatory manual yields isn’t.

It is, that is why there is preemptive multitasking and non-preemptive multitasking.

people will sell their things and buy it. especially now that it seems to have this epithet that it is for "people who want the best camera array and have money to burn"

> There's a theory in the comments that they want to align with "people who want the best camera array and have money to burn".

I agree with you and this theory sounds like moving goalposts.

First people claimed that the free market will always give the consumer what they want.

Then this turned out to be not true (we even have a term, enshittification), and now people come up with a more "refined" theory. Why would it be true this time?

Could it be that "people" that say that are different groups of people?

This is the other side of it. "Online everyone complains about X," but everyone is 200 randos online, hardly conclusive. If anything its more like the yelp effect. The people who are most likely to complain and celebrate online are the small vocal slice. Not even online really. The vast majority of people just dont give a damn so long as youtube, calls, and texting works (if its a phone), or whatever are probably the most common 3-4 activities most users do.

> First people claimed that the free market will always give the consumer what they want.

Enshittification does give consumers what they want: free stuff. People will deny it up and down and claim they would pay for non-enshittified Facebook, for example. But how many people actually would pay a subscription to use a Facebook style service? Enough to build sustain a company of Meta's size? Probably not. How many people pay for Kagi?

>Enshittification does give consumers what they want: free stuff

Nope. Enshittifition happens to paid stuff just as well, including stuff you pay more (including when inflation adjusted) from what you paid before.

It's about futher increasing the profit margins, whether it's a paid product or not, not about affording to give something for free.

Yes. And it's also about strategic lock-in.

> Enough to build sustain a company of Meta's size?

This is the problem - I'd argue we shouldn't have companies the size of Meta (or Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, etc.). It's that these companies are nation-state level huge, and operate in a system that continues to demand more growth still, that causes problems like enshitification.

Would enough people pay for Facebook to support a company of Meta's size? No, but that's OK - enough people would pay for it to support a much smaller, customer-focused company, and that would be a really good thing across all of tech.

What's so wrong about just sustaining a certain size/user base instead of endlessly growing bigger and bigger?

>First people claimed that the free market will always give the consumer what they want.

That was maybe true at the time of Adam Smith for something like chocolates or bags of cheaper rice, or shirts and socks and bricks.

For things that take tens of billions to design, code for, build, and support, like smartphones and their OSes, there are just a few players (only two that mater for smartphone OSes), and there are huge barriers to entry even ignoring any rules and regulations you have to adhere to, but even more so with those in mind too.

So you get what the players give you, and that's it.

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