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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

Response from Apple: We know you have a lot of vendor lock-in, which is why we're doing this. We want shiny features to talk about to get people to buy their first Mac, and don't give a shit about providing a great experience for existing users because we know they won't leave anyway.

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The current state does not feel malicious in this way to me at all. It feels bumbling and amateurish. It gives the feeling that the people who kept the product cohesive have left or retired, and that a new generation of overly ambitious careerists have entered positions of leadership.

I feel like it says a lot, when intelligent amorality seems genuinely preferable to blundering incompetence. Many such cases. One wonders how much "enshittification" is intrinsic to networked software and our late-stage-whatever political economy, versus how much is a farcical byproduct of office politics and org chart turf wars.

I think any organization at Apple's scale has no shortage of skilled workers and ambitious careerists. But at the product level, I do believe that the result you see is generally an honest reflection of the organization's priorities.

If Apple wanted to ship a rock-solid OS, they could. They're just choosing to put those resources elsewhere.

>the people who kept the product cohesive have left or retired

This is everything post-covid. The competent people that could left and retired early.

The current environment is in some ways indistinguishable from COVID. The uncertainty of AI, forced RTO, and processions of layoffs have produced a terrible environment for retaining people who have the means to do literally anything else.

I’m convinced leadership at Apple are not power users. They’ve never put MacOS through their paces, or did any development themselves it seems. If they did they would have found all of the bugs and irregularities and huge performance problems themselves.

Not this simple, unfortunately. Actually this is largely the mindset they have

What do you mean by "largely the mindset they have"? I think the comment you're replying to is right, most Apple execs probably have jobs that can be done entirely on iPads, so none of the complaints by power users about macOS resonate at all (and this group is sadly far too small of a minority to have any financial impact).

Their software lead definitely uses a Mac.

Yeah true, just wish there were more who did though.

The alternative for most people is Windows, which Microsoft seems hellbent into making worse and worse (I didn’t think that was possible but hey, here we are). macOS definitely sounds like the least of two evils anyway.

But what do I know - the year of the Linux desktop for me was 1996.

Win11 and OSX, and to a limited extent Ubuntu feel like they want to just keep selling you stuff.

You see.

It's not enough.

Buy OneDrive, Gamepass, Copilot Pro. This is a big part of why Microsoft is fine with all the sites selling 10$ Windows keys.

Otherwise you might try Linux to save money.

Buy a Mac, you need Apple Plus Deluxe. You need iCloud, etc.

Ubuntu only tries to upsell you via Ubuntu Pro, I guess it's not as aggressive though.

Ubuntu Pro is still free for personal use on up to 5 physical machines, which covers my small home network just fine. It is annoying that they withhold security updates unless you fork over your email address, but I don’t recall them trying to sell me anything since I made an account

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