“Vision for a New Era”

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I found this to be a thought provoking article so I thought I’d share it.

In my previous article, we talked about the user community being Apple’s secret asset, and that the symbiotic relationship between the two, specifically the creative genius of the user community imagining use cases for devices that the company could never have imagined on its own, is essential for individual product development and maturation. For this discussion, we are including both users and developers, who are also consumers, into this notion of community.

https://www.macobserver.com/analysis/apple-unified-platform-vision-new-era/

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I don’t know how to say what I want to say tactfully, so I won’t try.

I am unaware of any “symbiotic relationships” between Apple and the user or developer communities. Apple does what they want, and I have to assume that they do this in their own interests: to sell stuff, thereby making money.

If I ask myself “What do users want from Apple?”, I think the number one answer is “reliability.” We want bugs fixed. There are many on this forum who have expressed frustration with bugs, some of which are long-standing. Not much profit there, though.

If I ask myself “What do developers want from Apple?”, that’s more difficult to answer, but certainly one good candidate would be “decent documentation.” I’ve seen this all over the interweb. Why should StackOverflow be my go-to resource for questions about how this or that works (in iOS, macOS, etc)? Again, not much profit there.

I doubt if that many, if any, users or developers wanted Catalina. Yet that’s what Apple gave us, and we learned to live with it.

I’m certainly not saying that Apple Silicon is a bad thing. It’s far to early to make that kind of judgement. But I also think it’s far too early to be calling Apple Silicon “the next big (I.e. revolutionary) thing,” as this article trumpets.

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This.

In my decades of using Apple kit, I’ve never felt that Apple cared for my opinion. No one at an Apple store or on a call with support – the only contact I have with Apple other than via my wallet – has ever asked me if I had any suggestions, wants, needs, or priorities regarding their products. No different than any other business. “Community” is a cynical marketing term.