The Apple of old had a deep respect for their users. We paid for a product that tried its best to sweat the details and deliver the best experience possible. UX was king. Apple made hard choices and delivered minimal, thoughtful and delightful products. The motto was "less but better".
Today we have an Apple that keeps pushing new poorly thought out features. More and more they don't respect the user. Constant interruptions that don't serve the user, a ridiculous onboarding process with far too many screens, forcing their own products like Apple Music on people, not making design choices and making the user pick an option. We are so far from less but better and it's only getting worse. I wish there was a way forward for Apple, but I think it's just going to slowly die.
Except the way some system notifications worked on iOS was always disrespectful. The kind where you unlock your device with a clear goal in mind and a modal alert pops up telling you that your battery is low, or that something "important" happened to your Apple ID, or that a system update is available, or asks you to set up iMessage again, or some other shit that of course has no relationship to what you're trying to do this very moment. It's rudely diverting your attention, interrupting your train of thought. That isn't respectful by any stretch of imagination, and they've been doing it since at least iOS 6.
Long-time iOS users like to dunk on Android but even Android doesn't do this. All these things are notifications on Android, so you could deal with them on your own time.
This is a legacy design decision all the way back to iOS 1 before notifications existed. SMS messages used to be delivered through the same modal system. I believe the Apple ID and update messages are now banner notifications, and the battery alert gives you an easy way to turn on Low Power Mode, although I agree there should be a way to make that a banner notif as well.
Apple has reverted to being a regular company. Everything is a potential revenue stream, and decisions are made based on next-quarter ROI. They needed the movie investment to meet the targets, so they've synergized with the Wallet team.
I wish the fact that every company enshittifies in the end would wake us all up to the fact that rampant unregulated capitalism just doesn't work before it's too late to make any changes at all.
Half the news stories about Apple, Google, etc are them being fined or being forced to change their business practices due to regulations. These companies employ hundreds if not thousands of people to make sure they are following thousands and thousands of regulations.
I was snarkily echoing my parent comment’s criticism (sorry!). Of course there’s lots of regulation especially once these companies grow large. My point is it’s capitalism that grew them from $0 to $3T, and it’s capitalism that’ll take them back down to $0 and recycle those assets into newer, innovative companies.
What capitalistic mechanism allows a garage startup to compete with a company worth $3,000,000,000,000 ?
Surely you've seen this in Silicon Valley: the infamous way Google (or whoever) kills your startup by releasing your product for free, waiting for you to die, and then killing the product, just to ensure there's no competition in a field they may want to one day enter.
Or they just buy you. Great for the founder! Terrible for the consumer.
There's no need for me to prove that this can happen because, as I pointed out, it already has happened many times, from Xerox to HP to Dell to IBM. It's happening right now at Oracle. You can see the very earliest stages at Apple and Google.
Apple and Google control the internet, through controlling web search and browsing. One pays the other to ensure this monopoly. And none of the companies you mentioned were worth 3 trillion, and last I checked they all continue to exist and hold reasonable market share, and none of them taking market share from another is a case of a garage startup knocking off a monopolist.
The modern tech company is more akin to Standard Oil, but possibly even more powerful and all encompassing considering Google for example can determine what is true and false for a given population. Standard Oil was only able to be toppled by a State.
So again, what capitalist mechanism exists to allow a garage startup to knock over apple or Google? I completely agree with you that Google is enshittifying - my disagreement is that anything will happen about that unless a State intervenes.
A better system would be one where you never need to rely on one of only a handful corporations to talk to your friends. The way to achieve this is regulations that require interoperability - then companies have to compete on service rather than coasting on their locked in user base.
The minimum amount needed to ensure the basic spirit of the law actually happens.
The less regulation and tax you have, the quicker the wheel of innovation above turns.
OTOH, there are some cheap and easy regulations with a large societal return, like pollution regs. These low-hanging fruit should be picked, as long as the fruit-pickers don’t redirect the whole economy towards ever-taller fruit-picking ladders.
Apple hasn't existed in a time with "rampant unregulated capitalism", whatever that term is supposed to mean. You can argue there weren't enough regulations, but there were massive volumes of business rules regulations in 1976.
It existed today, so, yes it has. Capitalism describes the global mode of production, not just the United States economy. We haven't already forgotten the anti-suicide nets at Foxconn, have we? Without the margins that cheap foreign labor provides, the insanely high growth target required to please investors in a Capitalist economy can't be achieved.
I think we're fixating too much on purity of the word "unregulated." If you'd like to offer a different one I'm open to it - to me, the closest example of "regulated capitalism" is the PRC's State Capitalism, however it's a poor example given the atrocious working conditions there and the massive wealth inequality.
"Unregulated" to me doesn't mean "literally no regulations." To me it means, the owners of Capital have a very large amount of power, to the point that every regulation on them is an uphill, nigh-unwinnable battle. See: pushes for 30 hour work weeks in Europe. Or, see: pushes for socialized healthcare in the USA. I think we can both agree that the USA will never have socialized healthcare so long as the health insurance companies wield so much power and influence!
Apple's primary value driver (when it mattered) was luxury margins on mediocre tech. Without rampant demand, you don't have market stratification. If substantial regulation like the DSA existed in 2014, Apple's business model would look radically different today.
Because Apple under Steve Jobs worked because Steve had full control. Zero chance they become successful run by committee or group ownership or whatever. And they also needed venture capital in the beginning afaik.
I don't think Apple could have existed as it did under Jobs in any other system.
That's just a myth, they've had way too many obvious flaws with conscious self-interested barriers to users' ability to fix bad UX for this to be even remotely true
Today we have an Apple that keeps pushing new poorly thought out features. More and more they don't respect the user. Constant interruptions that don't serve the user, a ridiculous onboarding process with far too many screens, forcing their own products like Apple Music on people, not making design choices and making the user pick an option. We are so far from less but better and it's only getting worse. I wish there was a way forward for Apple, but I think it's just going to slowly die.