While the article seems to have a histrionic tone, it’s essentially correct that Apple have been unwilling to cooperate on standards (despite overtly signalling the opposite) and have had to be forced by regulation or market forces. There are plenty of examples of this, Safari/iMessage/lightning port etc.
> …it’s essentially correct that Apple have been unwilling to cooperate on standards (despite overtly signalling the opposite) and have had to be forced by regulation or market forces.
That's a strange take on Apple's actual relationship with standards. Like every tech company, Apple has used proprietary technologies when necessary to deliver an experience that meets its (including its users') requirements. But Apple also has a long, well-documented history of adopting, participating in, and pioneering the use of standards.
If, in your view, Apple is incapable of doing anything Not Evil, you can still frame its contributions to the history of computing standards as "commoditizing their complements".
> Like every tech company, Apple has used proprietary technologies when necessary to deliver an experience that meets its (including its users') requirements.
That's a very rosy, even naive, view of the relentless move to proprietary walled gardens over the last 30 years.
Apple, like nearly every tech company, uses proprietary extensions to lock users into their ecosystem and to lock out standards-compliant open source implementations.
In 1990 everything interoperated with everything based on open, standard protocols published in RFCs. Today, interoperability is a legacy exception and the norm is proprietary walled gardens that only serve their owner. Everything the Internet was not supposed to be. We on the Internet used to make for of the people locked inside AOL, and now the whole Internet is basically AOL.
Anyone who’s actually being in the room with people from Apple when talking about standards I’m sure would be more than happy to correct you on the fantasy you have constructed here.
The author of this post is one of them who actually has a long list of these horror stories which I don’t know he has talked about much publicly but he has very good reasons for making the claims he is making.
> Anyone who’s actually being in the room with people from Apple when talking about standards I’m sure would be more than happy to correct you on the fantasy you have constructed here.
FWIW, you're saying this to an ex-Apple person who has actually been in the room with people from Apple when talking about standards, both internally and during standards committee discussions and meetings.
I might have chosen my words slightly differently but my point still stands. Apple has an incredibly well known horrible reputation inside of standards meetings and bodies from their peers. It has been that way for well over a decade at this point. It’s not a one off thing and it’s not a subtle thing. It’s a very strong and very bad reputation they have built.
To be fair to them, I think a very meaningful part of that comes from upper management and is not necessarily the fault of the representative in the room and multiple people have gone out of their way to make that point to me explicitly and I think it’s worth repeating here.
But there is absolutely 100% a huge culture problem inside of Apple on this specific topic.
Original author of the article here; I went out on a limb to document a bit of this in a footnote to a post a few years ago. Saying that it is unusual to call this behaviour out is a drastic understatement:
Safari, iMessage and Lightning are all pretty nice and I like using them. They look and feel better than the rest. Google and Firefox make me feel like I am using a Fischer-Price toy computer. I wish that there was interoperability and that all parties would resolve their differences in good faith.
I always find it funny how people say they got an iPhone because they have a Mac, when, in fact, Android has for years been more compatible with the Macs, since you could charge both your phone and your laptop from the same charger.
I've been charging my Android with my Apple's 96W USB-C charger from my work's 16in MacBook Pro for "free". What's exactly so nice about not being able to do that with an iPhone? Why would you carry a separate cable/charger just for the phone, when you could share with an Android?
BTW, there's no Firefox or Chrome on iOS, either; the stuff you'd find in the App Store are simply skins for Safari, and they have the exact same rendering bugs as Safari does, so, there's little reason to use either one on iOS.
When traveling I use the same charger and cable to charge my Mac, iPhone and iPad, since they're now all USB-C. I can't say it's really changed much from when I also needed a lightning cable.
Around 2010, you had to use Mini-USB for digital cameras and Micro-USB for phones, and the super-ugly non-standard 30-pin dock connector for the iPhones and iPads. Mini-USB has remained popular for car dashcams until very-very recently.
It's hard to believe anyone would defend a time when you had to have a separate charging cable for each device.
Yet evidently, every iPhone used is happy to do just that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>Google and Firefox make me feel like I am using a Fischer-Price toy computer.
I get that sentiment with Google given their primary color palette, but Firefox? The selling point of the browser, for me at least, has always been that I can configure it however I want and avoid the abomination that was/is IE/Safari/Chrome.
Yep, they cooperate to a point and then decide that they're doing their own thing anyway. This isn't new.
When they were small nobody cared about firewire (even if it was better). Then they did it with lightning to keep hold of their devices again. Then there is the whole not supporting USB 3.X but 3.0 and 4 for "reasons". Now they also don't care about software and web standards, same company, same problems. They clearly see "standards" as "competition" at a corporate/management level.
- sent from my iPhone