On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 14:33:28 UTC, Joakim wrote:
similarity of APIs between macOS and iOS, but obviously there are significant developer and IDE differences in targeting a mobile OS versus a desktop OS, even if iOS was initially forked from macOS.
Not in my experience… There are some things programmers have to be aware of, because some features are not available on iOS, but overall the same deal. Not too surprising as the iOS simulator compiles to X86, so by keeping the code bases similar they make it easier to simulate it on the Mac. So yeah, you kinda run iOS apps on your mac natively. (Not emulated as such.) Only when you go low level (ARM intrinsics) will this be a real problem.
So it goes without saying that iOS and OS-X have to be reasonably similar for this to be feasible.
Let me correct that for you: there are many more iOS developers now, because it is a _much_ bigger market.
Yes, but that does not mean that your original core business is no longer important.
Just a couple responses above, you say the iPhone UI will keep those users around. I'd say the Mac is actually easier to commoditize, because the iPhone is such a larger market that you can use that scale to pound the Mac apps, _once_ you can drive a multi-window, large-screen GUI with your iPhone, on a monitor or 13" Sentio-like laptop shell.
By commoditise I mean that you have many competitors in the market because the building blocks are available from many manufacturers (like radios).
However, I think "laptop shell" is perceived as clunky. People didn't seem to be very fond of docking-stations for laptops. Quite a few went for impractically large screens on their laptops instead.
I agree that very few apps are used on phones, and that they aren't as sticky as desktop apps as a result. Hopefully that means we'll see more competition in mobile than just android/iOS in the future.
iPhones are easier to displace because the UI is not so intrusive compared to a desktop and the apps people depend on are not so complicated. That might change of course… As people get used to the platform Apple can make things more complicated (less to learn, so you can introduce more features one by one).
There are things about modern iOS that I don't find intuitive, but since so many have iPhones they probably get help from people nearby when they run into those issues. Scale matters in many strange ways…
Lack of competition at the high end certainly played a role, but as I noted to codephantom above, consumers not needing the performance played a much larger role, which is why Samsung, with their much weaker SoCs, just passed Intel as the largest semiconductor vendor:
I assume those aren't used in desktop computers? Samsung need a lot of SoCs as they manifacture lots of household items…
Yes, but would that be in 2020 or 2050? Would people who never had a cellphone get a smartphone, driving that market even larger, as is happening today in developing markets?
Ok, I think it was fairly obvious that smart phones would at least for a while be a thing as it was already then fashionable in the high end. What wasn't all that obvious was that people would be willing to carry rather clunky iPhones and Android devices with bad battery life compared to the Symbian phones… Which I think was to a large extent driven by social norms, fashion and the press pushing the story on frontpages over and over…
Also, when I think of it, I wonder if Apple would have succeeded if the press had not played them up as an underdog against Microsoft in the preceding decade. The underdog Apple rising from the dust and beating out Microsoft and Nokia made for a good story to push… (in terms of narrative/narratology)
Jobs certainly wasn't, almost nobody was. If there were a few making wild-eyed claims, how many millions of dollars did they actually bet on it, as Jobs did? Nobody else did that, which shows you how much they believed it.
Apple had worked on this for a long time and had also already failed at it, but they decided to pushed it again when touch screen technologies made it possible.
I'm not sure how the starting point matters, google funded Android from nothing and it now ships on the most smartphones.
I don't think Android came from nothing, and it was significantly more clunky than iOS, but Google did this to have an option if other giants would try to block their revenue stream from ads… So it was more passive-aggressive than a business.
But even the google guys never bet the company on it, just gave it away for free for others to build on, which is why they never made as much money as Apple either.
Well, it was to proctect their business, not to develop their business, so I am not sure if Android is a good example.
