On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 07:57:11 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad
wrote:
On Monday, 6 November 2017 at 08:33:16 UTC, Joakim wrote:
Sure, they took existing IDEs and refocused them towards
mobile development. XCode better be focused on iOS, as that's
pretty much all that devs are using it for these days.
iOS has always been mostly a subset of OS-X. There are some
differences in the UI components, but the general architecture
is the same.
One is a touch-first mobile OS that heavily restricts what you
can do in the background and didn't even have a file manager
until this year, while the other is a classic desktop OS, so
there are significant differences.
I'm not sure why you claim that people aren't writing for OS-X.
Just because the iOS space is flooded with simple software does
not mean that people don't write complicated applications for
OS-X.
E.g. there are lots of simple audio applications for iOS, but
the complicated ones are on OS-X.
I never said they don't write apps for macOS, I said iOS is a
much bigger market which many more write for.
with legacy calculations, but they're probably still making
good money off Macs, but it just distracts and keeps good
Apple devs off the real cash cow, iPhone. Even if the Mac
financials aren't _that_ great anymore, you don't necessarily
want to piss off your oldest and most loyal customers, who may
stop buying iPhones and iPads too.
I don't know if I trust the current management in Apple, they
seem to be too hung up on fashion and squeezing the market, but
fashions change and fashion items are relatively quickly
commoditised. It is slightly slower in this space because the
upfront investments are high, but it is easier than in the CPU
market where you have some objective measures for performance.
They have been selling the most popular expensive "fashion item"
in the world for a decade now. And according to objective
benchmarks, their hardware blows away everybody else in mobile,
so they have that going for them too.
This dynamic used to be the case with cell phones too, but
eventually Nokia lost that market. Similarly, this dynamic used
to be the case with Apple's MacIntosh line. They approached it
as a fashion item and they almost folded over it.
The same may happen to the iPhone some day, but it shows no signs
of letting up.
One reason that Apple could price up their iOS products was
that people could justify buying a more expensive phone/tablet
since they also replaced their digital camera with it, then the
video camera.
You have to view their push of iPad Pro in the same vein, it is
a product that cannot be commoditised yet and they try to
defend the price by convincing people to think of it as a
laptop.
Since they still have a ways to go to make the cameras or
laptop-functionality as good as the standalone products they
replaced, it would appear they can still convince their herd to
stay on the upgrade cycle.
It would be a bad idea for Apple to ditch the Mac. It is a
product that is much more difficult to commoditise than the iOS
products. And their owners tend to have multiple Apple devices,
so it does not take away from the iOS sales, it comes in
addition.
While I disagree that you can't commoditize the Mac, as you could
just bundle most of the needed functionality into an iPhone, I
already said that Mac users probably buy iPhones and that Apple's
unlikely to kill off the Mac anytime soon, though they've already
significantly cut the team working on it.
The performance of mobile devices will always be limited by
heat. The reason mobile devices perform well is that a lot of
effort has been put into making good use of the GPU.
Even within that lower power budget, performance is now so good
that it rivals laptop CPUs, which is what goes into most PCs sold
nowadays, so heat and the GPU are not that much of a concern
anymore.
The reason that desktops are not improving much is probably
because AMD has not been able to keep up with Intel, but Intel
is now on the market with i9, so maybe they are feeling
threatened by Ryzen.
No, the reason they don't improve is consumers don't need the
performance.
Also, nobody saw mobile growing so gigantic,
If you are talking about devices, then this is completely
false. "mobile" was big before iOS. The academic circles was
flooded by "mobile this - mobile that" around year 2000, by
2005 the big thing was AR which only now is gradually becoming
available. (And VR peaked around 1995, and is slowly becoming
available now).
You are conflating two different things, fashionable academic
topics and industry projections for actual production, which is
what I was talking about. I agree that a lot of people were
talking about mobile being potentially next for awhile, Microsoft
even came out with their UMPC platform years before the iPhone:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-mobile_PC
But if you looked at the chart I linked earlier, where mobile
sales jumped 25X in a decade, that is extremely difficult to
predict, as it was driven by a host of mobile CPU, display,
3G/4G, and power improvements that nobody saw happening so fast.
Fashionable tech topics are mostly irrelevant, I'm talking about
actual sales projections, especially when you're so confident in
them that you bet your company on them. Nobody other than Apple
did that, which is why they're still reaping the rewards today.
What was unexpected is that Apple and Samsung managed to hold
onto such a large segment for so many years. I think Android's
initial application inefficiency (Java) has a lot to do with
it. Apple chose to limit the hardware to a very narrow
architecture and got more performance from that hardware by
going binary. That was a gamble too, but they were big enough
to take control over it by building their own CPUs.
Those two companies still have the best hardware and the
multi-billion-dollar marketing budgets to make sure you know it,
;) no doubt that helps them maintain their share.
