It’s hard to address this without writing an essay, but what Apple has done is largely introduce annoyances, without actually hurting workflows. That’s not nearly enough to get people to switch platforms en masse. The Nvidia situation is a good example of a problem of the magnitude that will actually get people to migrate off of a platform, but the markets that need Nvidia on local hardware is small enough that it hasn’t made much of an impact.
But look at the other markets, why would anyone switch off of the Mac for other use cases like development, A/V editing, Adobe Creative Suite apps, or design? This is debatable, but you could make the case that Apple is best-in-class for all of those, and there’s no other platform you could make that case for (e.g., Linux is clearly worse for A/V editing, and Windows/Linux for design, both missing core apps - note also I’m excluding high-end specialized hardware you’d find at a studio for example).
Migrating off of platforms is a huge hassle, and although they’ve skirted the line, they haven’t actually crossed it by hurting workflows (outside of Nvidia).
(In fact I’d argue that the worst casualties of Apple's bad Mac years were advantages that only Apple had. Apple had a thriving indie software ecosystem that produced one of the greatest platform exclusives in modern history, Sketch. That doesn’t happen anymore because Apple's approach to the Mac App Store prevents it. But that was an advantage only Apple had and therefore they could afford to lose it, because there’s nothing else to switch to that also had it. Apple were willing to sacrifice there own advantages for their security crusade, but they weren’t wiling to go all the way and block apps like Adobe CS and VS Code from running on the platform, which the security model they have been pushing for would require. Because blocking those apps would actually have resulted in lost market share, because those apps run on Windows.)
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It’s hard to address this without writing an essay, but what Apple has done is largely introduce annoyances, without actually hurting workflows. That’s not nearly enough to get people to switch platforms en masse. The Nvidia situation is a good example of a problem of the magnitude that will actually get people to migrate off of a platform, but the markets that need Nvidia on local hardware is small enough that it hasn’t made much of an impact.
But look at the other markets, why would anyone switch off of the Mac for other use cases like development, A/V editing, Adobe Creative Suite apps, or design? This is debatable, but you could make the case that Apple is best-in-class for all of those, and there’s no other platform you could make that case for (e.g., Linux is clearly worse for A/V editing, and Windows/Linux for design, both missing core apps - note also I’m excluding high-end specialized hardware you’d find at a studio for example).
Migrating off of platforms is a huge hassle, and although they’ve skirted the line, they haven’t actually crossed it by hurting workflows (outside of Nvidia).
(In fact I’d argue that the worst casualties of Apple's bad Mac years were advantages that only Apple had. Apple had a thriving indie software ecosystem that produced one of the greatest platform exclusives in modern history, Sketch. That doesn’t happen anymore because Apple's approach to the Mac App Store prevents it. But that was an advantage only Apple had and therefore they could afford to lose it, because there’s nothing else to switch to that also had it. Apple were willing to sacrifice there own advantages for their security crusade, but they weren’t wiling to go all the way and block apps like Adobe CS and VS Code from running on the platform, which the security model they have been pushing for would require. Because blocking those apps would actually have resulted in lost market share, because those apps run on Windows.)
Thank you for posting this, very insightful :)