"Apple also references locking people into devices, which Cook says means making products work so well together that customers don't want to switch."
I've heard that's why most prisoners never leave prison. It's just so nice there.
I mean come on . . . a credit card that gives you less back if you don't use an iPhone to pay and until recently couldn't manage on a web-site, bluetooth trackers that become useless if you switch to a different platform, a smart watch that ceases to work if you switch to a different platform.
And yes iMessage is both functionally a feature that people like, but it also does have a psychological allure where people don't want to have to leave their blue bubbles. I'm sure they've considered the psychological effect of the color.
And what about iCloud? For years they sold phones with 16 GB of storage and 4K cameras and no way to add storage (and forget about Image Capture working to store locally, that's another story), so they upsell customers who were getting warning messages on their phones constantly to buy iCloud storage, but iCloud is not like any other online storage service. You can't switch to Android and keep using iCloud Photos. And for files, they only have the most basic web interface for class platform compatibility.
Almost every review for Apple products comes with a mention of, "This product your best choice if you're already in the Apple ecosystem," which so many people are.
I wouldn't be so critical of Apple if their products were great, but the truth is they're not as good as they used to be. They make what I call Taco Bell tech products. All the platforms share a common core, just like all Taco Bell food comes from the same few ingredients in different forms. An iPod was an iPod, and a Mac was a Mac. But now their main platforms have stagnated because they do parity across all of them, even when it means holding each other back. They have four multi-purpose computing platforms now.
Their financial success is an impediment to them being like they were in the early 2000s. If they were on the ropes in any way, given a curve ball, they would be forced to do something interesting and make a change.
Is the App Store really that interesting? It has 2 million apps, which is 1/3 the number of articles on Wikipedia. Does an App Store need 2 million apps when there are only 6 million subjects in the entire world?
Is anything on the App Store that discoverable? Do you find the cream rising to the top? It's like a new version of the Web, but not quite as well indexed and hyperlinked. Should there be an app for McDonald's, Chik Fil A, Bank of America, etc?
He said a third party app store wouldn't be as good. I think it could be better. What if there were an app store that only allowed 200 apps at any time. That gave actual curation. Where it was known products were good enough to charge higher prices than the race to the bottom on the App Store and where trials were offered.
Of course such an App Store could be an app available within the App Store itself, but that's exactly the type of thing Apple has disallowed such as with Xbox and cloud gaming.
"He said that he oversees the strategic direction of the company, and that he works with the App Store in a 'limited review capacity.'"
That's very easy to believe. I picture him sitting in an office watching The Jetsons, and saying, "Let's do that" and rehearsing lines about AR. He is good at squeezing supply chains and maximizing profits. But I don't think Apple would be better if his ideas were front and center, mainly because he doesn't seem to have any ideas.
In his latest interview with Kara Swisher, he talked about AR in general terms and said, "Imagine if we were talking right now, but instead of just talking, I could be showing you a presentation." I was thinking, "Like Powerpoint?"
And I was also thinking, "Do you even know Apple had this feature back in 2008 with iChat Theater that integrated with Keynote? And that it was pretty amazing! And do you know that you got rid of it? And now when you talk about the potential of AR, you're talking about a feature you killed off already."
I kind of think he probably has no idea about that, a lot of Apple's history, or its products.
I imagine he uses an iPad 99% of the time and is mostly focused on the supply chain and legal/political issues and revenue. And granted, he is good at that. It's just not the same company.
His biggest foray was probably the Apple Watch.
It launched doing a lot of things, and doing a lot of things poorly.
Apple had the money to wait and let it mature.
But when Apple was on the brink, it needed OS X to be good.
When they came out the iPod, it did one thing and did it really well.
I don't think Steve Jobs would have let the original Apple Watch ship. It was a Jetsons idea that wasn't ready. It became good. But Apple can ship a lot of crap right now and not suffer the consequence.
As an example many have pointed out, the Music app on the Mac.
Imagine if the first version of iTunes had been that bad. Apple might not have made it. They didn't have the time or money to keep trying over and over.
Something that boxes them into a corner, any sort of disruption, would be a benefit for consumers. Because they are running on inertia in a lot of ways, able to ship a lot of crappy software and half-baked ideas. That is the point of anti-trust action—that it spurs innovation. It is a bit odd that no other company has stepped into fill some of gaps Apple has left wide open. For example, why is messaging so fragmented on Android? All the same, for no other reason than that I am an Apple enthusiast, I would like to see them shaken up a bit.
Edit:
"Cook was asked whether Apple competes against Google in operating systems. "We compete against Samsung and LG," Cook said. "Customers don't buy operating systems, they buy devices,"
He's had the best experts preparing him for this, and no one told him that LG has been losing billions for years in smartphones and just left the business entirely?
When being accused of anti-trust behavior, it's probably not best to direct attention to competitors that were unable to compete and have left the market.
Edit 2 (the article is updating):
I should have been a lawyer. I made the exact same points about the ridiculous size of the app store and about how a third party, actually curated app store could be better before I knew the lawyer had made those same points.
Edit 3:
"Lawyer asked about third-party app stores that are tailored to people's specific interests or more curated, and Cook said he's not aware of that kind of app store."
So he's never heard of Setapp?
Has he ever heard of something called Apple Arcade then, which is a curated app store within the App Store, which no other developer would be allowed to offer?
