As a commercial OS, OS X/macOS was quite compatible: FOSS Darwin core, FreeBSD userland, POSIX compiant certified UNIX, built-in Python and Java support.

Apple/OS X also contributed some nice things, by way of funding, hiring main devs, and/or heavily supporting certain FOSS projects: LLVM and Clang, CUPS printer drivers, WebDAV, WebKit, libc++, and Swift.

Also designed some widely used interface standards: FireWire (started by Apple), Thunderbolt (co-designed with Intel driven by Apple) which eventually turned into USB 4, Mini DisplayPort (later incorporated to the official DisplayPort standard, and even the design re-used for Thunderbolt).

There was nothing to "maximize rents" as there were no rents for the most part of OS X's journey until later Cook. They put out good products and people bought them, getting them out of near certain bankruptcy.

> That was always the strategy

Wrong. Steve would have charged you for everything he thought they deserved, but he'd never allow ads in Apple Maps.

["We like our own stickers better."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COAOknlfMgI)

That's not really true. He was a control freak and thought he and Apple knew better what people need. They always wanted to control the whole experience and most of the things were initially closed off because he never wanted anyone to modify the Apple experience and his products. That's why initially he didn't even want to let people install other apps on the iPhone and was against the AppStore.

The openness of PC clones was a mistake IBM failed to regain control from, everyone was like Apple.

> If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices.

Basically what Apple News is, they don’t have a web or Android client.

If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices.

Well Microsoft tried to do the exact same thing with that dreadful Microsoft Network in the early days of the web. So it's not inherit to Apple only, all large corporations would like their users locked up in their ecosystems.

I don't know that it was always the strategy; there's a difference between openness and rent seeking.

Mmmh ... whats the difference to what MS is doing then? :-D

That isn't true. The original Apple Store proposal by Bertrand Serlet is available and it is pretty clearly driven by the need to polish the user experience of installing and managing applications. Being able to charge a significant premium was just a part of the picture and originally considered to be required to pay for the associated infrastructure of reviews and such.

> I think it's important to remind ourselves that the responsibility doesn't lie with the one individual.

No, the responsibility lies with the culture of growth at all costs. Margins and revenues must continue to increase, whatever else happens.

If you want to blame someone, blame whoever decided it was a great idea to pay executives in stock/stock options. That's what incentivises this kind of behaviour.

As an aside, it's amusing to me that Apple ran so hard on privacy with (apparently) the explicit intention of creating a market for their ad products.

Absolutely true. Cook is an officer of the company, and has a responsibility to the company itself; and the current incentive structure that Apple operates in dictates a drive towards rents. Change needs to be exogenous, but there is a certain amount of pushback that even a fiduciary can use, and the evidence here is, to me, damning.

That is not the economics textbook sense of the phrase.

The first sentence from the wikipedia article seems good to me: "R-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth."

Per the article:

> For example, just recently, Apple deployed its formidable multi-billion-user global cloud infrastructure in service of… promoting the Brad Pitt Formula 1 movie. People were, understandably, a bit disconcerted to see their wallet payment app sending them promotional messages about a film, and Apple undoubtedly screwed up in polluting a functional messaging channel about transactions with a commercial message, but hey — this is a clear sign Apple knows it’s got the power to drop a note directly into millions of people’s pockets.

There are ads in the Apps Store, and in Maps. Also ads for iCloud subscriptions in the settings if you don't use it.

Honestly, I even consider the constant reminder to setup Apple Pay as some kind of ad

Steve Jobs was a business man and CEO of a company.

Judge the man on what he was. And he was those things brilliantly.

> If the Linux community could [...]

This starts with a wrong assumption. Like if there was a "Linux community" company driven by a CEO.

The App Store vig with no exit is, if anything, even more distorting.

You can be a jerk and be brilliant at the products you create. One can admire the latter while criticize the former.

Jobs revolutionized music and computing.

It's the implication that success excuses it that sucks. The fans don't care how their status symbols came about - only that they have them. The illusion is presented that without him we'd all be using MS-DOS to this day.

I don't get your point.

He was, objectively, a huge POS. Ask anyone who worked with him. He ruined people for capital gain. He failed to acknowledge his first child. He time and again made people miserable.

The man, the myth, the legend.

That phrase gets bandied about quite casually in my experience. Usually is an ironic light joke about somebody in your peer group on talking to other people or near your peer group.

As such, it's been sort of semantically watered down quite a lot in our popular cult.

But it's perfect for people like Steve Jobs.

He was a huge piece of shit. Yet, when I lived in Silicon Valley, I saw parents scrambing to get a house in the right district so their kid could go to Homestead High and have a shot of "being like Steve Jobs." They want their kids to be deadbeat dads who die in their 50s?

No one has been remembered for being extra nice alone. I mean, being an asshole is inconsequential if you are brilliant.

Only total losers whine about such silly things in successful people...

I don't think intelligence entitles anyone to being an arsehole thought it might sometimes be frustrating. Lets say we make AIs that are more intelligent than us in the end - do we want them being arseholes to us just to achieve some new technology or dream that they have? Perhaps we would be just as happy without scalable fonts on our computers or phones that we can doom-scroll on and don't need to be whipped into achieving them?

The argument here is that "know-it-all assholes" arise spontaneously if you excel in a field and care so much about it, which I kind of agree with. The corollary here seems to be that several people associate being an asshole as meaning you're good at something. However, that's just an excuse for being an asshole, as it's not a necessary condition to excel at something. It's only through our lack of discipline to tame our own minds that leads us to becoming assholes in general and using expertise as an excuse.

Those should not be ideals we strive for; you can excel without sacrificing social niceties and we should strive for intellectual humility. As one gets better in their respective fields (specially in ours that is always changing so fast), one should try to keep its ego in check. There is a saying in my country: "No one is so big that they cannot learn, nor so small that they cannot teach."¹

The problem with "know-it-all assholes" is that most think they are always talking to someone below them and their expertise carry on to all other fields². Their pride may prevent them from admitting from learning from even the most ignorant of beings.

As an exercise, ask your brothers the times that they were wrong (specially if there was anytime that came from someone that surprised them). If they fail to recollect many stories, I fear you're only hearing one part of the story and you'll never know it yourself. Steve Jobs himself used to do that: people would bring ideas to him that he would dismiss. A week later, he would come back with the idea presented as his.

We should strive to be gentle and humble to anyone, despite success in a field: we'll never know who we're talking to and what they can teach us. Perhaps is our misconception that we think that we're average (or above average) that prevents us from learning from other people.

-----

¹There is a variation, "No one is so ignorant that they have nothing to teach, no one is so wise that they have nothing to learn.", but I kinda like the former because it fits perfectly with the Lord of the Rings.

²I'm not raising the Dunning-Kruger card here.

Survivorship bias. My own experience is that the jerks self-select out because no one wants to work for them.

That said, in the entrepreneurial space it's less clear to me this is true. In a team setting? Sure. But the C-suite of a business isn't necessarily a team sport and a lot of wildly successful CEOs are notoriously pieces of shit including Gates, Bezos, Zuck, Musk, and many others.

It can also be taken as an attack on the cult of personality surrounding Jobs.

source re: "trafficked Tennessee bodyparts"?

My guess if he could stand up he would have continued to go to work.

That's a technicality

Considering he told them they were holding it wrong when they weren't happy with it, I doubt that.

Well that’s a fickle and non-homogeneous bunch. You place too much importance on your own opinion.

you think the next CEO will be any different? the board wouldn't have elevated him to that position unless he was willing to kowtow to trump when needed

He had a kind of decent plan to improve things, but when AI popped up he panicked and went crazy. Same thing happened to Zuckerberg, who abandoned his VR crap and dumped into AI at a massive cost.

The AI companies' marketing plan, FOMO, worked--just on themselves and competitors.

> requiring literally all of his peons to do his work for him while he makes weird blog posts about a reality that doesn't exist.

And also being a supporting character at podcasts: https://youtu.be/WEnBCfzsgyE?t=95

Comparing Apple to China, Steve Jobs was Mao Zedong while Tim Cook is like Deng Xiaoping. Lets see if the next CEO will be Apple's Xi Jinping.

That story is not quite true: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/steve-jobs-and-biological-fathe...

Neither would I. What’s your point?

Why do you think it is spineless? I thought it is masterfully manipulative.

Look, I hate Trump as much as the next guy, but Cook's job, being the CEO, is playing politics. It is literally part of the job. Making sure your company is not going to get legislated out of existence is one of the things you must do as CEO.

I would not want that job. As a matter of fact, as I started up the ladder in the company I was working for I realized that politics (internal and external) are a big part of the job and I was just not suited nor qualified for it, so I quit. But that is what CEO's must do if they want their company to be successful.

> Or am I remembering the wrong person here?

No that was indeed Tim Cook (though it was 24 karat gold plaque not a statue).

Whatever his legacy is, that's a thing people are going to remember him for, Bending the knee to a President who should never have been President in the first place.

"yo we heard you like camera bumps so we put camera bumps on your camera bumps so you can camera bump while you camera bump"

I wouldn't say they're an exact copy...

> Maybe it's possible that a form factor is largely correct for its use case after a while?

very much so -- same for UI components, which they keep changing for no good reason except to feel "fresh and new"

> big bulge on the top-left of the device and no longer sit flat on a table

Fucking hate this trend so much. My Pixel 8 is an absolute dogshit phone compared to my Pixel 2 for the same reason. Phones are giant now, impossible to use with one hand anymore, and slide off of fucking everything because they don't lie flat, and are uncomfortable to hold with how top-heavy they are too. I wish phone design would have stagnated, about 10 years ago. A phone's form factor did not need innovating! It was already perfect!

A phone can only get so big, and there's only so many viable shapes and form factors. I don't know what more innovation anybody expects in a rectangular tablet form factor that can still fit into pockets and purposes. Folding phones are expensive and a gimmick so far and have not achieved much market share.

There's advances to be had in cameras, battery life and other tech inside the rectangular slab, but in terms of innovating on the form factor, the practical reality of what people want to hold and put in their pockets will dictate the maximum size and form factor.

Tbh I want my 3GS form factor back. That design was the "right" one imho, and we lost it due to market pressure for bigger screens and better cameras, when what we needed to do was keep the utility but largely stay off our screens.

But they do keep evolving the iPhone and its functionality. You need taste and a great sense of user experience to do it well. Apple also sells more things than juts iPhones.

you can’t think of a single thing that could be better about the hardware and software experience of phones?

not one?