Apple at 50 (Part 4): Apple Today (and your Q’s Answered)

I thought I’d close out this series by taking a look at Apple today. Clearly the company is a successful company way beyond any measure we could have dreamed up when I was there, but there are some worrisome behaviors that I’m watching as well. 

Overall, I’m happy with today’s Apple and I’m comfortable having so much of my life and data tied into their ecosystem — in fact, in the last year I gave up my Microsoft Office and OneDrive subscription in favor of Pages and Numbers and iCloud and to date, it’s been painless. 

I’m amazed at how easy and painless the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon was. I don’t think people understand just how complicated this kind of migration is, and they made it look trivial. The quality and speed of the Apple Silicon chips also just blows me away — as someone who needed on things at the chip level at times back in the day (both at National Semiconductor and at Sun where I helped push the first Sun-4 machines out the door), the level of innovation and execution here is insane. 

In the last year or so I upgraded from an M1 MacBook Pro to an M4 MacBook Air, and I love it. It’s more than fast enough for everything I do. My downstairs Mac is an M2 Max Mac Studio, which since I retired is mostly a Plex server for the house,  although when I want the screen real estate I’ll head downstairs to use it. 

Since migrating from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom Mobile, all of my data is now sharable across machines and so I’m not tied to any one computer; I’ve put some time and effort into data sharing, and these days, if an app doesn’t make that trivial, I throw it out and find one that does. My iPad is a 5th gen Air, again a place where I no longer feel the need for the more powerful “Pro” version — that was unthinkable for me five years ago. And I depend heavily on my iPhone 16 and Watch (11) as ways to stay connected and be able to monitor what’s going on as I go through my day. I had a rare occasion where I forgot to change my watch overnight and so had to run around without it for an hour or so, and I felt naked without it. These are all heavily embedded in my life and I see no reason why that might change. 

So, what gripes do I have about Apple? 

First, two really trivial annoyances: I find battery life on the Watch substandard, to the point where my next one will likely be an  Ultra,  not because I want the extra capabilities but because I really want the extra battery. Both the Apple Watch 10 and 11 had disappointed me and were equally poor in my daily usage. 

Second, when I set up the iPhone in nightstand mode, I really want to be able to pin a given face — it’s too easy to accidentally swipe to a different design, and I want to be able to lock it down. 

Given these are my primary pain points with Apple today, it’s safe to say the issues affecting my use of Apple products is pretty trivial. I’ll also note I’m one of the people who updated to the new Liquid Glass releases and after about five minutes, stopped thinking about it. Is the new design great? No. Is it good?  Not really — lots of rough edges they still need to sand down. But is it the great disaster some people have hyped it up to be? Nope. And it’ll get refined and improved over the next few years, just like the previous times Apple has done a huge re-design. Remember Aqua? 

That said, there are some bigger issues I have with today’s Apple. 

The biggest problem I have with Apple today is its overt greediness. It seems to believe it’s entitled to every penny, and it fights, sometimes irrationally, to fulfill that goal of keeping it all for themselves. This core culture aspect manifests itself in a number of negative ways: it’s at the core of a lot of the legal challenges it faces, from the Epic case to it’s ongoing fight with the European Union. Both of these could have been avoided by a company willing to adapt and make some small compromises, but Apple has instead more or less chosen scorched earth responses, and I don’t understand the rationale behind that. 

And another key area where this manifests itself is in Developer Relations. They treat developers like crap, and where the fees they charge might have been reasonable in the early days of the App Store, but those fees should have been ratcheted down over time. Instead, Apple treats developers like serfs, not partners. This was an issue I argued about back when I was still at Apple, and it’s only gotten worse. As someone who was the Developer Advocate for developer relations at both Palm and Cisco, I consider Apple’s attitudes towards its developers reprehensible. I believe one reason you’ve seen a lot of developers sit on the sidelines with the Vision Pro is that Apple has given then no reason to want to help Apple succeed with it, and that’s caused by years of treating developers as poorly as they have. 

I’m seeing some of that same attitude creeping into the product in other ways that impact how Apple seems to view its users — for instance, the shift of the iWork apps to a Freemium model — I think Jason Snell’s analysis of this is spot on. 

I’ve always felt these relationships need to be seen as partnerships and nurtured.  One forgotten aspect of Apple’s resurgence starting with that iconic iMac was that the user base and developers wanted Apple to succeed, and if you abuse that loyalty when you get into a situation where you need to leverage it, it won’t be there. I think Apple has pushed developers far away from the idea of loyal partnership, and I’m seeing the same thing happen with its users as well. This is in the long term troublesome, because if developers back in the early days of MacOS X felt about Apple the way it feels about Apple today, I believe Apple would have failed. That’s a key part of that recovery that Apple has forgotten, and at some point, it’s going to create real problems. I think, actually, it already has, but other aspects of the company are doing so well it masks the problems, and as John Madden used to say, winning is a great deodorant. But at some point, the winning stops, and then what? 

I’m not expecting that in the next year, or five. Maybe ten? Maybe 20? But the reality is, if you don’t invest for the future, when it arrives, you can’t be ready to deal with it — and it’s just as important to invest in your relationships — users and developers — as it is your R&D budget. That’s something Apple’s forgotten. 

Your Questions Answered:

And now, a few Q’s Answered. I’ll do some more of these later if you keep sending in the questions. 

Apple had their own Unix in the 80s?!

A/UX. Based on System V. Ran on 68K computers, Launched 1988, cancelled 1995. Should have been released for PowerPC, but, well, Mike Spindler. It ran a form of System 7, including the Finder, so it was both a Mac and a Unix box long before MacOS X did this. 

I'd like to hear more about the Amelio era. I recall he fixed some loans to buy Apple more time.

I think Amelio got a bit of a bad rap. He wasn’t a great CEO, especially for Apple, but I view his tenure at Apple as a field surgeon: his work wasn’t pretty, but it kept the patient alive and stable until they could be transported back to someone who could patch them up properly. He was a numbers guy, so he really didn’t “get” technical types, and while he tried to build a relationship with the technical teams, he wasn’t really respected by them. He definitely wasn’t a product guy, either, but he stabilized the product line and fixed some of the worst blunders of the Mike Spindler Performa era, and he increased the investment in testing and QA, so the quality of the products started to increase as well. And he was smart enough to not buy Be from Jean-Louis Gassee and instead bought NeXT, which was his ultimate downfall and the thing Apple needed to begin its recovery. 

I’d like to hear more about JLG. I followed BeOS in the 90s and played with early betas. It was such a breath of fresh air.

I have a lot of respect for Jean-Louis Gassee. He would have been a much better choice than Spindler, but I don’t think he was the person that could save Apple, and I don’t think Apple would have survived if they’d bought Be. Be wasn’t nearly as vaporware as Apple’s Copland was, but it wasn’t nearly ready for mass usage, either. 

JLG did great parties — I was able to attend his Christmas Party that featured special guest Ella Fitzgerald, and it was amazing. I met JLG a few times over the years once when I was at the Palo Alto Computerware buying my first external hard dive (a whole 10 MEGAbytes) for my Mac 512K computer. 

I'd be interested in your experiences working on mailman. 

I was involved with the Mailman project for a few years around 1990. It’s written in Python, not my strongest language, but I contributed some code and a lot of ideas. I’d say I was more architect than coder, but it was (and is) a good system that’s still in use in many places. That said, on today’s internet, if you want to run a mailing list, I strongly suggest using a survice rather than rolling your own, and I’m a big fan of groups.io for email lists. 

How did you get an email at mit if you were in Southern CA?

Back in the day (we’re talking mid-1980’s) there were systems where if you could figure out how to connect, you could get an account. MIT-MC.ARPA was one of them. It was a Dec-10 running Tops-20. I’d discovered the internet/arpanet at college (CSU Fullerton, or as I described it during my days on the debate team, the Fullerton University Center for Knowledge) and later got the phone numbers for the dialup at USC, which hooked me onto the net from home, and got me connected to MIT. There were a couple of other machines as well, MIT-AI, and MIT-ML, which was the original home of Zork. MIT-MC had a number of interesting people using it in the early years; two of the names you might have heard of are Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. If you poke around the dark corners of the internet, you’ll find chuqui@mit-mc.arpa poking out from under the piles of dust. It’s where I first got involved with the SF-Lovers email list, which in some ways was part of my finally deciding to publish OtherRealms, which ultimately got me two Hugo nominations (and I’m proud to say, finished above No Award for both).

I want to hear about how a private detective in 1982 would need programming. What was it connecting to?

It connected to nothing. We were running a Vax 11/750 running RSTS/E, and it was doing a few things — he ran a shop that repossessed cars (yes, we were Repo Men, and the stuff you find in repossessed is as weird as you think it is), but we also repossessed credit cards, which involved sending out a lot of paper mail and making phone calls trying to convince people to send them back. So it was mostly terminals for data entry and Diablo printers to generate letters. 

Later on we built a system to allow police departments to track traffic tickets, which led to some interesting findings of people with dozens of ignored tickets because until then, nobody was really enforcing anything. 

This involved talking to California’s DMV — which consisted of writing an 8 track tape of the license plates we wanted data on, taking it down to a DMV data center and having them process it, and bringing back the tape and reading the returned data into the system so we could identify the owners of the cars. 

No, seriously. That was how things were back in the early days. 

Okay, I think that covers it for now. Keep sending in questions, and I’ll keep posting answers to them. 

And congrats Apple, for making it to 50 years. Well done.