It's mostly frustrating that this is still the rhetoric from Apple now that they are the largest company in modern existence. They have the faculties to release their Unix drivers and even provide world-class Linux support while still profiting heavily from their hardware sales. Yet, they don't. Every time they're given an opportunity to err on the side of freedom or choice, they shrug.
This is an ongoing problem that has prevented me from daily-driving MacOS since Catalina. Really a stance I wish Apple would revert, even Microsoft does a better job here than Apple.
> "it's mostly frustrating that this is still the rhetoric from Apple now that they are the largest company in modern existence."
But why should it change? They've become the most profitable for sure, but they became that while ignoring docs etc. Why should they now change, considering it's been unquestionable proven that it doesn't matter for their financial success?
PS: i still don't understand how people some people call it largest, doesn't that adjective describe size...? It doesn't have the most employees, it doesn't have the most locations etc. It definitely has the largest pile of money, but that's still a very unfitting description for that, at least in my opinion, as that's usually called richest.
Because I'm not buying Macbooks anymore. In fact, over the past 5 years I've increasingly seen people develop on a dedicated Linux box or Linux VM. Apple's appeal is shrinking to developers, and it has been on a steady decline for the past 10 years. For all of MacOS' POSIX certification, it hasn't stopped people from trying to implement Linux just so they can run privacy-respecting software and benign GPU libraries that Apple refuses to officially support.
Their plan here isn't working. It might placate the 80% of users who don't care about this stuff, but the technical sentiment towards Apple's technologies is waning. I'm frustrated with WebKit, I'm frustrated with Swift, and everyone is frustrated with their 30% tax. Something has to give, and it's probably going to be Apple's facade of benevolence.
> It definitely has the largest pile of money, but that's still a very unfitting description for that, at least in my opinion.
All businesses are constrained by a set of limiting factors. The most important factor will always be capital, since you can trade it for any one of the lesser factors. Apple uses their 200 billion USD cash reserve to buy goodwill in the form of advertising, first-in-line tickets to TSMC and the finest lobbyists in the nation. They have every protection that lesser companies do not, which is why their valuation supersedes any other publicly or privately traded organization.
I'll stop calling them the biggest company when business stops revolving around money.
You're not but many people still are [0]. Many people started to see Apple's developer experience wane in previous years, true, but their Apple Silicon changed that. Their price/performance/battery life ratio is simply unbeatable for devs and anecdotally many people I know bought AS Macs where before they would've bought or used a Windows or Linux computer, including me.
There are some things I will agree with you on though, such as their 30% tax, as a mobile developer myself.
With all due respect, if you're a mobile developer you don't get much of a choice which laptop you buy. A Macbook is the only machine that lets you meaningfully deploy to iOS, so I'm not sure if I agree that Windows/Linux machines were competing products.
Apple Silicon only reverses their hardware quality (which was truly awful 2015-2018). Their software quality has still been in rapid decline since Mojave, and it's developer experience out-of-the-box is still marred with coreutils older than dinosaurs and increased restrictions around running software. I know a lot of developers that are happy with Apple Silicon, but I know exactly 0 developers that don't complain MacOS.
You're right, I do complain about macOS. I guess the stuff I'm doing isn't as dependent on the OS itself (web, mobile dev) so I don't see the same problems as others might who are working on lower level stuff.
I used to use tools like Codemagic which ran macOS in the cloud for deploying mobile apps, so buying a MacBook wasn't necessarily a blocker for me.
> I used to use tools like Codemagic which ran macOS in the cloud for deploying mobile apps, so buying a MacBook wasn't necessarily a blocker for me.
Codemagic, from my understanding just does code-signing and deployment. I don't know how you did it, but a Mac would still be necessary for access to Xcode libraries, Objective-C, and iOS simulators.
Codemagic and Bitrise allow connecting to a Mac in their cloud via VNC where you have full graphical access to XCode and iOS stimulators. I believe both have free plans that support this.
> Something has to give, and it's probably going to be Apple's facade of benevolence.
Honestly speaking, Apples main success vector has always been it's marketing. It's never been benevolent, and if you ever thought it was... I'm afraid you've only witnessed first hand how effective they are at their job.
> I'll stop calling them the biggest company when business stops revolving around money.
I admit that I'm not a native speaker, but that's exactly the reason why that adjective confuses me so much.
Bigger/largest directly translates over but nobody would consider bigger to be better in a financial context. Profitability is the thing that's interesting, and to a lesser extend how rich is is.
Calling it biggest/largest doesn't (to me) say anything particularly interesting about it
For one, they helped build Linux drivers for NTFS. Despite Apple promising to document and open-source APFS, they still have not gotten around to it (which makes interop with Macs really frustrating). There are lots of little things, too - Microsoft packages desktop apps for Linux and made pretty great OSS contributions like the Monaco editor. The list could go on, but this really shouldn't be surprising. Apple doesn't even treat upstream BSD with respect, it's insane to think that they would respect Linux.
This is an ongoing problem that has prevented me from daily-driving MacOS since Catalina. Really a stance I wish Apple would revert, even Microsoft does a better job here than Apple.