I share the feeling, but at the same time Apple seems to be what Sony was back in the day. They have central very successful products, and are spreading their influence in numerous new markets while betting a lot on artificial restrictions keeping users in their ecosystem.
Sony wasn't the biggest company in the world I think, and the game was a lot more primitive back then, but I remember owning a walkman with a Cybershot, a Sony music compo and at the end a matching laptop because all of there where integrated. If I had the money at the time I'd bought a Handicam and a matching TV in a heartbeat.
Sony seemed unstoppable, until the pieces just crumbled; there would be way better laptops, the camera market evolved and there were far from keeping in touch with the best players in the field, then the music industry moved on, and keeping the integration going on becomes more and more compromising.
With today's Apple, while they are spreading, the same cracks seem to appear to me.
They still have very competitive products on each market, but these are more and more compromised as deep design decisions are made and the competition is getting better.
As an anecdote, a year ago I broke my iPhone and decided to go android for a few month waiting for the iPhone 6, and surprisingly to me it didn't really matter much in my day to day use, except for the artificial limitations (no iCloud, no iMessage) on the integration. But these limitations instead of being a deal breaker, really forced me to go into Google/third party centric services on my laptop/ipad/other family members devices. In a Apple heavy household there is now one device that forces the others to change service providers for central things like email, messaging, calendar, online storage, and the thing is it's not really difficult nor handicapping, the pros and cons balance very well.
Interestingly enough, with Apple Pay, Apple is starting to step on the feet of the new Sony who've been investing in payment processing and ecosystem for so many years now.
TLDR; I think Apple has started playing a game that put them in a position where they have to be better than everyone else at basically everything. Right now I don't think they are at the top of their game, especially in giving options to their customers or software quality/reliability. So, while they have a ton of money and are super successful, I think there is even bigger pitfalls waiting for them ahead. Hope they don't fall.
Sony absolutely couldve continued to own the portable media player market.
They decided to use smaller, more expensive storage, with no discernible reason to choose their players over existing ones that used standard storage like SD cards.
I worked for an electronics retailler around the time that the iPod came out (our store didnt sell Apple products at all) but it was obvious that Sony would burn out their loyal customer base just from the number of people we had coming in complaining about their memory costing 2-3x for the exact same storage size.
People got turned off the brand due to bad experiences
Totally. They had a string of bad decisions when it came to the overall experience, the network walkman with loading the songs from usb was a nightmare too, hardware quality also degraded over time.
I've been reminded of these when I has to sync to my computer to load arbitrary mp3 in the iOS library. The tracks are on a NAS, I could get them through dropbox as well, or any other way, really. But I have to go through iTunes if I want to add it to the library and listem to them through the main music player (and since at the start every app duplicating existing fonctionnality were refused, there's just no compelling, high quality alternative player not relying on the song library)
This is a single bit of annoyance, but then you still have to juggle with the libraries' respective itunes accounts, getting your tracks randomly deleted while syncing to a new computer etc.
It's still somewhat better than what I had to deal with when I was using a Sony MD with digital tracks. But for comparison I don't have these music related pbs on android.
I'll tell you the secret why: Sony aggressively expanded in the 80's and got into the media business.
The values couldn't and didn't align.
The idea is the synergy of Sony electronics and Sony entertainment would create something amazing but the reality was Sony electronics and Sony entertainment couldn't, wouldn't, and didn't play together.
Whatever the electronics side made, even if technically better than anything on market, had to be locked down to appease the entertainment side.
But the entertainment side didn't get big enough to be making such demands.
Sony also didn't make the jump to digital as fast as it could so upstarts were able to come in. I remember the transition from minidisc to MP3 player. THAT WAS PAINFUL and did not need to happen. Nor the subsequent jumps of oh hey, buy content again and again as different formats to fit into your playstation or your TV or your walkman.
There's a massive treasure chest, massive inertia, massive momentum, and again... it's freakin' amazing to me how much we clutch our little black mirrors and how central everything has been.
Personally I would make a lot of sacrificies to have a super solid software/hardware solution.
Where sony lost me was the abyssimal software quality of their products. Ignore the DRM, ignore the licensing limitations. Their music management software was clunky, limited, slow, had critical bugs and barely had enough functionnalities to be usable. I was loosing my time clicking and dragging everywhere to transfer my music, the NetMD went to a drawer and I bought an ipod. I just seems so hard for traditional big japanese companies to benefit from talented developpers.
Their laptop line has/had good specs, but the windows integration is perfectible at best. I can't imagine trying to update the drivers or doing anything non sanctionned on them. One of my relatives has one, and my MBA performs better 4 years down the line while it went out roughly at the same time for the same price. I don't see wintel becoming an underdog anytime soon, but I'd love ubuntu in this role.
Yes, if only because Wintel has a history of relative openness and backward compatibility.
However, the new Microsoft board is going in a different direction, prioritizing cloud and cross-platform over Windows. Hence Win10 will be cheap/free and continually updated by the cloud without notice, i.e. it becomes a non-deterministic magic box. Businesses will have to pay for Windows not to change.
Apple improved on Sony's success by understanding how to integrate open or semi-open ecosystems which Sony still doesn't really comprehend.
Apple's analog is web services, which, to their credit they have tried harder to figure out then Sony ever did with open ecosystems, but which they likely will never be able to compete with Google.
That said, I'm still not seeing the cracks yet since their software/hardware integration UX combo and ongoing mindshare with creatives is setting a bar that no one else has the vertical integration to approach. Google's services are clearly superior to Apple, but that only puts Android on equal footing with iPhone, it's a long way from a knockout blow.
I think Apple really learned from Sony that they need to master the whole stack for a product. Windows was really a bad bad fit for Sony, i seriously think they should have bet the farm and tried to have their own OS, be it linux or a BSD variant and licensing a professional looking office suite.
They did it with Playstation, they would have been in a better shape if they went this way from the start.
About the cracks in Apple's integration, I think even the most vocal people only have mild complaints for now. But it seems money and power and mindshare are not enough for Apple to get the resources to fix these, and there are obviously planning to spread even thinner.
I also think the competition doesn't have to be absolutely better than Apple, just bring unmatched features that would tip the balance for specific consumers. Like the digitizer in the MS surface, or waterproof android phones, etc. Once one of the device is a non Apple one, it brings the potential value of the whole ecosystem way down.
To me Sony lost because they didn't understand non embedded 'software'. Sony had talent and mastery over hardware internals and interfaces (fixed set of physical inputs). It was new and difficult, you had to make strict physical compromises, something nowadays software doesn't have to. Their pre 90s hardware did what you wanted earlier and better than others, now they're selling sub par products (they don't own TVs, laptops, media devices like they did) thanks to their past glory.
The thing is, their skills aren't worthless, I often wonder how they managed to design and ship things that would work right away without the ability to fix it later at low-cost like a software patch. Also, I kinda miss dedicated physical interfaces. As amazing as speaking to your phone is, I think that touching stuff is valuable for mammals.
Sony wasn't the biggest company in the world I think, and the game was a lot more primitive back then, but I remember owning a walkman with a Cybershot, a Sony music compo and at the end a matching laptop because all of there where integrated. If I had the money at the time I'd bought a Handicam and a matching TV in a heartbeat.
Sony seemed unstoppable, until the pieces just crumbled; there would be way better laptops, the camera market evolved and there were far from keeping in touch with the best players in the field, then the music industry moved on, and keeping the integration going on becomes more and more compromising.
With today's Apple, while they are spreading, the same cracks seem to appear to me.
They still have very competitive products on each market, but these are more and more compromised as deep design decisions are made and the competition is getting better.
As an anecdote, a year ago I broke my iPhone and decided to go android for a few month waiting for the iPhone 6, and surprisingly to me it didn't really matter much in my day to day use, except for the artificial limitations (no iCloud, no iMessage) on the integration. But these limitations instead of being a deal breaker, really forced me to go into Google/third party centric services on my laptop/ipad/other family members devices. In a Apple heavy household there is now one device that forces the others to change service providers for central things like email, messaging, calendar, online storage, and the thing is it's not really difficult nor handicapping, the pros and cons balance very well.
Interestingly enough, with Apple Pay, Apple is starting to step on the feet of the new Sony who've been investing in payment processing and ecosystem for so many years now.
TLDR; I think Apple has started playing a game that put them in a position where they have to be better than everyone else at basically everything. Right now I don't think they are at the top of their game, especially in giving options to their customers or software quality/reliability. So, while they have a ton of money and are super successful, I think there is even bigger pitfalls waiting for them ahead. Hope they don't fall.