[OT] Windows dying

Ola Fosheim Grøstad ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang at gmail.com
Tue Nov 7 07:57:11 UTC 2017


On Monday, 6 November 2017 at 08:33:16 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> Sure, they took existing IDEs and refocused them towards mobile 
> development.  XCode better be focused on iOS, as that's pretty 
> much all that devs are using it for these days.

iOS has always been mostly a subset of OS-X. There are some 
differences in the UI components, but the general architecture is 
the same.

I'm not sure why you claim that people aren't writing for OS-X. 
Just because the iOS space is flooded with simple software does 
not mean that people don't write complicated applications for 
OS-X.

E.g. there are lots of simple audio applications for iOS, but the 
complicated ones are on OS-X.

> with legacy calculations, but they're probably still making 
> good money off Macs, but it just distracts and keeps good Apple 
> devs off the real cash cow, iPhone.  Even if the Mac financials 
> aren't _that_ great anymore, you don't necessarily want to piss 
> off your oldest and most loyal customers, who may stop buying 
> iPhones and iPads too.

I don't know if I trust the current management in Apple, they 
seem to be too hung up on fashion and squeezing the market, but 
fashions change and fashion items are relatively quickly 
commoditised. It is slightly slower in this space because the 
upfront investments are high, but it is easier than in the CPU 
market where you have some objective measures for performance.

This dynamic used to be the case with cell phones too, but 
eventually Nokia lost that market. Similarly, this dynamic used 
to be the case with Apple's MacIntosh line. They approached it as 
a fashion item and they almost folded over it.

One reason that Apple could price up their iOS products was that 
people could justify buying a more expensive phone/tablet since 
they also replaced their digital camera with it, then the video 
camera.

You have to view their push of iPad Pro in the same vein, it is a 
product that cannot be commoditised yet and they try to defend 
the price by convincing people to think of it as a laptop.

It would be a bad idea for Apple to ditch the Mac. It is a 
product that is much more difficult to commoditise than the iOS 
products. And their owners tend to have multiple Apple devices, 
so it does not take away from the iOS sales, it comes in addition.

The performance of mobile devices will always be limited by heat. 
The reason mobile devices perform well is that a lot of effort 
has been put into making good use of the GPU.

The reason that desktops are not improving much is probably 
because AMD has not been able to keep up with Intel, but Intel is 
now on the market with i9, so maybe they are feeling threatened 
by Ryzen.

> Also, nobody saw mobile growing so gigantic,

If you are talking about devices, then this is completely false. 
"mobile" was big before iOS. The academic circles was flooded by 
"mobile this - mobile that" around year 2000, by 2005 the big 
thing was AR which only now is gradually becoming available. (And 
VR peaked around 1995, and is slowly becoming available now).

What was unexpected is that Apple and Samsung managed to hold 
onto such a large segment for so many years. I think Android's 
initial application inefficiency (Java) has a lot to do with it. 
Apple chose to limit the hardware to a very narrow architecture 
and got more performance from that hardware by going binary. That 
was a gamble too, but they were big enough to take control over 
it by building their own CPUs.





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