[OT] Windows dying

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 08:53:46 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> One is a touch-first mobile OS that heavily restricts what you 
> can do in the background and didn't even have a file manager 
> until this year, while the other is a classic desktop OS, so 
> there are significant differences.

Yes, there are differences for the end user, such as the the 
sandboxing, but that also applies to applications in OS-X 
appstore though. I don't expect iOS to change much in that 
department, I think Apple will continue to get people into their 
iCloud…

On the API level iOS is mostly a subset, and features that was 
only in iOS has been made available on OS-X. The main difference 
is in some UI classes, but they both use the same tooling and UI 
design strategies.

So in terms of XCode they are kinda similar.

> I never said they don't write apps for macOS, I said iOS is a 
> much bigger market which many more write for.

Yes, there are more Apple developers in general. Not sure if the 
number of people doing OS-X development has shrunk, maybe it has.

> The same may happen to the iPhone some day, but it shows no 
> signs of letting up.

They probably will hold that market for a while as non-techies 
don't want to deal with a new unfamiliar UI.

> Since they still have a ways to go to make the cameras or 
> laptop-functionality as good as the standalone products they 
> replaced, it would appear they can still convince their herd to 
> stay on the upgrade cycle.

That is probably true, e.g. low light conditions.

> While I disagree that you can't commoditize the Mac, as you 
> could just bundle most of the needed functionality into an 
> iPhone

My point was that it is easier to commoditize the iPhone than the 
Mac. There is a very limited set of apps that end users must have 
on a phone.

> they've already significantly cut the team working on it.

Ok, didn't know that. I've only noticed that they stopped 
providing competitive products after Jobs died.

> No, the reason they don't improve is consumers don't need the 
> performance.

I don't think this is the case. It is because of the monopoly 
they have in the top segment. Intel was slow at progress until 
Athlon bit them too. If they felt the pressure they would put 
their assets into R&D. Remember that new products have to pay off 
R&D before making a profit, so by pushing the same old they get 
better ROI. Of course, they also have trouble with heat and 
developing a new technological platform is very expensive. But if 
they faced stiff competition, then they certainly would push that 
harder.

In general the software market has managed to gobble up any 
performance improvements for decades. As long as developers spend 
time optimizing their code then there is a market for faster 
hardware (which saves development costs).

The Intel i9-7900X sells at $1000 for just the chip. That's 
pretty steep, I'm sure they have nice profit margins on that one.

> You are conflating two different things, fashionable academic 
> topics and industry projections for actual production, which is 
> what I was talking about.

What do you mean by industry projections? It was quite obvious by 
early 2000s that most people with cellphones (which basically was 
everyone in Scandinavia) would switch to smart phones. It wasn't 
a surprise.

> confident in them that you bet your company on them.  Nobody 
> other than Apple did that, which is why they're still reaping 
> the rewards today.

Only Microsoft had a comparable starting point. iOS is closely 
related to OS-X. Not sure if Nokia could have succeed with 
scaling up Symbian. Maybe, dunno.