[OT] Windows dying

Ola Fosheim Grøstad ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang at gmail.com
Tue Nov 7 15:21:20 UTC 2017


On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 14:33:28 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> similarity of APIs between macOS and iOS, but obviously there 
> are significant developer and IDE differences in targeting a 
> mobile OS versus a desktop OS, even if iOS was initially forked 
> from macOS.

Not in my experience… There are some things programmers have to 
be aware of, because some features are not available on iOS, but 
overall the same deal. Not too surprising as the iOS simulator 
compiles to X86, so by keeping the code bases similar they make 
it easier to simulate it on the Mac. So yeah, you kinda run iOS 
apps on your mac natively. (Not emulated as such.) Only when you 
go low level (ARM intrinsics) will this be a real problem.

So it goes without saying that iOS and OS-X have to be reasonably 
similar for this to be feasible.

> Let me correct that for you: there are many more iOS developers 
> now, because it is a _much_ bigger market.

Yes, but that does not mean that your original core business is 
no longer important.

> Just a couple responses above, you say the iPhone UI will keep 
> those users around.  I'd say the Mac is actually easier to 
> commoditize, because the iPhone is such a larger market that 
> you can use that scale to pound the Mac apps, _once_ you can 
> drive a multi-window, large-screen GUI with your iPhone, on a 
> monitor or 13" Sentio-like laptop shell.

By commoditise I mean that you have many competitors in the 
market because the building blocks are available from many 
manufacturers (like radios).

However, I think "laptop shell" is perceived as clunky. People 
didn't seem to be very fond of docking-stations for laptops. 
Quite a few went for impractically large screens on their laptops 
instead.

> I agree that very few apps are used on phones, and that they 
> aren't as sticky as desktop apps as a result.  Hopefully that 
> means we'll see more competition in mobile than just 
> android/iOS in the future.

iPhones are easier to displace because the UI is not so intrusive 
compared to a desktop and the apps people depend on are not so 
complicated. That might change of course… As people get used to 
the platform Apple can make things more complicated (less to 
learn, so you can introduce more features one by one).

There are things about modern iOS that I don't find intuitive, 
but since so many have iPhones they probably get help from people 
nearby when they run into those issues. Scale matters in many 
strange ways…

> Lack of competition at the high end certainly played a role, 
> but as I noted to codephantom above, consumers not needing the 
> performance played a much larger role, which is why Samsung, 
> with their much weaker SoCs, just passed Intel as the largest 
> semiconductor vendor:

I assume those aren't used in desktop computers? Samsung need a 
lot of SoCs as they manifacture lots of household items…


> Yes, but would that be in 2020 or 2050?  Would people who never 
> had a cellphone get a smartphone, driving that market even 
> larger, as is happening today in developing markets?

Ok, I think it was fairly obvious that smart phones would at 
least for a while be a thing as it was already then fashionable 
in the high end. What wasn't all that obvious was that people 
would be willing to carry rather clunky iPhones and Android 
devices with bad battery life compared to the Symbian phones… 
Which I think was to a large extent driven by social norms, 
fashion and the press pushing the story on frontpages over and 
over…

Also, when I think of it, I wonder if Apple would have succeeded 
if the press had not played them up as an underdog against 
Microsoft in the preceding decade. The underdog Apple rising from 
the dust and beating out Microsoft and Nokia made for a good 
story to push… (in terms of narrative/narratology)

> Jobs certainly wasn't, almost nobody was.  If there were a few 
> making wild-eyed claims, how many millions of dollars did they 
> actually bet on it, as Jobs did?  Nobody else did that, which 
> shows you how much they believed it.

Apple had worked on this for a long time and had also already 
failed at it, but they decided to pushed it again when touch 
screen technologies made it possible.

> I'm not sure how the starting point matters, google funded 
> Android from nothing and it now ships on the most smartphones.

I don't think Android came from nothing, and it was significantly 
more clunky than iOS, but Google did this to have an option if 
other giants would try to block their revenue stream from ads… So 
it was more passive-aggressive than a business.

> But even the google guys never bet the company on it, just gave 
> it away for free for others to build on, which is why they 
> never made as much money as Apple either.

Well, it was to proctect their business, not to develop their 
business, so I am not sure if Android is a good example.



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