When the first M1 Apple Silicon systems sprouted at the end of 2020, we loved the tech but not the walled garden it grew in. Apple had complete control over all its platforms and could set its own rules, but only to become more Apple-y. There was a whole world outside that area where Apple Silicon would never tread, even if Cupertino could iterate fast enough to keep up. Plus, Apple’s appliance sensibility limited its expansion options, especially with performance dependent on its own silicon.
More than five years on, that remains true. Yes, the architecture can iterate at least as fast as anything else in its class. It turns out that gigabit Wi-Fi, 10 Gb Ethernet, and high speed expansion is not such a problem anymore. Otherwise, if you ignore embedded niche cases that nobody cares about, Apple is still where it started, in desktops and laptops. It has even lost one form factor. And ironically, the most exciting new machine for years, the Macbook Neo, doesn’t even have an M-type SoC in it.
And yet, that Macbook Neo has given the Windows world the fear, precisely because of the Apple Silicon walled garden strategy. A simple equation has reached a critical point, and it may be irreversible. Every year of Apple Silicon, the experience of using a Mac has gotten better. Every year of Windows 11, the experience of using a PC has gotten worse.
It really feels like OS makers fail to accept “this is working just fine for me” and endlessly attempt to shoehorn more in. Every time I get an Android update, my first reaction is “what workflows that had been working am I going to need to relearn?” I can’t even figure out how to get someone I’ve not talked with in four years out of the primary position in Frequently Used on my contacts list.
Oh, Android does this to me too. It constantly suggests I want to call my old boss from 13 years ago who I honestly hope I never see again.
I mean, I figured a long press and a context menu would solve the issue, but no. When my dad died last year, I had to completely remove him from my contacts (not wholly unreasonable, given that’s a bit of a useless number). I don’t want to remove this guy from my contacts because, well, life changes, we bonded over a lot of shared interests, and maybe I’ll be in NYC at some point.
You want that guy in your phone. You don’t want him to be Option 1.
My old phone was constantly recommending that I send YouTube videos with spy query parameters to the e-mail address of a dead relative instead of Untracker. It’s like they designed the system to push users towards doing what they want users to do instead of helping users do what users want to do.