Apple always has been like that, see The Cult of Mac book.
However, it appears being at the edge of bankruptcy, and having turned the ship around has made them paranoid of losing a single cent.
When Apple Store came out it was great.
I was a Nokia employee at the time, and 30% was a dream compared with what you would have to pay to phone operators, app listenings in magazines with SMS download codes, for Blackberry, Symbian, Windows CE, Pocket PC, Brew, J2ME,...
However we are now in different times, and acting as if the developers didn't have anything to do with it, it was all thanks to Apple's vision of the future, it is pure arrogance, and yes the Vision Pro was the first victim.
Here is another one, if they do really announce an UI revamp at WWDC 2025, I bet most will ignore it.
"In 2013 i met a very close friend of Steve Jobs and i remember saying "there's one thing i absolutely have to know, it's really important to me" he responds "okay what is it?"
I ask "what was all the money for?!" puzzled "what do you mean?" "Steve Jobs saved up like 200 billion dollars in cash at Apple, but what was it all for? what was the plan? was he going to buy AT&T? was he going to build his own telecom or make a giant spaceship? what was it for?"
And he looked at me with just the deepest and saddest eyes and spoke softly "there was no plan" "what??" "you see, Steve's previous company, NeXT, it ran out of money, so at with Apple he always wanted a pile of money on the side, just in case. and over years, the pile grew and grew and grew... and there was no plan..."
Totally believable. My grandmother lived though the great depression, wherein she was lucky to get an Orange at christmas. The last few decades of her life she basically was a food hoarder, pantries overflowing with canned goods, and a freezer where you never saw the back.
When I was a kid I did odd jobs, and one of the odd jobs was cleaning out a semi-hoarder’s house after he’d passed away (iirc he’d lived through the Great Depression). Not like you see on TV, with the heaps and heaps of garbage. Maybe like your grandmother, tons of… basically well organized supplies and stuff.
I dunno. Toilet paper, some canned goods, lighters, I guess that stuff all lasts decades if stored properly. Takes up a lot is space, though, and your descendants might have to pay some kid to throw it all away if you don’t use it up in time…
But, some folks wished they were toilet paper hoarders during the pandemic I guess. Wonder what the kids of 2060 will be throwing away as a result of our life-experiences.
> Wonder what the kids of 2060 will be throwing away as a result of our life-experiences.
EOL devices(tablets, phones, macbooks, thinkpads, hobby electronics boards, home lab equipments, hdd and ssd full of archive data, swag from conferences, outdated books on product and programming, smart watches etc).
And Microsoft had to invest in Apple, as a bankrupt Apple would have left them with effectively no defense against the antitrust investigation they were undergoing.
The jury's still out on this case. When historians look back a hundred years from now, will they consider it beneficial that Apple survived? Or will they see it as an unfortunate reprieve for a company that wrought unfathomable destruction upon our society via the creation of the smartphone and the attention economy that soon followed?
It's really hard to argue counterfactuals on this one. Perhaps the smartphone would have been built by Google anyway. I can't really imagine how, given the state of the mobile phone market at the time of the iPhone's release.
That is why I believe had Steve been alive the App Store would actually be something like 5-10% rather than 30%. They needed the money then, even in 2011 when he passed away. They really dont need it as much now.
Apple now has more money than they know what to do with it. They have spend close to $800 billion stock buy back in total by the end of this year.
They could have lowered the the margin of Mac and gained Market Shares. Which is something Steve said during NeXT era that Apple got greedy. Focusing too much on margin.
Alternative/complementary view: traditional software applications business is extremely high-risk high-return. It’s no accident that NeXT (and Microsoft in early days!) almost ran out of money. To balance the risk, you would want to compensate with extremely conservative balance sheet.
Michael Milken published a paper analyzing exactly this issue a while back.
The only way that differs "any corp" is that in most publicly corporations, you want to return that money to your shareholders - and they sit on it for the same reason. IE, this just says Jobs ran Apple as his personal fife. But since he made lots of money, no one cared.
I’m a shareholder, and I would rather that money be used to grow stock price (since it is already at a business known for creating new products and markets).
If I get a dividend, I have to pay tax today. And then I just turn around and buy more stock with post tax income?
If I can sell the share at a higher price when I want the cash, then I can pay the tax whenever I want, possibly under more preferable terms.
This and the Cult of Mac book completely describe it. Leaders are people who can have emotional damage that they compensate for in their business decisions.
It is "easy" to understand why parents would lie to home invasion robbers about whether or not they had a safe in the house. Leaders of companies will readily lie if they believe that the survival of their company is at stake. The rational is "well someone might get mad that we lied but at least the company will still be here."
> However, it appears being at the edge of bankruptcy, and having turned the ship around has made them paranoid of losing a single cent.
That was more than 20 years ago, under a totally different market condition and Apple leadership. Back then, they needed developers to turn the ship around, now they think devs need them. They's a cash cow and act like assholes.
> Back then, they needed developers to turn the ship around, now they think devs need them.
No, that's the opposite of what actually happened with the iPhone. Back in 2007, Apple actually saw evidence from the customer buying frenzy that Apple didn't need 3rd-party devs to make iPhone a wild success. After the very desirable iPhones got into millions of customers hands, it was the 3rd-party devs that needed Apple more than Apple needed the 3rd-party ecosystem as I've mentioned before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39291668
Maybe an alternate history would have had all the 3rd-party devs deliberately boycott Apple iOS and thus only create apps for Android in 2008. We now know that didn't happen so we'll never know if devs realistically had enough leverage back in 2008 to alter Apple's App Store commission structure and policies.
The iPhone was so desirable as a platform that new popular apps like Instagram and WhatsApp were released for Apple iPhones months before Android.
The OP isn't talking about iPhone devs, they're talking about a decade before that when Apple was called 'Apple Computer' and had mad a series of bad business choices (confusing product line up, allowing other companies to make Mac clones, etc).
Developers had started to abandon the Mac OS platform - or at least start making Windows versions of previously Mac-only software - and getting developer confidence back was one of the key things that kept the company alive to grow into the consumer electronics manufacturer that it is today.
OP's wording was somewhat confusing because they were talking about the later iPhone devs with, >", now they think devs need them" by comparing them to the 1997 Mac OS devs.
As though possibly implying that Apple incorrectly misjudged the later iPhone-era devs' leverage as if it's the opposition situation of "Apple is the one that needs the devs" and somehow Apple misunderstands that.
I was clarifying that Apple didn't misjudge the devs and they correctly predicted that devs would want access to millions of new iPhone customers. It isn't just "Apple thinks devs need them", it's more definitive in "Apple _knows_ that devs need them." The timeline of events reinforced in Apple's mind that it was "Apple's customers" more than the "dev's customers".
Seeing customers camp out overnight in front of Apple's stores for iPhones that didn't have any 3rd-party apps -- and still sell millions of them -- is why they're so arrogant. Apple concluded it was Apple's efforts alone that recruited those customers to their new platform and not the 3rd-party devs. (Apple itself created the first Youtube app instead of 3rd-party Google devs doing it.) The 2008 devs may have had a chance to flip that narrative by rejecting iOS and only create apps for Android and Windows Phones but they didn't do that and instead, went along with Apple's gatekeeping and 30% fees.
>Developers had started to abandon the Mac OS platform [...] and getting developer confidence back was one of the key things that kept the company alive to grow
Well, the 1997 dev confidence behavior for a Mac platform with only ~5% market share at that time wouldn't be relevant to Apple's attitude about iPhones because devs never abandoned the iPhone. iPhones were an instant hit with 100% market share of touchscreen smartphones until Android came out a year later.
>, we had plenty touch screen smartphones in Europe, between Nokia, Siemens-Ericson and PocketPC/Windows CE.
Those were older TFT resistive touchscreens and not the newer capacitive touchscreens that could detect multi-finger gestures like swipes and pinch-to-zoom. TFT touchscreens requiring finger pressure instead of finger swipes is not as intuitive a UI.
That's why the audience at Macworld 2007 gasped in astonishment when Steve Jobs demonstrated gentle finger scrolling on a capacitive screen. Deep link to that demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQKMoT-6XSg&t=16m05s
Keep in mind that MacWorld tradeshow attendees are technology geeks who are aware of the latest gadgets and phones. Many of those in the audience would already have the latest 2006 Palm Treo 680 in their pocket that had a TFT touchscreen. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_680)
The iPhone's touchscreen capabilities made that Palm phone's TFT touchscreen technology obsolete.
You can check the Europe news archives back in 2007 to see both the telecoms and customers there were also eagerly awaiting the iPhone. If Europe already had equivalent touchscreen smartphones with Nokia, Siemens-Ericsson etc, the iPhone would have been a non-event and flopped in sales.
Nokia/Blackberry/WindowsCE/Android/etc switched to capacitive touchscreens to compete with the iPhone.
Why didn't European devs collectively just ignore the Apple iPhone and instead, focus on Nokia Symbian OS? Devs did ignore platforms if they wanted to. E.g. the devs mostly ignored the Blackberry OS and Microsoft Windows CE Mobile.
>I could write a lengthy comment, however it appears it would be a waste of my time.
It won't be a waste of time if you correct something I wrote that was factually incorrect. I won't debate it.
>I even happened to be in Espoo, the tragic week of the burning platforms memo.
Was Stephen Elop's assessment of Nokia's fading market share by both consumers and developers in 2011 incorrect? What Nokia phone in 2007/2008 was compelling that people were not buying and the developers not adopting compared to Apple iPhone? What do you believe happened?
>In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent. They are enjoying a tremendous growth trajectory with a 78 percent earnings growth year over year in Q4 2010. Apple demonstrated that if designed well, consumers would buy a high-priced phone with a great experience and developers would build applications. They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range.
And then, there is Android. In about two years, Android created a platform that attracts application developers, service providers and hardware manufacturers. Android came in at the high-end, they are now winning the mid-range, and quickly they are going downstream to phones under €100. Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry's innovation to its core.
[...] While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind.
The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.
[...] At the midrange, we have Symbian. It has proven to be non-competitive in leading markets like North America. Additionally, Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements, leading to slowness in product development and also creating a disadvantage when we seek to take advantage of new hardware platforms. As a result, if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind, while our competitors advance further and further ahead.
Honestly, I think they're less jealous of money than rep. A man like Jobs would rather die under torture than be laughed at, and even almost 15 years gone, we still see his mark.
However, it appears being at the edge of bankruptcy, and having turned the ship around has made them paranoid of losing a single cent.
When Apple Store came out it was great.
I was a Nokia employee at the time, and 30% was a dream compared with what you would have to pay to phone operators, app listenings in magazines with SMS download codes, for Blackberry, Symbian, Windows CE, Pocket PC, Brew, J2ME,...
However we are now in different times, and acting as if the developers didn't have anything to do with it, it was all thanks to Apple's vision of the future, it is pure arrogance, and yes the Vision Pro was the first victim.
Here is another one, if they do really announce an UI revamp at WWDC 2025, I bet most will ignore it.