Antiderivitives

I’ve been thinking all week about this macbook air review by Paul Thurrott: Apple MacBook Air 15-Inch M3 Review - Thurrott.com (via Daring Fireball).

For a little bit of context Thurrott has spend most of the last couple decades as The Windows Guy. I haven’t really kept up on the folks in the Windows ecosystem now that I’m not in that ecosystem as much anymore, so it’s wild to see him give a glowing review to the macbook.

It’s a great review, and his observations really mirrored mine when I made the switch fifteen years or so ago (“you mean, I can just close the lid, and that works?”). And it’s interesting to see what the Macbook looks like from someone who still has a Windows accent. But that’s not what I keep thinking about. What I keep thinking about is this little aside in the middle:

From a preload perspective, the MacBook Air is bogged down with far too many Apple apps, just as iPhones and iPads are. And I’m curious that Apple doesn’t get dinged on this, though you can, at least, remove what you don’t want, and some of the apps are truly useful. Sonoma includes over 30 (!) apps, and while none are literally crapware, many are gratuitous and unnecessary. I spent quite a bit of time cleaning that up, but it was a one-time job. And new users should at least examine what’s there. Some of these apps—Safari, Pages, iMovie, and others—are truly excellent and may surprise you. Obviously, I also installed a lot of the third-party apps I need.

And this is just the perfect summary of the difference in Operating System Philosophy between Redmond and Cupertino.

Microsoft has always taken the world-view that the OS exists to provide a platform for other people to sell you things. A new PC with just the Microsoft OS of the day, DOS, Windows 3, Win 95 Windows 11, whichever, is basically worthless. That machine won’t do anything for you that you want to do, you have to go buy more software from what Microsoft calls an “Independent software vendor” or from them, but they’re not gonna throw Word in for free, that’s crazy. PCs are a platform to make money.

Apple, on the other hand, thinks of computers as appliances. You buy a computing device from Apple, a Mac, iPhone, whatever, out of the box that’ll do nearly everything you need it to do. All the core needs are met, and then some. Are those apps best-in-class? In some cases, yes, but mostly if you need something better you’re probably a professional and already know that. They’re all-in-one appliances, and 3rd party apps are bonus value, but not required.

And I think this really strikes to the heart of a lot of the various anti-monopoly regulatory cases swirling around Apple, and Google, and others. Not all, but a whole lot of them boil down to basically, “Is Integration Bad?” Because one of the core principles of the last several decades of tech product design has been essentially “actually, it would be boss if movie studios owned their own theatres”.

And there’s a lot more to it than that, of course, but also? Kinda not. We’ve been doing this experiment around tightly integrated product design for the last couple of decades, and how do “we” (for certain values of “we”) feel about it?

I don’t have a strong conclusion here, so this feels like one of those posts where I end by either linking to Libya is a land of contrasts or the dril tweet about drunk driving..

But I think there’s an interesting realignment happening, and you can smell the winds shifting around whats kinds of tradeoffs people are willing to accept. So maybe I’ll just link to this instead?