This may undercut your point a bit, but it's just a difference in how they got to the result: iTunes was based on purchased software. I know because I actually had SoundJam MP before Apple bought it and turned into iTunes! Still, Apple did great things when times were tough, and I hope they can find a vision to at least come close to the insane greatness Steve Jobs had as his north star.
Apple Silicon seemingly gets no credit, which is wild because it’s the best thing to happen to computers in the last decade.
No one is forcing you to buy anything. You could have no phone, a land line, Android, generic flip phones, TracPhones, etc.
if you’re trying to demonstrate how much better Apple used to be at software, you chose a bad example because Apple just bought Sound Jam and turned it into iTunes, it was not a Apple developed thing.
People in the US regularly decry that "everything" is made in China yet continue to buy Chinese made goods. By your logic we should deduce people prefer Chinese made goods. It's not just a completely free marketplace; it's the power of agglomeration and inertia. People may use it without loving it.
I know that it was SoundJam MP. My point was that they wouldn't have had the option of putting something as bad as bas as Apple Music on the Mac is today out on the market back in 2001 when iTunes came out because they needed hits.
Poor performance relative to...?
Speaking as a programmer, I must say that I don't think your analysis here holds at all. The development environment for Apple's platforms has frankly never been better. Or at least not within the past 12 years I've been interacting with it. Catalyst *is* UIKit. It's just the codename for the UIKit implementation on macOSutilising some styling and View components from AppKit to Macify the experience a bit more than a straight 1-1 port of UIKit, but it is still UIKit in its API. UIKit as UIKit only runs on iOS, or as an iOS app running on an Apple Silicon Mac, but that is "something you can do" not something that is a Mac native experience. Then there's AppKit, the traditional macOS GUI toolkit. And SwiftUI. But SwiftUI is more of a new frontend way of interacting with the system UI layouts - It builds on top of UIKit and AppKit (depending on the platform) and uses UIKit/AppKit under the hood. It is not so much an entirely separate thing as it is a declarative interaction model with Swift-centric APIs that interact with the traditional GUI toolkit under the hood. Really the Mac still has one true GUI toolkit. AppKit. It then has UIKit support through iOS apps and Catalyst to allow for a wider software library of ports from the wider Apple ecosystem but aside from a brief dogfooding period to demonstrate the technology being good to go, Apple doesn't really use this for Mac applications. It is meant to broaden the available software base without a great barrier to entry and works great for some use cases. And then there's SwiftUI that wraps all of this in a declarative style. It is not fragmentation of toolkits. It's rather streamlined and nice to interact with. SwiftUI to me is a cross platform (Apple platforms like iPadOS, macOS, tvOS) analog to something like QML for describing Qt layouts. With QML the language is different but it's still QtWidgets underneath.
That certainly depends what you're criticising. I don't subscribe to the "There's big profits so it must be great" idea, but I do like Tim Cook and what he's doing. He's not the products guy Jobs was but he points Apple in good directions as far as I can see. The Apple Watch is one of the greatest experiences I've ever had with any device. Never really and bugs at all and just such an elegant and clean experience. Apple Silicon is fantastic, and sure. Bugs are frustrating. But software complexity is also greater than ever with massively concurrent and distributed systems all around us. And frankly, the Jobs days also had very buggy releases. Cheetah for example. Ironically named after such a fast cat was a sluggish mess with numerous bugs and performance issues. Lots of products were released with horrendous hardware defects and class action lawsuits followed, Ping happened - When thinking of the past it's easy to remember the great and forget the bad. All the best music was from the past. But that's not because the past made better music than now (although I personally might say that) it's because the music from the past that survives in our memory has already been filtered.
You obviously know about worlds that I do not.Speaking as a programmer, I must say that I don't think your analysis here holds at all. The development environment for Apple's platforms has frankly never been better. Or at least not within the past 12 years I've been interacting with it. Catalyst *is* UIKit. It's just the codename for the UIKit implementation on macOSutilising some styling and View components from AppKit to Macify the experience a bit more than a straight 1-1 port of UIKit, but it is still UIKit in its API. UIKit as UIKit only runs on iOS, or as an iOS app running on an Apple Silicon Mac, but that is "something you can do" not something that is a Mac native experience. Then there's AppKit, the traditional macOS GUI toolkit. And SwiftUI. But SwiftUI is more of a new frontend way of interacting with the system UI layouts - It builds on top of UIKit and AppKit (depending on the platform) and uses UIKit/AppKit under the hood. It is not so much an entirely separate thing as it is a declarative interaction model with Swift-centric APIs that interact with the traditional GUI toolkit under the hood. Really the Mac still has one true GUI toolkit. AppKit. It then has UIKit support through iOS apps and Catalyst to allow for a wider software library of ports from the wider Apple ecosystem but aside from a brief dogfooding period to demonstrate the technology being good to go, Apple doesn't really use this for Mac applications. It is meant to broaden the available software base without a great barrier to entry and works great for some use cases. And then there's SwiftUI that wraps all of this in a declarative style. It is not fragmentation of toolkits. It's rather streamlined and nice to interact with. SwiftUI to me is a cross platform (Apple platforms like iPadOS, macOS, tvOS) analog to something like QML for describing Qt layouts. With QML the language is different but it's still QtWidgets underneath.
But there's also a lot more to the development story than the GUI toolkit and Apple just has the loveliest frameworks and libraries to use these days. The only thing I could ask for is support for modern OpenGL and Vulkan implementations in the driver stack but I can live with a focus on Metal and MoltenVK as a solution. But hey, going against your point I'm asking for *more* frameworks now
If you want to see something cursed btw, look at the window decorations for Steam's chat related windows. They implement Windows-style window decorations. That has nothing to do with availability of Catalyst or SwiftUI. Frameworks don't design UIs. Designers do.
I use Apple Books and have for years, I'm not even sure how you get that view.
Click on your name in the lower left hand corner of the side bar.
Ah thank you - yeah I've had this happen before on my iOS devices. (Not happening now on my Mac OS device but I've seen it happen before).
.
Based is a totally different from copy&paste. Go to a developer and says that realising a software integrated with all the services it is just simple as a bought an existing one.
So just to be clear, when I said I disagreed with your analysis, I was only really responding to your comment that the reason for software issues potentially being framework related.
