I've always said closed ecosystems are the second worst thing for the industry. The first worst thing being, consumers who let themselves be sucked into one. How many times have you heard Apple users say, I would love to try that Galaxy or Note device, but I'm afraid to leave the ecosystem. I need iMessage or I have a Mac and don't think the Galaxy will play as nice with my other Apple devices. So this is why I've always said, the breakthroughs and innovation will come through the hungriest OEMs, which will always be the Android OEMs. Apple have no competition in their own ecosystem, they got their users willfully locked and loaded at their mercy. They don't need to advance their phones year after year to get their users to buy. It's the nature of the closed ecosystem beast. The iPhone will always keep advancing on a "need to" basis. Meaning as soon as the customers start trickling out for compelling Android devices. This guy here kinda gets it....
I think the closed ecosystem could have remained advantageous had Apple stayed hungry. But they did seem to coast for a bit during a period of malaise. Perhaps the build out of the spaceship campus was too consuming. Or maybe the long slog into China was too draining. I don't know.
I do know just a few years ago it would have been crazy to leave such a well oiled ecosystem backed by so many well designed and top-serviced individual parts. It did all "just work" and played together very nicely compared to what was going on outside of the Apple ecosystem. Apple stuff was the stuff to get for our less tech savvy family members, especially. Yet it was still really powerful and useful equipment.
But look at how many parts of that ecosystem they killed off or let die a slow painful death...yet kept the insanely high prices.
For quite some time I perceived them as only showing signs of hunger for China's market and perhaps a tiny bit, for now, for India. And so far all that's gotten most of the rest of us is red and pink phones and the SE and a foothold into the US for Didi.
The innovations in the iPhone X are impressive and obviously now very imitated. I'm not personally excited about them, but I acknowledge their significance. But it's just one part of the ecosystem. I am looking forward to seeing if Apple is going to rise up with a new strong ecosystem in the next few years now that they seem to be waking up to how badly their neglect of desktops has reflected on their image.
They're in the process of bringing together a lot of disparate elements we never saw them mess with before, like original programming. I don't know what they're up to with automobiles. They're getting into health data. Right now they're going through something akin to puberty for business and so it isn't always pretty, but it is promising.
For me as an individual customer I don't currently see any advantages to being totally enmeshed in any one ecosystem, so I dabble.
I hope this post is coherent. Morning coffee has worn off.
