No True Apple User

(transcript of a Twitter exchange)

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Benedict Evans:

Different people prefer different trade-offs. The important thing is to understand that these are mostly trade-offs — and about one and a half billion people like the trade-offs that Apple makes

My reply:

Before Apple offered one-click opt-out from FB tracking in iOS, it could have been argued that Apple users like Facebook’s “trade-off.” After all, they all signed up for FB and kept using it. But once there was an opt-out for surveillance, >96% of Apple users took it (and FB lost $10B in the first year).

FB offered a bargain, and Apple helped its users make a counteroffer. That’s a common practice in tech, as old as the first third-party drive for an IBM 360.

This practice (“adversarial interoperability“), greatly benefited Apple in the past, e.g., when Apple reverse-engineered MS Office’s file-formats for iWork, reversing losses due to the poor compatibility between Win Offce and Mac Office.

MS would have argued that the legions of users defecting from MacOS for Windows in order to enjoy high-reliabliity interchange between Office docs preferred that trade-off — yes, users liked MacOS, but they liked reliable collaboration more.