alt Hacker NewsI’ve never found them user hostile. They just sell appliances that do a thing.
If you don’t want that thing don’t buy it. If you do want that thing, it dies it pretty well.
I don’t have an iPad. My wife uses her, a lot.
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> I’ve never found them user hostile. They just sell appliances that do a thing.
It is very hostile to users and their freedom. They are requiring you to buy things that they approve of. I guarantee you somewhere in their backlog is an item that says "require app store for app installations on macOS". In line with iOS.
You have paid for some hardware, and you can only run their software. They are refusing to give you information on running one of many other operating systems. They are refusing to allow you to buy hardware that runs their operating system[0] (this is in my opinion more okay, unless they are willing to sell the software separately).
They then refuse to give you new versions of the same software that they enforce to run on the hardware you bought. The hardware is probably still in perfect working order, and will still work with an older version of said software, but soon after some zero day is found, and you are stuck with this software that you can either never connect to the internet, or suck it up and accept the risk.
You can recycle it sure, but apple will give you pennies on the dollar (if they give you anything at all) and no one else really wants it because Apple refuses to let them (or you for that matter) fix it if it breaks, give it a new life through Linux (or Windows for that matter). So now you have at best some expensive paperweight, at worst e-waste.
So yes, Apple is user hostile whether it affects you or not. And no, Apple is not the only one.
If there were 5 million options and you could hyper specify exactly the product you want, that would be a valid argument.
I buy an iPhone because the combined product is ultimately the best option, that doesn’t mean I agree with every single thing. If there was “iPhone but you can sideload apps” I’d buy that instead.
Car analogy time. Users would be angry if your car could only run on Apple fuel, and drive on Apple roads, and were speed-limited based on what Apple thinks is safe.
The fact that we think this is normal for phones is crazy. And the longer we wait the more Apple fuel stations and Apple roads there will be, until there is no way back.
We can discuss about iOS vs macOS, etc. and I feel that others have litigated that already, but where I see no way to view their current position anything besides user hostile is in the fact developers are forced to buy a Mac to develop for any Apple device.
Own an iPad? Can't develop on that, pay for a Mac.
Prefer Linux, BSD or Windows? Tough noogies for you, you will have to both pay for a Mac and deal with macOS regardless of your preference.
Already developed a cross-platform app that could run on macOS and iOS via React Native, Flutter/Dart, Kotlin? Well, buy or rent a Mac to compile and in all likelihood iOS devices to boot as the simulator in Xcode has idiomatic misbehavior vs physical devices so some things work on it which don't on real iOS hardware and vice versa.
Beyond the App Store and Apple Pay being the only game in town in many jurisdictions, limitations on JIT hampering innovation and rules that are less than consistent (why is game streaming not permitted but video streaming is, why does Amazon Prime Video get an exception but Netflix and others do not, etc.), the fact that developing software for Apple devices means you have to own their hardware in ways other platforms do not require and are forced to use Xcode with its bugs and peculiarities feels very hostile. Then there is what you have to do as part of actually testing your in development app on your own hardware. Ridiculous to the n-th degree and I'd argue textbook user hostile.
Saying this as someone who daily-drives a Macbook Pro because, having tried three laptops from other vendors that are as or more expensive to the Macbook due to my preference for Fedora Silverblue over macOS, the Macbook continues to be the only one that has decent hardware. Good lord, there is a circle of hell for whomever thought that POS clicky excuse of a touchpad in the Asus ProArt P16 is serviceable in a € 299,- bargain bin special, let alone a high-end workstation. And the less said about HP and Dell in 25/26, the better...