"...The Minitel business model was a thing of beauty, a well-tended garden that didn’t admit outsiders. In this world, the Internet was the unwashed enemy...
To paraphrase one of my past collaborators, the Minitel did less, but it cost more"
Replace Minitel with iPhone and call me in 10 years.
I don't think this is a fair comparison. From the perspective of most consumers, the iPhone does just as much as its competitors. (This is even true for me, an engineer: I neither need nor want my smartphone to be a generic computing device.)
The iPhone certainly costs more than its competitors (even, perhaps, its technically superior competitors), but it's a mistake to think that this cost isn't purchasing value. An iPhone customer is buying the ease of use and universal compatibility of the iPhone -- and I invite anyone who thinks that this is overvalued to contemplate the phrase "Linux on the desktop." (Thinking about Linux also highlights a basic principle of the technical market that techie types often miss: "power" tends to inversely correlate with ease of use, and the majority of people would much rather have their device work than have their device be receptive to hacking that they'll never even contemplate.)
The purchase of an iPhone is also a very explicit investment in social capital. Sneer all you want at status symbols -- they're an effective form of social currency, and dismissing them is highly irrational.
Here we go again, claiming that the reason Linux is not on the consumer desktop is technical. Nope, it is squarely economical (and quite a bit political). when the OEM contract with Microsoft makes it expensive to do non-Windows PCs, the OEM opts not to.
Ever since KDE 2.x Linux has been just as good as Windows from a technical standpoint (and likely easier to fix once the inevitable error comes up, as there are few to none opaque binaries involved).
Ease of use is a smokescreen, as there is no "tabula rasa" users running around any longer.
I used Linux on the desktop for years. I ultimately switched to Macintosh because I was sick of battling my operating system to fulfill basic consumer needs. To be fair, this was five years ago, and I'm sure that Linux has made usability strides since then. But it's hard for me to believe that the ethos of Linux -- a platform by developers, for developers, that is additionally hindered by the FOSS orthodoxy of certain camps -- has been fundamentally altered in that time.
This - I loved it, but I couldn't afford the random time sinks doing things like making my notebook talk to a projector or give me a keyboard mapping that worked for every key.
Source code is just as opaque as a binary for the overwhelming majority of people. Actually, if you tell someone to consult the source code, they'll probably see it as far more opaque than a binary.
Minitel was a completely separate system. iPhones have a walled garden for apps, but they interoperate just fine with the rest of the world. My iPhone can call or text anybody with a phone number, and it browses the same web as everybody else.
You might have had a point if SMS wasn't a first-class citizen on iOS and you can also easily use Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, LINE, WeChat, KakaoTalk and whatever else is out there
My whole point is that the existence of areas which don't interoperate doesn't harm the areas that do. iMessage is proprietary, but SMS isn't, and iPhones support both pretty seamlessly.
Replace Minitel with iPhone and call me in 10 years.