This is a common, lazy argument. Apple's bundled apps are typically MVPs rather than best of breed. For me an MVP is perfectly fine for my photos and video editing while, say, for calendar and address book I use third party apps.

I doubt anyone would claim that Pages or Numbers are any sort of competition for flagship apps like Word or Excel, while at the same time they don't even break new ground like google docs did (yes, I know it wasn't the first either).

And perhaps Apple will get its act together on its subscription services but so far they aren't world beaters either, and never have been (going back at least as far as eWorld in the 1990s).

I'm sensing an assumption that Apple needs their in house apps to be best of breed. I'm not an iOS or macOS user, but I've worked on systems over the years. It really seems like they're happy to let someone get popular to identify the niche that needs to be filled, roll an MVP to cover it, and kick out the originators with no real excuses.

It's like they're still focused on hardware development and the software is just things users want to do so let's have an app only as needed to retain users, ish.

Really schizoid from my point of view.

I am an iOS and macOS developer and user and it doesn't look that way to me at all. (FWIW I use their hardware because IMHO it sucks less than the alternatives; I'm no special fan).

Actually this part I agree with 100%:

> It's like they're still focused on hardware development and the software is just things users want to do so let's have an app only as needed to retain users, ish.

And I assume this hardware focus is why their subscription options have been a mixture of mediocre and worthless.

But this point, while a common trope (and even with a name, "sherlocked"), I have't really seen it much in practice, especially since OS X rolled around:

> It really seems like they're happy to let someone get popular to identify the niche that needs to be filled, roll an MVP to cover it, and kick out the originators with no real excuses.

I haven't seen much evidence of this in the real world. Even in the case of the Sherlock app they made a more powerful tool and still left room for third parties. They don't make much on their own software and their MVPs really are basic.

Apart from a few marquee apps in the photo/video space they don't really have a big app effort as far as I can tell from outside. I don't know how good those apps are either.

I appreciate that closer perspective - I've never been even moderately involved so I expect I only see the noisy things.

The earlier machines I've worked on always did come across as well designed and at least generally well thought through.

In the end they want to save on r&d / market research costs. In Ye Olde Times, Apple would go on their own and ask themselves "how can we make an improvement in the lives of our customers?"... the answer were iconic, revolutionary products (iPod, iPhone, earpods) that outright created entire device classes.

Now? The only thing in focus is rent extraction - App Store cuts -, recurring revenue and vertical integration. Anything not contributing to that gets atrophied (documentation, as mentioned, or Apple Server) or put on life support (essentially the whole rest of the ecosystem, including for all too many years pro-level hardware). Innovation? Why should Apple take the risk and improve their core product with features that won't get used? They're letting third party devs pick up the slack and buy up or clone the most successful things.

They're still better than Microsoft as they discovered that people are willing to pay a hefty premium for devices that have security and privacy first class members at the priority scheduling for new features (especially compared to the utter shitshow that Google has allowed Android to become by not cracking down on vendors), but innovation that doesn't give them a direct cash profit simply does not happen any more.

> Now? The only thing in focus is rent extraction - App Store cuts -, recurring revenue and vertical integration. Anything not contributing to that gets atrophied (documentation, as mentioned, or Apple Server) or put on life support (essentially the whole rest of the ecosystem, including for all too many years pro-level hardware). Innovation? Why should Apple take the risk and improve their core product with features that won't get used?

well, thats the system we live in; companies are chartered to make profit...

to be honest, im surprised we get even the current level of support and innovation from apple that we do... i think in the long term though, this will only hurt apple, as other alternatives will be more plesant and easy to develop, the only thing keeping apples controlover devs will be its vice-grip on the appstore...

No, but I would staunchly argue that Keynote is better than PowerPoint for making and giving presentations.

Apple cares about presentations, and is lukewarm at best about making documents and running spreadsheets. It shows.

You can do a lot more with powerpoint though the results are pretty unattractive, but that doesn't matter to me.

Keynote still feels like an MVP though the results do look a lot better.

I don't think the presenter tools are any better or worse on either system.

Yeah, and if you had the balls to make something you thought people would like, you sure as hell wouldn't call it a common, lazy argument, because you'd do everything you could—which is very little—to protect yourself from being cannibalized in the software industry.

Absolutely! Have you seen this (interactive) article by the New York Times? It's unbelievable.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/09/technology/ap...

I found it to be believable.

Jokes aside, the point would be more compelling if the Apple apps at the top of the list all were competing against the apps being searched for, and if they included searches for apps that didn't provide functionality Apple did. The algorithm as I see it from the article is that the #1 popular app comes first. Of course Apple takes the top spot ... this is unfortunate winner-take-all promotion that in fact the entire software industry actually wants regardless of what they say or gripe about on medium (only upstarts complain, which ceases the instant they make it big).

So, then the #2-#k spots are apps by the same maker, which both serves to help the user discover other apps they mightn't have otherwise searched for (promoting use and engagement, and the app ecosystem per se), and helps persist the winner-take-all business model. By only promoting apps by the same manufacturer it maintains some odd definition of relevance.

Then after a run of same-manufacturer apps, we get back to #k-#n organic results. The user can very obviously and very easily pick out the fact that up to #k is pushing discovery, and that below there are the results they wanted. It's actually not a big deal (actively harmful) because of the irrelevance of the #2-#k results.

So, if they had bothered to include information on apps that Apple doesn't compete against (instead of producing a 1-sided story), for which there is a manufacturer who produces a very wide variety of apps, I wonder if you'd see the same type of results. #1 result being their super popular app for the search in question, #2-#k being other (unrelated to the search) apps by the same producer, then #k-#n organic results. Clearly most app makers are one- or two-trick ponies so wouldn't have search results like this. But surely there are some?

The point is, as written, it's a hit piece.