Perhaps a bit cynical, but it seems that as Microsoft continue to shove ads in absolutely everywhere and track everything they possibly can, Apple are content to be just marginally better rather than actually having meaningfully higher standards. Of course, it's business as usual, but we are boiling the frog for the next generation by tolerating it.
The problem is that these systems are so costly and hard to make that without a capital incentive no indipendent entity is going to make them and what entity do have an interest in making them as a "loss leader" if not monetized in any way (ads or paid product)?
Apple has been running maps for well over a decade without this. They are one of the most profitable businesses in history and have spent almost a trillion dollars in financial games to enrich stakeholders because they had so much cash to burn.
The idea that "poor little Apple is struggling without enshittifying to microptimize profit opportunities" is an utter joke.
I think they were talking about the challenge for a non Apple/Google competitor to emerge in this space with a comparable enough product to win real, meaningful marketshare.
Firefox's abysmal market share, despite being, for the average user, a strictly better experience, would incline me to agree.
Yeah Apple’s evolution over the past decade has been very frustrating and disappointing to see. It seems like whatever scraps remain of the company’s core values now exist solely with a handful of old heads at the company and will likely not survive their retirements.
A lot has changed in the tech industry, but the rapidity of hiring and expansion of headcount just seems to have engendered a broad homogenization of business strategies, design conventions, and product vision. I think they started hiring people based on narrow defined ideas about skills and resumes to fit certain roles and they all end up shuffling the same bunch of people around across the same incestuous company hiring pipelines until they’re all doing stints at every company and driving them in the same broad direction.
