Comment by mantap
7 years ago
Do Apple customers use recent actively developed software because they want to or because Apple often breaks their APIs and actively developed software is all that you can use?
7 years ago
Do Apple customers use recent actively developed software because they want to or because Apple often breaks their APIs and actively developed software is all that you can use?
I think it's both. Ten-year-old enterprise desktop applications may be functional and even highly usable, but they look and feel ancient. It's been a long time, but I remember using Windows software in the 2000s where I could almost smell the mold and dust. Applications like that are the software equivalent of Miss Havisham's wedding dress. If you're positioning yourself as a fashion-conscious brand selling products that become part of a person's identity, it helps to have a mechanism for sloughing off applications that aren't constantly being refreshed and rewritten. Constant rewrites aren't economical for enterprise applications with a few hundred or few thousand users, but those have moved to the web anyway.
Note that this doesn't reflect my personal values about software, but I can see how it serves Apple's priorities and keeps their products attractive in the eyes of their customers.
A contributing factor could also be that because for many in the Apple world, hardware goes in tandem with the software, it follows the natural cycle of hardware refresh. Sure every now and then someone finds that an app no longer works, but if they aren't paying big big bucks, who cares?