Thread by @dhh

Look, I get it. It's difficult to accept that a company that makes products you really like acts like an abusive, monopolist bully. It's a mindfuck for me too! To have gone two decades cheering the company, only to recoil at what it has become. All of the ughs.

This is what it felt using a PC in the late 90s. I despised Microsoft, and how they treated the developer community. The way they "cut off the air supply" to Netscape. But I gritted my teeth and kept using Windows because there wasn't an alternative at the time. That's monopoly!

Then, all of the sudden, there was real choice! Apple came out with OS X, and I got a white Macbook running OS X Puma in 2001. And suddenly I was free from Microsoft, and running with the underdog. IT FELT SO GOOD. Apple was everything Microsoft was not.

That's a formative experience! To have Apple be the escape pod from Microsoft and Windows. I spent so much effort in the early days evangelizing them because of that. Converted half my university class to Macs. Pushed it hard with Ruby on Rails. Team Apple through and through.

But now Apple has become the Microsoft of the 90s. Nay, strike that. They've become WORSE. Their monopoly power, their economic weight, their ability to upend industries on a mere rumor. Big tech today is endlessly more powerful than Microsoft was back then. AND IT SUCKS.

It sucks because it feels so unnecessary. Apple makes good products! I'm marveling at the A14 and the M1. I love they brought back small phones with the 12 mini. They have a two trillion dollar company. They don't need to hurt us like this. That makes it all the more painful.

I totally get the boring, economic incentives for why Apple is turning into the evil that Microsoft once was. Because they can. It's hard keeping up those growth numbers when you're already at two trillion, but darn it, you must. So you start rationalizing all this abuse.

I ALSO understand the psychological incentives for why people embedded in the Apple ecosystem – as developers or consumers – need to think the company is actually doing the right thing. It's painful to accept when "your team" bends into darkness. Much easier to rationalize it.

I want to rationalize it too! I mean, for fucks sake, I made a COMMERCIAL FOR APPLE some 13 years ago. Singing their praises, because working on the Mac was such a liberation compared to the PC. So trust me. I feel this. And it fucking stings.