Developers embraced Windows over Mac, users followed. (Until iOS development made Mac's the default dev machine.) Developers embraced iOS and Android over Symbian and webOS.
Windows and Mac were great development platforms ten years ago, and iOS and Android were way better than the now-dead competition.
I'd argue Mac's were the default developer machine before iOS. E.g., Paul Graham from 2005 (http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html):
> All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.
From my anecdotal experience, the rise of the Mac among creators, including developers, was meteoric, and immediate, once OS X was stable. Not to say it was everybody, but I'd say by the mid-2000s it was the default choice, as in I rarely ran into anyone using any other platform in the web startup circles I was in at the time.
I'm not sure what IT purchasing looked like in enterprises and SMBs through the '00s, but I wasn't able to get an Apple machine at a non-tech mid-size employer in the late '00s and it seemed like developers at big employers still had PCs.
I've always been issued (and supplied) Macs since the early '10s, and I'd say at this point, given how bad macOS has become, it ultimately does boil down to the fact that "being able to build an iOS app" is a valuable feature, and no other company can offer it.
See StackOverflow survey.
> Until iOS development made Mac's the default dev machine.
I was just pointing out that based on my personal experience, it started earlier than that.
I don't know what to say about the elitist comment. I'm only pointing out my anecdotal experience. I'm well aware of Stackoverflow's developer statistics, but I just don't personally run into developer machines that aren't Macs very often. But then, I transitioned to iOS development myself around 2010, which is obviously going to skew things. Frankly I'm super curious where all the non-Mac using developers are, because they aren't on the web teams, or mobile teams (Android/iOS) that I usually work with. I know Windows is by far the most popular choice for game development, but that's far from my career.
(I guess actually, for the elitist point, I only really care about the hardware being used by people doing work I admire, because I want to do work like that too. I suppose if that's elitist so be it, but to me, that's just being practical.)
Bash, and a lack of a good command line story on Windows, made the Mac the "default dev machine" for certain cultures/industries.
I gave up the last attempt because two things happened: someone out there pushed a bad update that crashed my GUI for no readily apparent rhyme or reason, and I could not for the life of me get my scanner to work.
Now if I wanted to have 17 CPUs or hook a HAM radio into it or do something truly weird, Linux was the way to go.
But I just wanted my computer to (a) not break and (b) do the basics smoothly.
Linux phones no longer seem limited by hardware or cost (at least judging by my PinePhone), more stability and support. Once stability is there in terms of reliability of the core "Minimum Viable Phone" apps, which seems relatively close, there will be a great opportunity for design-oriented founders/brands to craft highly polished experiences without needing to pay off the Duopoly or, worse, trying to compete with them for talent.
Yeah, there will be new innovative startup phones, but what'll happen when every brand can offer their own phone just by hiring a few designers and engineers?
NikePhones, GucciPhones, DunkinPhones, TeslaPhones, McPhones...
I'm glad that you're happy with your PinePhone, and I hope that one day in the future it achieves perhaps 1% of the global market for smartphones. I doubt it, but that would be nice.
In my family, some of the users chose their platform after asking me what to buy. I'll normally recommend Apple because the hardware is generally pretty good and their service and support through their stores is decent.
Applications usually don't matter, with gaming being the big exception.
If applications really were the biggest factor, Apple probably still wins. Through virtualization, a Mac can legally run more software than any other computer.
> Developers embraced iOS and Android over Symbian and webOS.
Users embraced iOS before developers. The day the iPhone was release, there were far more apps on Windows CE based smartphones but none of that mattered. So I don't think you can say it's all about applications.
They also choose brands. Apple has one of the biggest ones, and the fact that people bought MacBooks during the butterfly keyboard years should tell you just how powerful that brand is.
Brands don't seem particularly defensible, and Apple doesn't seem to have any network effects outside iMessages/FaceTime and their accessory ecosystem.
James Currier on brands: "I don't think brand is a worthy defense at all. I've seen companies with phenomenal brands get crushed in a matter of years. If you go back to the early age of PC software, the best brands in the industry were Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect. Microsoft crushed them in a matter of years, and they had the brands. I don't think brand buys you very much. The best brand in search was AltaVista or maybe Yahoo! and now they're roadkill."
Perhaps that's why Apple advertises so much with product placements in movies. On a lot of movies the main characters have iPhones - it's not overt, just a jingle or them looking at a call (which looks like iOS incoming call UI). Same with Macs or AirPods. I honestly wonder what their placement spend is like.
They aren't the most valuable brand for no reason [1]. That placement is earned, but reinforced with lots of spend.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-surpasses-amazon-as-wo...
"Average consumers" are becoming increasingly technically sophisticated as demographics shift, and of course the two leading mobile OSs are already Unix-based. While they're not marketed as "*nix" to end users, they absolutely were marketed as such to developers.
Probably no so related but your comment remembered me some friends sentence, something like: "end-users don't mind about the technical aspects they just want something that works".
This is an ad-hoc claim and not necessarily true, I know. But turns out that this sentence is trivial nowadays with this such of big impact of technology in people's lives. So users are not foolish, they are every day more aware about software in general. They know what they want and can give you the value that your software deserves so just let's start to tell them more about Linux.
Yes you have to jump through hoops and not everyone in IT is extremely happy always but even some of them prefer it.
To me it feels kind of like when Mac broke through in developer circles.
First it was weird and IT department laughed. Then more and more people including bosses demanded it and here we are: if a job demands all devs use Windows many devs will go somewhere else.
People buy Apple because the hardware is great, the software is more integrated than Linux and Windows due to that tight hardware control, and the Apple Store model which “just works” for the average person.
