I mean, they kind of have to be pretty good to entice you into the walled garden to begin with. Get people in the door with a smooth, super-polished experience, and then you’ve already got plenty of them pretty well won over. You’ll lose some users with previous experience with another OS to “It doesn’t work the way it did on $ancient_version of $OS, I hate it,” that go back, some just get tired of the same thing and want to try something new, and others that hit the walls of the garden and decide they want out. If it was straight garbage and restrictive, on top of being expensive, nobody would hang around until they got comfortable enough that overcoming the friction of changing was a real obstacle to switching.
There’s just a disproportionate representation of folks like myself in tech communities versus the general population who are opposed to any walled garden, no matter how polished, when there exist a free alternative.
surprisingly many computational scientists use MacOS
Yeah, I have some anecdotal evidence to that as well.
Everyone likes to shit on AAPL for being a walled garden, but it’s really hard for some to admit that they are pretty good at what they’re doing.
I mean, they kind of have to be pretty good to entice you into the walled garden to begin with. Get people in the door with a smooth, super-polished experience, and then you’ve already got plenty of them pretty well won over. You’ll lose some users with previous experience with another OS to “It doesn’t work the way it did on $ancient_version of $OS, I hate it,” that go back, some just get tired of the same thing and want to try something new, and others that hit the walls of the garden and decide they want out. If it was straight garbage and restrictive, on top of being expensive, nobody would hang around until they got comfortable enough that overcoming the friction of changing was a real obstacle to switching.
There’s just a disproportionate representation of folks like myself in tech communities versus the general population who are opposed to any walled garden, no matter how polished, when there exist a free alternative.