Linus has made a video about this recently trying to build an equivalent machine. There’s really nothing like the base Mac Mini for its price, but that stops being true as soon as you make any upgrades.
The whole sales of Macs is a small portion of Apple's earnings, but I think it’s still a lot in gross numbers.
I think it’s the sort of thing to keep a hold in case the market shifts and Apple needs to change strategies, like they’ve been doing in raising the percentage coming from services compared to iPhone sales. They’re monetizing the “ecosystem” more than ever.
He/she is onto something though. An example of it is games made by people who care and love the field being bold and pushing for new cool and interesting stuff vs. games made by companies just wanting money with 0 effort and using the same boring formula.
This is true, it’s like other platforms that value content creation rather than value, so people keep repeating the same thing. I haven’t worked as a moderator ever so I don’t know what’s possible or impossible, but I think many of these problems are a result of poor moderation though.
Sometimes moderation needs to be a bit unpopular to have the community work in some way.
It’s the totally opposite of what Brazil is doing, which is to force companies to have a legal representation in the country to deal with the law whenever there’s some problem to settle.
Ever since I realized TikTok creates a unique share URL that tells the person you’re the one sharing it, I became paranoid with any social media share links that are created dynamically. I won’t share them unless I try them out first.
Also Android has this annoying problem where there pirate versions of an app will show up when it has in-app purchases or scammers will rip-off your app, rebrand it and place an overwhelming amount of ads to make a quick buck before the app is flagged and taken down. That’s not accounting for the stories of accounts simply being taken down without warning.
I think the issue now is that the market got fragmented and now you can’t find as much content as before without using multiple services, which is an annoyance.
They’ve done with with platforms that were already created like that: which is iOS. They never closed macOS completely because the outcry would be huge and it would disrupt all the existing stakeholders of it and ultimately lose a significant market share.
It’s actually one reason they won’t allow macOS to run in an iPad: the iPad apps ecosystem is completely controlled by them, while macaOS’s isn’t.
I’ll still say that when it comes to developers, Apple is a much better experience than Google.
On the App Store you can appeal if your app is rejected and you have an actual human on the other side to explain you what are the issues.
On the Google Play, anything goes usually, but later if your account gets flagged by their automated system, you might 1) get a generic email with no explanation and a threat that you should fix it or the app will be taken down and your account get 1 out of 3 warnings; 2) get your account simply banned without explanation, losing all your services associated with Google forever with no appeal or anything you can do; 3) have your Google account simply disabled for supposedly being “associated” with some other account that was banned.
Many of these horror stories can be found on the Android development subreddits and I suspect this is the result of the Play Store being a big target of malicious or scam apps constantly.
It’s all about trust. The problem is that people trust Apple not to steal your credit card information and to honor subscription rules etc. You probably trust the independent platform a bit less, such as many of those scammer platforms who might even charge people more than they should by “mistake”, then have an awful process to get reimbursed etc.
In that sense, most people will always prefer Apple to manage these things. Everything’s then in one place, and you trust that once you cancel it you won’t be charged again.
As an example, I had a Netflix subscription and after I cancelled it, I’ve got 2 or three emails saying “Thank you for reactivating your subscription” which I didn’t do. I suspect they make some pop up that my mom tapped without noticing, but that definitely shouldn’t happen without my password. I could only solve the problem by adding a second payment method (which doesn’t work) and only then it allowed me to delete my previous credit card data.
Linus has made a video about this recently trying to build an equivalent machine. There’s really nothing like the base Mac Mini for its price, but that stops being true as soon as you make any upgrades.