Apple's Shifting Differentiation
&gt; Sketch, to be sure, bears the most responsibility for its struggles; frankly, that native app piece reads like a refusal to face its fate.<p>Ben can write paeans to this new &quot;cloud&quot; business model. But at the end of the day, the question for us, the users is simple.<p>Do we own what we buy?<p>When I buy a Mac (and I&#x27;ve bought several), I am buying a computer. A general purpose computational device. And by selling it to me, the company is selling me a general purpose computational device.<p>What right does the company have to stop me from installing&#x2F;modifying my device in any way that I see fit? Sure, they may refuse support&#x2F;warranty, that is their prerogative, but what gives them the right to stop me from having someone else repair it? Or, to boot into Linux? Or, to open my own computer?<p>I have a MacBook Pro from 2016. Recently, I wanted to give it a thorough cleaning. So I took out my speciality screw driver and unscrewed the screws for the bottom plate.<p>It wouldn&#x27;t budge.<p>It was then I realized that I needed suction cups and strength to move the plate downwards to unlatch something inside to make it &quot;pop&quot;.<p>This design serves no engineering purpose. It exists to make it harder for me, the device owner, to access the device I&#x27;ve purchased without sacrificing dollars at the altar of Apple.<p>And this was their most &quot;open&quot; product. Prior to the M1 announcement, you couldn&#x27;t boot into another OS - or significantly alter - your iOS device. And now we can&#x27;t do so with our Macs. We seem to have collectively decided to blur the line of ownership.<p>A device we buy isn&#x27;t ours even after purchase. No, we must continuously give our money to the corporation for the benefit of their revenue projections.<p>Which returns us to this,<p>&gt; Sketch, to be sure, bears the most responsibility for its struggles; frankly, that native app piece reads like a refusal to face its fate.<p>With Sketch you own your data, and thanks to the open format, you can port that data to other mediums.<p>With Sketch you own a copy of the tool that allows you to do your job.<p>With these other, less powerful but &quot;collaborative&quot; software, you don&#x27;t truly own your data or the tools to access it. You merely rent it.<p>Should there be an event where Figma is acquired or goes out of business, then (in all likelihood) every user of this platform will lack the ability and the choice to preserve their work for future generations (and for their business).<p>What are the odds of Figma staying as it is, in the control of founders, chugging along as a profitable business a year from now? 5 years from now? A decade? Two decades?<p>I do not wish to single out Ben, but this post is an exemplar of the shift in thinking being pushed by the current crop of tech cognoscenti. They have made a growing argument that the future is one without ownership. Where it&#x27;s one where you don&#x27;t own your devices, you rent them. And they assure us that&#x27;s the future, and because that&#x27;s the future, it&#x27;s going to be amazing.<p>But that sounds like dystopia to me. It is one thing to have a tradeoff between accessing all the songs in the world and owning a few on vinyl to having the tools of your trade be abstracted away.<p>Spotify and Netflix aren&#x27;t essential services to me. <i>My</i> computer is. My vector design software is. My ability to write code is. My ability to make things is.<p>They argue that there are benefits to &quot;collaboration&quot; with the &quot;cloud&quot;, but that doesn&#x27;t need to be so. The only reason why they&#x27;re operating in the browser is because the tradition of web apps started within them. There is no reason why every other application can&#x27;t collaborate natively, with combined local + server-based data storage with other apps across the world.<p>Video games do it all the time! Games like counterstrike etc are in some ways far more collaborative than a Figma file. The state of what occurs in the world depends on every other person in the world, with the context being time sensitive, and the state being additive. And it works beautifully.<p>If it can work for non-essential entertainment, why should we accept the reduced paradigm for our essential tools? Why should we buy into crippled software that is limited by the fact it runs in the browser? Why should we buy into the abusive business model of having to rent our ability to do work from another company? Why should we buy into the idea that we don&#x27;t own the fruits of our labor? And that we don&#x27;t get to have a copy of our work nor access it without paying the toll?<p>Bohemian Coding, if you ever read this, don&#x27;t go down with this ship. Add support for Windows. Or, Linux. It will save your company.