Well, if you use your computer as a sort of "dumb device" or single (or few) purpose instrument (typewriter, internet terminal, etc), then there's only so much innovation they are likely to make in those areas over a period of time. It's natural for them to also look at integrating with other devices and providing new functionality. Obviously not everything will interest you, and it's possible some releases will just happen to have few changes that hit the particular areas that you care about.
"Integrating with other devices" is not their goal. Selling desktops, laptops, monitors, phones, tablets, watches, keyboards, mice, trackpads, ear buds, and to a lesser extent subscription accounts, that's their goal.
If they truly wanted to provide useful integration, they would make Android and Windows Phone devices first class citizens just as much as the iPhone. They're first and foremost a hardware company. Even their Mac's OS is free! Because they get money from the Mac, not the OS.
There's plenty of useful innovations they could still make that doesn't require them to focus on up-selling me new hardware, if innovating was still their goal. They're using a Star Trek future as their marketing ploy, and it's working scarily well.
I guess the one upside you could say is that they're probably not selling your data and/or profile to advertisers. So at least they have that going for them.
> "Integrating with other devices" is not their goal. Selling desktops, laptops, monitors, phones, tablets, watches, keyboards, mice, trackpads, ear buds, and to a lesser extent subscription accounts, that's their goal.
Obviously, but offering better integration (even if only with their own ecosystem) is how they are trying to sell more right now.
> There's plenty of useful innovations they could still make that doesn't require them to focus on up-selling me new hardware
I didn't say there weren't, just that it's not likely to advance beyond a certain level in a certain time period. This is about feedback and learning what ideas survive in the market. To their credit, Apple is fairly good at coming up with radical leaps (or, at least implementing those leaps on a mass scale)[1], but they are fairly bad IMO at listening to whether they are working out well in practice (Google has the opposite problem, they so aggressively remove failed ideas that the few people that liked them feel betrayed, and express it loudly). Throwing a few hundred million dollars right now at word processing, or the browser, or any particular thing and then ignoring it is probably not as efficient as a few tens of millions spread out over years, just because there's only so much you can do to advance a field in a short period.
> I guess the one upside you could say is that they're probably not selling your data and/or profile to advertisers. So at least they have that going for them.
Apple ran (runs?) their own advertising service for mobile apps, iAd. I'm not sure the status currently.
That said, Google isn't selling your profile or data to advertisers. That makes zero sense for them to do, and they probably have quite a lot of safeguards to make sure absolutely the bare minimum of information about an individual an ad is served to makes it back to the advertiser (preferably nothing). This isn't because they are stalwart defenders of privacy, but because it's in their best interest to not give away the data that they make their money from. I trust them to act in their self interest.
Yeah, I looked it up before I posted because my information was fairly old, but I found some conflicting info when I did. Some sites state it was just the developer integration that allowed developers to advertise their own apps (as an update to the story). I'm not sure if Apple still runs an advertising framework or not, and wasn't willing to dive much deeper when the first few sources seemed ambiguous and nothing official seemed to clarify.
