[tw600040]

It's not about whether consumers like interoperability or not.

If scenario-1 - is no interoperability but superior user experience]

scenario-2 - is interoperability with subpar user experience

there are those that would rather have the former than the latter. Pretty sure Apple can provide a better user experience without the constraint of interoperability than otherwise.

[Aachen]

> interoperability with subpar user experience

I keep seeing this being touted by Apple users (and only by Apple users, whose vendor has been telling them this for decades now). Genuinely wondering if you have any source for this besides Apple saying so. Are there any examples of this? Where a better experience was explicitly possible because of a vendor lock-in? Or where one company, that competes in e.g. the market for watches or headphones while already controlling a large share of another market (like phones), was forced to open up their system and give competitors the same access, and then the market-controlling party's product somehow got worse by giving competitors the same access?

[kmeisthax]

Let me rephrase Apple's argument: "If we can't make the Apple Experience™ exclusive to Apple products only, then we will actively harm that user experience so our competitors can't ride our coat-tails."

You absolutely can make interoperability a good user experience, it's just work Apple doesn't want to do. Apple wants you to think their competitors are scary; they want the Internet to be a slum so that their walled garden looks safer.

[refulgentis]

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool kool-aid-drinking Apple fanboy, and think you're being too kind: it's a shibboleth, cargo-cult thinking, a thought-terminating cliche: most simply, utterly irrational and meaningless as rendered.

I'm more than happy to entertain it when there's specifics, but it's most kindly described as lazy, the way I see it deployed these days.

[pas]

it's pretty important too for consumers when they live among non-Apple folk

it directly leads to subpar UX when they can't communicate with others, can't share files/battery/photos/cables.

[croes]

Where does interoperability = subpar user experience come from?

[janis1234]

interoperability with subpar user experience is just an excuse for poor engineering or low resources. I.e, my x-wifi-network card doesn't work in Linux. No one is spending time making it work / too many devices to test properly. It is the manufacturers responsibility to make it work with linux and they don't care so there are a few people that make it work and write generic drivers that may or may not be optimized to the specific manufature. Same story for all " interoperability subpar user experience"