✱ The Quiet Contempt of Cupertino
Apple is famous for delighting customers - and infamous for squeezing suppliers. But when developers are both, Apple picks the wrong side.
Apple thinks an awful lot about customer delight and customer satisfaction… And separately, a whole other part of Apple treats its suppliers with quiet ruthlessness, squeezing them for every penny of margin. And at some point Apple forgot that its developers are both customers and suppliers, and treated them like suppliers alone
This isn’t just a framing issue - it’s a strategic design problem. It shows up in subtle, corrosive ways. Take the new EU red-flag warning modals for external purchases...
The warning is decorated with a big red “!” icon.The uncompetitive nature of the App Store — I’m using uncompetitive rather than anticompetitive just to give Apple the benefit of the doubt here — has left at least some top Apple executives hopelessly naive about the state of online payments. It’s like when they still blather on about software being sold on discs inside boxes in physical retail stores. That was true. It was once relevant. It no longer is and hasn’t been for over a decade.
Same with payments. Online payments through, say, Stripe — which zillions of companies use — are completely private and secure today. Amazon payments are completely private and secure. I’m sure there remain sketchy corners of the Internet, but for the most part, all mainstream online payments today are private and secure. Apple’s IAP system has numerous advantages and user-centric features. (If Apple were actively competing, it would have many more.) But the fact that it’s “private and secure” is no longer distinguishing at all.
Instead of competing on user experience, Apple is performing security theatre. This isn’t about privacy, security or safety. It’s about control. And Apple no longer sees the difference.
At a certain point, refusal to acknowledge the world as it now is becomes a pathology. It reveals a strategic drift and a cultural rot. There are countless micro-adjustments Apple could make to increase delight and boost satisfaction.
Instead, it chooses to squander attention on performative friction. That’s not just contemptuous - it’s strategically self-defeating.
It’s behaviour better suited to Scorsese than to Cupertino.
"I mean, they were suckers. They had no balls. If we wanted something, we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again." - Henry Hill, Goodfellas