The Mac, Web Apps, and Desktop Publishing

Almost all content in the Stratechery Cinematic Universe has been dedicated of late to Ben’s vibe coding odyssey. He’s been predictably running into issues with macOS permissions, remote management woes, and the like. But none of this is a surprise.

Apple has never been the platform for hackers, or at least not post-Woz. Look back to the late 90s and early 2000s. It was Windows that let you pick from endless WMP skins, run any hardware you found, and get an unusable machine as a reward.

In the 2010s, all but the most extreme neckbeards were refocused on SaaS and web apps. For this, the Mac was (and still is) perfect.

I’d argue that writing Ruby or PHP in your perfectly-configured editor is actually more spiritually similar to the desktop publishing workload that kept the Mac alive a couple decades prior. Early Macs had WYSIWYG previews of full vertical pages. Later Macs let you accurately preview how your code would run in a server environment because of the shared Unix foundation of macOS and Linux. In Ben’s words, an all-time strategy credit. But maybe also, it’s just the platform supporting the same workflow style. Great tools, write, preview, publish.

Endless customization and control are things the Mac has never really cared about doing well. The Apple approach has always been to protect the user from their own bad taste. Maybe that’s been less apparent historically because workloads shaped like “perfectly designed tools editing text” have served technical users so well. Maybe, to put this in classic Apple terms, Ben is just holding it wrong.