Apple has slowly been opening up, they used to be such an incredibly secretive company under Jobs there's no way this would've ever happened.
Whoops. I just said "Steve Jobs never would've let this happen" line. Oh well.
They're letting in third-party keyboards another extensions, small additions to Siri, releasing actual software on android, it's not too surprising that they might be willing to do this now. Been very open on swift.
There was a time if you had issues with hardware, and email to Steve Jobs actually resulted in a customer escalation. I had one of the 15" MBPs that had the Nvidia chip issue, but never experienced that. But had 3 other problems -- all handled (first time for me with Mac hardware). A polite email on a friday night after I did hit my 4th hardware issue, next trip to the apple store was for a "in kind" based on purchase price replacement.
Apple Software has been suffering for awhile. And where software was involved, he certainly did call teams out for failures, but we also ended up with the path iTunes is on under his watch.
That said, I don't know now, but at a time, an email to Jobs did make things happen.
Just for the sake of discussion: Are they opening up because they need to do this to survive? And they need to do this to survive because their products aren't as good as they used to be and they can't live in an enclosed environment?
My guess is management just sees it as a sensible way forward. Lot of value from engaging more with outside world. (See also: Swift.) Previous management was a bit more secretive, the culture is changing under the new boss.
I don't think it's a "we have to do this to survive" situation, just a "this seems a good idea" situation.
Whoops. I just said "Steve Jobs never would've let this happen" line. Oh well.
They're letting in third-party keyboards another extensions, small additions to Siri, releasing actual software on android, it's not too surprising that they might be willing to do this now. Been very open on swift.