Apple has some proprietary stuff, but it's not that crazy. Apple used SCSI, standard floppy disks, cd drives, etc. Their floppy drives had extra features (like the eject motor), but the drives worked with bog standard floppy disks. Mini display port is a standard, so it's not that bad. When they ditched all the legacy stuff, they went with USB instead of inventing their own. Firewire was a standard too. They moved to Ethernet with the rest of the world, and used/promoted WiFi (even thought they had their own term for it).
Apple did how their custom ADC for a few years though.
But Sony is... in another world. They pushed SACD (technically a standard but no one cared), MiniDisc, Beta, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick blah, the custom PSP discs, their proprietary music format, all sorts of stuff. They didn't use VHS-C mini video tapes, they used their own competing format. I believe they used their own MiniDV type format for a while. They had their own interconnect to connect their receivers to TVs for controlling things (not video, but turning on/off, volume, etc).
Firewire 400 had a standard connector, and it worked very well. Sony decided the connector was too big for their tiny camcorders, so they made their own. It was the little 4 pin FireWire connector that didn't pass power. That's the one most PC laptops later adopted, making it useless for external drives. Sony's connector, which they invented their own name for (i.Link 1394), had to be adopted into the standard because it became so common from Sony pushing it so much.
Sony and Apple have both lived in their own worlds (to a degree). What Sony is learning now is that when you're not on top that becomes a huge liability. Apple learned that when they nearly bankrupted themselves in the mid 90s.
Apple has some proprietary stuff, but it's not that crazy. Apple used SCSI, standard floppy disks, cd drives, etc. Their floppy drives had extra features (like the eject motor), but the drives worked with bog standard floppy disks. Mini display port is a standard, so it's not that bad. When they ditched all the legacy stuff, they went with USB instead of inventing their own. Firewire was a standard too. They moved to Ethernet with the rest of the world, and used/promoted WiFi (even thought they had their own term for it).
Apple did how their custom ADC for a few years though.
But Sony is... in another world. They pushed SACD (technically a standard but no one cared), MiniDisc, Beta, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick blah, the custom PSP discs, their proprietary music format, all sorts of stuff. They didn't use VHS-C mini video tapes, they used their own competing format. I believe they used their own MiniDV type format for a while. They had their own interconnect to connect their receivers to TVs for controlling things (not video, but turning on/off, volume, etc).
Firewire 400 had a standard connector, and it worked very well. Sony decided the connector was too big for their tiny camcorders, so they made their own. It was the little 4 pin FireWire connector that didn't pass power. That's the one most PC laptops later adopted, making it useless for external drives. Sony's connector, which they invented their own name for (i.Link 1394), had to be adopted into the standard because it became so common from Sony pushing it so much.
Sony and Apple have both lived in their own worlds (to a degree). What Sony is learning now is that when you're not on top that becomes a huge liability. Apple learned that when they nearly bankrupted themselves in the mid 90s.