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Is Apple Turning Into the Next "Evil Empire"?
jira writes "'You may think you own your iPad or iPhone but in reality an invisible string links it back to Apple HQ' writes John Naughton. He adds: 'Umberto Eco once wrote a memorable essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven.'"
it is not an ongoing process. you should use past perfect tense.
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I would had wanted to argue "what is there to discuss?", but nevermind.
Is apple _turning_ into the next evil empire?
No, they already are.
Now what?
Can we drop this absurd use of the word 'evil' please?
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
What do you mean, "turning"? They were never good to begin with. They perhaps turned more evil in 2007 with the release of the iPhone.
I don't think they are overpriced, after all they don't operate in a supply/demand type chain. Apple sets the price based on the development, design and manufacturing costs, plus whatever profit margin they want. If they were overpriced then a lower priced competitor would come into the market and take some market share... like Android has done quite successfully with smartphones, except that the market is not yet saturated.
As for their other stuff, well personally I like their computing equipment enough to think that it's worth the extra you pay (and when I priced up my macbook it was actually cheaper / on par with the competition). On the other hand an iPhone is overpriced for me because I don't see the value in what it does, same with the iPad. But for plenty of others it's obviously not overpriced. If they try to control OSX as they have iOS, then I'll move to Linux if it doesn't work for me, and they'll lose my custom.
I really don't like what Apple are doing in the content space with walled gardens etc. However, that doesn't make them overpriced. Evil perhaps, or maybe just normal corporate. I don't think Anonymous are the weapon to use here, and I didn't like the tone of your comment, people are allowed to buy into Apple equipment and services if they choose to do so. Try your wallet as a weapon instead.
Turning? Like they were not?
...so shit gets selected for the front page. Sigh...
The fact that this question is being asked is, in my opinion, a sign of the times. I never thought I'd see the day when Apple is considered an "evil empire", and Microsoft is kind of the underdog/good-guy.
People have been saying this for over twenty years now. Nothing new here. What would be interesting is if common perception is that this is a valid question, and it's most definitely not.
forcing the end user to buy their hardware
No one has ever been forced to buy Apple hardware. In fact, most people don't buy their computers.
I think that we're going to see a repeat of the 90's here somewhat shortly with respect to mobile devices (aka "the next frontier"). Apple will insist on selling iPads and iPhones at $500 - $800 each, and Google will allow their OS to be placed on any device the consumer wants, decoupling the OS and hardware and ultimately "owning" the mobile marketspace, just like Microsoft beat Apple in terms of marketshare and continues to do so to this day.
Three problems...
1. Market share of the OS is a simple, but incomplete metric. Apple makes more money than any other PC maker, and is just shy of greater profits and revenue than MS. So claiming MS has "won" is not so cut and dry.
2. You are comparing iPhones to Android. You should be comparing iPhones (and other iOS devices) to Android phones and other Android devices. That an iPhone costs $199 and $299, but the Android OS is free is meaningless. iOS is free on iPhones too.
3. iOS has outsold Android. So your conclusion has yet to come to pass. But even if it ever does, you end up with the first point, how has that benefitted Google greater than iOS has benefitted Apple? Even if Android outsells iOS 5 to 1 (and it most certainly does not, and won't any time soon), how is that an example of Google beating Apple? Apple will still make far more from iOS than Google will be making from Android.
And, more on topic, what does this have to do with Apple being "evil"?
to it's shareholders. Which is the only metric that matters.
Apple isn't evil. It's very good at making money. What other criterion is there with which to judge the actions of a company? I don't like the product they sell so I don't buy their stuff. Apparently, however, some people like the walled, Apple taxed, restrictively licensed, closed products that they sell. The fact is, many people don't care that the platform is closed and Apple can take huge sums of money from them. It doesn't make them less nice, just not a company that I want to deal with.
If you think of companies as nice or not nice, good or evil, you will be constantly disappointed. They are judged on profitability. The products that they produce; however, can be judged as good or not good.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
I've never been too afraid that Apple would hold onto any dominant market position indefinitely because Apple's one size fits all philosophy simply cannot make everyone happy. Apple success has shown however that consumer electronics supports a one size fits all philosophy infinitely better than the business market where Microsoft trounced them.
Apple has kept their overpriced ipods on top largely by providing consumers with the most physically attractive product. And physical attractiveness has also played a role in adoption of their laptop line as well, especially the Air. Yet, I doubt the iPhone will carry the day on looks.
All the phone manufactures are far more habituated to producing a beautiful product that either laptop or mp3 player makers. Android lets them focus much more so on the looks problem. And people don't want to all look exactly alike.
Apple isn't likely to dominate any markets that actually matter. Yes, tablets remains an open question. Yet, we're seeing iOS's retarded design limits here. Maemo's widgets and integration made it a better tablet operating system than iOS. And that made Maemo ultimately a better phone operating system too. Apple may've needed to approach the problem from the other direction to escape the desktop metaphor, but ultimately iOS is inferior to Android with it's widgets.
We should ideally just pass a law that compiled code isn't protected under copyright law unless the source code is available to anyone who purchases the product of course, i.e. mandate open source licenses. Good luck! lol
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Apple's general SOP has ALWAYS been "evil empire". They simply weren't as financially successful as Microsoft. So Microsoft kinda took lumps for general tech company bad-neighborism.
Believe me, Apple WISHES they'd had Microsoft's success and capital. Had they done so, home computing would be an irrevocably stunted market.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I'll try as much as possible to stay neutral in this debate, assuming there is something to debate about.
But I find it quite amusing how one day I read "Apple is insignificant. Apple has no market share. No one care about Apple in the world. 's products are much more accepted / popular / better." and the next day I read from the same people "Apple is evil. Apple will ruin everything and make our life miserable."
So. Which one is it? Either they're insignificant or they are so significant we have to worry about their every doing, but it can't be both.
It is not a religion. :)
After many years with DOS, OS/2, Windows, misc. Linux desktop pc's, I now have a Apple computer, phone and tablet at the moment. But it is not a static thing. I might have a android tablet and phone in the future. I might even get Linux on my desktop, who knows.
But at the moment the most important thing for me is to have devices with maximum stability so I dont have to spend my percious sparetime tinkering/fixing them.
I am beginning to get a bit annoyed at the stupid limitations of the iPhone such as why are wifi scanning tools now banned and why am i not "allowed" to download more than 25 mb filesize over 3G, I have a good data plan. Otoh it is not really a problem but i think i should be able to so perhaps my next phone in a year or two is not iPhone, know knows.
While I do think Apple has gone quite a way down the road towards being a corporate control freak, I think this is a bit exaggerated. They haven't come even close to the kind of manipulative behavior the MS started pulling in the mid-90's. MS basically had the entire IT industry under its thumb for many years. They could kill other products just by making a vapor ware announcement. Good luck trying to get a system with Windows installed from anyone. Good luck trying to find a computer publication that didn't grovel before their feet and lick their boots. Apple has never enjoyed that kind of power with the possible exception of the mp3 player market. They may be a bit restrictive and manipulative with their own products but hardly "evil". I've had owned two Macs but I'm hardly a member of their cult as some see it. There's nothing on their platform that restricts you unless you go there voluntarily. I have migrated all of my data over to one of my Linux machines and lost nothing in the transition. No lock there. That said, I wouldn't tether myself to anything from their iTunes store.
If you want to talk about evil corporations, google some of articles on the stuff Monsanto, Haliburton or many of the Wall Street banks have done for profits. Once a business is in the business of selling stocks, the company is no longer about products or services or anything other than shareholder value. All other activities are merely means to achieve the end of increasing profits or share value. There is no morality once this path is chosen only expedience.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
They decided to tie their hardware and software together, forcing the end user to buy their hardware - at a drastically increased initial investment cost - in order to get their software.
Apple lost their initial lead because the Apple 3 was a complete lemon, not because of their business model!
Microsoft came along and blew that concept out of the water,
Not exactly. MS's big break was getting DOS adopted over CPM/86 for the IBM PC. IBM were slow getting into PCs but they already had a huge locked-in customer base in corporate business systems - customers with nice suits who didn't want to buy computers with psychedelic logos from hippies.
What everybody seems to conveniently forget is that The IBM PC was a closed, proprietary system - yes, the word "open" was bandied around at the time, but it didn't mean then what it means today (I think it basically meant that if you paid IBM lots of money they'd let you build plug-in cards). Yes, it ran MS-DOS and other MS-DOS systems were available, but software compatibility was restricted to command-line programs with character I/O. Any sort of remotely modern user interface, color, animation etc. required access to the IBM BIOS which was very much strictly (c) (r) IBM and only available on a kosher IBM PC.
Then some bright spark found a legal way to reverse-engineer the IBM BIOS and, several lawsuits later, cheap IBM compatible clones appeared. Wouldn't happen today, of course, since you can't clean-room your way around software patents. Of course, the only reason people wanted those clones was that IBM's huge captive corporate market had already turned the proprietary IBM PC, warts and all, into the "industry standard" system with a huge software/hardware base.
Of course, that was the beginning of the end for IBM (for any smaller fry it would have been the end of the end) so a few years later they sold off their last profitable PC line to Lenovo, renounced evil and became the fluffy, lovable champions of Open Source they are today.
Microsoft, of course, still got paid for every copy of MS DOS sold and lived happily ever after. However, this wasn't just because they were a software company who stayed out of the hardware business - they were a software company who managed to license their software to a near-monopoly holder just as the corporate PC market went exponential. Nice work if you can get it - but I don't think its available.
The other thing worth noting is that, at least through the late 80s and early 90s, Apple was using more advanced hardware than the PC world (proper 32-bit 68000 vs. the 086/186/286, then switching to PPC when 68k got old, built-in LAN and network printing) - which was pretty important when their main market was DTP and pro graphics. System 7 on a 80286 would not have been a big seller, I suggest (certainly not on the PC architecture with the 640K limit). You might also bear in mind that while the first Mac portable was a bit of a turkey (although, ISTR, it did introduce the world to active matrix screens) the first Powerbook pretty much defined the modern laptop (with the back-set keyboard and pointing device in front) and one of Apple's important selling points ever since has been that they made damn nice laptops. OK, now they are using essentially the same platform as MS, but if you don't think they've still got the edge in product design (albeit with a more cosmetic than technical bent than in the past) then you should have gone to Specsavers.
The other little historical wrinkle to remember is that Apple have already tried licensing their OS - round about the time they nearly went titsup and had to be rescued by Jobs. Did the licensees make "economy" Macs to vastly expand the customer base? Of course not - they made high-end workstations that just undercut Apple's models and punted them to existing Apple customers (Trying to remember if I ever saw a StarMac advertised outside of a Mac specialist magazine...)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
3. iOS has outsold Android.
How do you come by that? Android has a much larger market share than iOS, already:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Smartphone_share_current.png - they're now the largest mobile OS out there. In a few years, it's relatively safe to assume that gap will be even larger, as Symbian tends towards 0.
There are tons of problems with this. First and foremost, it's iPhone, not iOS. I'll list the others, but I don't want this first point to be lost, because it's really all that *needs* to be said.
But also, Apple reports actual sales numbers, while Android sales numbers are solely based on consultant firms' estimates, and even with the most recent estimates, going with the *highest* numbers by one group, Android OS, last quarter, did not outsell iOS, last quarter. And I also said "has outsold", not "does outsell" (although that is presently true as of the most recent numbers, I was trying to avoid debunking this whole thing. I should have known there are far too many Slashdotters here who think Android has outsold iOS for that to happen). Let's say that this quarter Android finally ships on more devices than iOS does, for the quarter, that won't catch them up over all the quarters in which they did not. Especially since many of those quarters they shipped zero. Apple has just sold over 100 million iPhones, and significantly more iOS devices (I could dig through numbers to come up with a specific amount, but it's probably somewhere between 150 million and 200 million).
So, yeah, iOS has most definitely outsold Android.
One must assume Google gets more than a buck or two for each phone you buy with "with Google" written on the back, like mine does.
And whatever Google gets per Android, one must assume Apple makes significantly more. That's why I said, later in this post, that even if Android were to ever outsell iOS 5 to 1, Apple would still make more money because of iOS than Android does because of Android. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Google doesn't actually make more from iOS devices presently than they do from Android devices.
Presumably, that adds up. Given Android's open nature, it has more companies developing for it
What the shit? iOS has *significantly* greater developer support.
which means Google gets benefits without even trying (as hard) as iOS. So I would say Google is already doing damn nicely out of Android and will continue to do so. In business speak, that's a "win". It's not even too far removed from getting "something for nothing".
The topic wasn't whether Android is a good business move for Google, it's whether Google has "won" (or is "winning" or will "win") over iOS. That's definitely not true now, and may eventually be true, but is definitely not the foregone conclusion so many here seem to think. Like I said above, even were Android to have a 5:1 market share lead over iOS (and that's an absurdly high number, btw), it won't be clear that Google as "won" over Apple. Presently, it's like Google is collecting dimes and Apple is collecting dollars (not a specific ratio, just that it's definitely a significantly skewed ratio. 10:1 in favor of Apple is probably an understatement). If Google ever collects more units (dimes) than Apple (dollars), that's not enough.
Back in 97, when MS bought into Apple, Apple had around 7% of the PC market. In 2010, Apple had about 8% of the PC market - so in the last almost 15 years, they have basically made no inroads at all. Dell, on the other hand, have 15% market share. In fact, the top 5 PC sellers are HP, Dell, Acer, Lennova and Toshiba. All of them doing basically zero research into the OS. This is basically true for mobile phones too, with Nokia, Samsung, LG, Rim and Sony taking the top 5 seller by manufacturer positions, all of them now movi