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.'"

Comments

An interesting question.

[Anonymous Coward]

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. I think, however, that Apple is making the same mistakes now they made 30 years ago. 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. Microsoft came along and blew that concept out of the water, and now Apple is doing the same thing again with mobile devices and iOS. Then we have Google creating an open source operating system that's totally "untethered" from hardware (I've even seen Android running on iPhones).

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.

Re:An interesting question.

[Gumbercules!!]

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.

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.

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. Presumably, that adds up. Given Android's open nature, it has more companies developing for it, 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".

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 moving to Android (even RIM is now working to allow Android apps to work on Blackberrys).

So I'd say that supports the parent argument pretty well - once again Apple's coupling of OS to hardware will guarantee that the market will move on past them, leaving them an important but none the less niche player, in regards to overall usage statistics. Once again, the market they can largely be credited with creating, will leave them behind. Google will be their new Microsoft. Whatever way you turn it, that's got to hurt at least a little.

Re:It's like being at school

[drinkypoo]

1.
morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked: evil deeds; an evil life.
2.
harmful; injurious: evil laws.
3.
characterized or accompanied by misfortune or suffering; unfortunate; disastrous: to be fallen on evil days.
4.
due to actual or imputed bad conduct or character: an evil reputation.
5.
marked by anger, irritability, irascibility, etc.: He is known for his evil disposition.

Apple conforms to #2 and #4. Steve Jobs conforms to #5.

Apple is Evil as per the dictionary. Thank you, please drive through.

Uhm. Look again.

[Chas]

Google comes from an era where choice is the norm. While not completely open, they make fairly heroic nods in the direction of enabling user choice.

Microsoft's record of enabling user choice is significantly poorer, though there have been exceptions.

Apple never left the "bad old days" of the late 70's and early 80's where vendor lock-in was the norm.

Re:Yes and no

[metamatic]

It depends on what you mean by evil. I've been a Mac user since what feels like forever and I can definitly see that something have changed over the passed few years starting about the same time Apple started to become really popular.

I blame Steve Jobs. He always wanted the Mac to be a closed proprietary appliance, but the Mac wasn't his project at the start, and he was kicked out of Apple before his vision could dominate.

I've been a Mac user for 20+ years, but I absolutely refuse to give my financial support to iOS. It is the absolute antithesis of everything the Mac stands for. Closed, proprietary, non-interoperable, with a cryptic and non-discoverable UI. I want to see it die in a fire.

I still fear that Apple will start to boil the OS X frog. They have code signing and an app store in place. They have a warning dialog if you try to run software downloaded from anywhere else. They're clearly repositioning OS X server versus the regular version in Lion. My fear is that the regular version of Lion (or perhaps the version after it) will have lock-in, and you'll have to buy a $500 pro version with the server stuff in order to get an open Mac. If that happens, I'll shed a tear and jump ship to Linux.