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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 thought Google was the next Evil Empire!
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'
Or perhaps this one.
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.
They have been for a long time, along with many others who would love to get to their position in the market. Apple chases profit like all other companies, they just oft have a better UI. The first thing Jobs did when he came back to Apple was axe all the Mac-clones that were being built. The second thing they did was try their best to put all non-Apple Macintosh repair shops out of business, and then open the Apple Stores once they'd done so. They haven't changed business models, they just now have a dominant market position to leverage. Frankly I think they learned a lot of their current tactics from MS, but they've never had everybody's best interests at heart, any more than MS or anyone else did.
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.
...so shit gets selected for the front page. Sigh...
The Apple logo is just the invitation to this sort of techno-moralism. For natural born atheists and non-Christians, the half-eaten apple is a representation of the Forbidden Fruit. So, yes, Apple is "evil" in that "iconic" sense. You just have to have an iPhone but all you can afford is an Android? Confess your sin and say your prayers, son.
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!!!
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....
Interestingly Eco's article was from 1994. And it was "Macintosh users vs MS-DOS users", not so much "Apple the company vs IBM".
This is a link to an English translation of Eco's article
Things were a little different back then, than I see it today. Today, definitely "Apple the company" is defining a selling their route to salvation as a full multi-media company. This did not describe Apple in 1994, which was to be honest struggling under the "Macintosh" brand, I don't think anyone in their wildest dreams would have imagined Apple ever become so broad back then. And today the "PC-clone" users (this is the obvious descendant from the "MS-DOS" religion) includes a multitude of religions that battle each other quite strongly (e.g. Linux vs Windows).
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.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Hi, everyone. Reading articles about Apple's Post-PC outlook (such as this one), it's interesting to think about where Apple is headed, as it provides a good context for their recent announcements.
First, it should be clear that Apple wants to extend their walled-garden approach to their entire line of products. This would allow them to provide a consistent user interface and good interoperability (something they'll continue to tout to sell consumers on their Post-PC products). It will also allow Apple to translate success in one area (e.g., strong iPad sales) into other markets (e.g., stronger Mac sales with Lion's interface echoing the iPad's). Finally, it will allow Apple to monetize other services (as they already have with 3rd party application and subscription sales).
At the iPad 2 announcement, Jobs gleefully boasted that Apple has the largest number of registered user accounts with credit cards of any online vendor, and Apple's certainly interested in billing those accounts as much as possible.
One obvious area where Apple could try to pull ahead is in data storage and synchronization. Apple is actually worse at this right now than many other vendors (e.g., using iTunes to get a Word document onto an iPad), as they've avoided implementing simple, consumer-centric solutions (e.g., WiFi syncing to iPhones, iPods, and iPads from Macs/PCs) so they could build the infrastructure necessary to implement an Apple-centric approach. The $1 billion data center they're building in North Carolina is obviously for something bigger than just music streaming.
It's likely that Apple will try to pull more customers into Ping and MobileMe. Whereas Google has to implement roundabout connectors to allow users to synchronize their calendars and office documents, Apple actually controls the OS and APIs used on Macs, iPhones, and iPads. Apple could simply force all applications, including 3rd party applications on the iPad and iPhone, to use Apple's cloud data store by changing the SDKs and development agreements for their iOS devices.
In iOS and in Mac OS 10.7 Lion, a multitasking application is supposed to gracefully "suspend" when a user switches to another application. If the application isn't used for a while, iOS/Lion actually can save its state and reallocate its resources for other applications to use. In Lion, this has even lead Apple to remove the open application indicator lights from the dock. In Apple's new computing paradigm, applications merely have a "state," they're never "closed" or "opened."
Now, imagine Apple extending this paradigm to applications running across devices. An end user could open a document for editing in Pages on her office Mac, then, without doing anything, could leave work, open Pages on her iPad on the train home, continue editing the same document, and so on. If data and application states are synchronized through the cloud, users don't have to worry about file versioning, backup, etc. The possibilities become even greater when multiple applications and file sharing with multiple users are involved.
Apple is in the best position to make this sort of computing paradigm possible, since they already have such large markeshare across multiple devices.
Having wireless carriers' cooperation in providing lots of cheap bandwidth to customers will be critical in enabling their vision. In this regard, Apple has recently moved from being at the mercy of a single carrier (AT&T) to having leverage over two carriers (AT&T and Verizon). The WiFi hotspot feature that Apple has just added to the
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.
they're not very open source and they fundamentally don't care.
You mean like this, or are you talking about something else?
If they did care they would clutter their designs with backwards compatibility hacks. They don't.
You mean like Classic environment in OS X or Rosetta on Intel macs, or are you talking about something else?
If they did care they would keep, perhaps slavishly, to existing standards, They don't.
Existing standards like, say UNIX, POSIX, CSS3, AAC, h.264, or are you talking about something else?
Why are they even discussed on /.?
I always figured it was because they are the world's biggest vendor of standards-compliant open source UNIX environments, and that stuff is considered pretty important around here. Plus they vertically integrate it with a closed source presentation layer that is the envy of the industry, and a media distribution model that is controlled with an iron fist, which gives us LOTS to talk about.
... or are you talking about something else, cuz it's really hard to tell if you are even on the same planet as the rest of us.
First of all, let's lay down our definitions of "evil" here. For me, Microsoft is evil due of *illegal* practices of abusing monopoly status, such as:
1) deals with OEM which includes clauses of avoiding of offering competition products;
2) bribing local politicians and using money for PR companies to curve public opinion about alternatives to Microsoft software;
3) encouraging lock-in in their products, indentionally or unidentionally, trough poor product quality;
4) etc.
Apple maybe is guilty of several things, but those are not coming even close to this definition. Yeah, they always preferred controlled enviroment - therefore it is not legal to buy & use OS X for your home-made Intel, there is no easy way to access iPad/iPhone/IPod Touch from other OSes than Windows or OS X, etc. But still choice is there.
So are they annoying and controlling? Yes. Are they evil? Not even close. I don't use their products - because I can't afford them and because I value my freedom too much. But still they don't lie about it when they sell or advertise it. They don't promise freedom, they promise certain ease of using their products.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
...don't care one little bit about the App Stores being "walled gardens".
They don't care that iPods or Macs do not natively support Ogg Vorbis or FLAC.
They don't care about iTunes not having as many features as some linux open source thing. They don't care about linux, either.
They don't really care about no Flash on iPhone/iPod/iPad. As long as they can watch the latest Maru videos on YouTube, they will continue not to care about no Flash on iPhone/iPod/iPad.
They care that the Mac Pro/MacBook/iMac/iPod/iPad WORKS.
They care about the seamless one click purchase and it's on the harddrive aspect of the iTunes Store.
They care about the seamless no click synching of iPod/iPhone to the computer.
They care about the interface that lets them get on with it. They don't want to hear about Terminal or how much better a CLI is vs. a GUI. Because they DO NOT CARE.
The vast majority of Apple users have never heard of Slashdot, and don't care a fat rat's ass what any of us here think about Apple.
Thank you for your kind attention.
Please carry on with the AppleHate/AppleLove.
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