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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.'"
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'
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.
The 'flamebait' was when Apple decided that '1984' was an instruction manual.
...so shit gets selected for the front page. Sigh...
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
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!!!
I read TFA and have to agree that it rates pretty dang high on my flamebait o' meter. I mean if forced to choose between one or the other Google is scarier by far because even without having anything to do with them Google can get tons of data on me whereas if I don't like Apple (and for the record the only Apple device I own is a Blue&Silver G3 Tower giveaway I got to play with PPC) I can simply not buy from them, end of story.
This is why I never understood those "ZOMG Apple! ZOMG M$!" types, as the answer is simple if you don't like them don't buy their products its JUST that easy. Hell never before have we had so many choices and if I want a Pad style device (which I don't) then I have tons of choices, same as there are plenty of little shops like System76 that'll be happy to sell me a laptop that has never had a Windows Sticker or WinKey.
So to me this smells like nothing but an article to piss people off and stir up page views, like Nichols on the Linux Troll side or Thurott the WinTroll. in all three cases the point is to stir as much shit per paragraph as possible to crank up the views. The only way to win against this kind of trolling is to quote Wargames: "Not to play".
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.