That Awkward Moment When 'Apple Mocked Good Hardware and Poor People' (dailydot.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a DailyDot article: Phil Schiller, Apple's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, took the stage in Cupertino, California, earlier this week to explain some of the new features and specs on the new iPad Pro. Between showing off a new display and camera, Schiller also took some digs at Windows and PC users, specifically calling out those users who are on computers more than five years old. Schiller said that 600 million people are using PCs that are over five years old. 'This is really sad,' he said.
C. Custer, reporter for Tech in Asia also didn't like Schiller's remarks. He writes: If Apple's really targeting those 600 million old PC users, it seems to have done a pretty poor job. It's been more than five years since I saw the need to upgrade my primary computer, and nothing about the iPad Pro presentation made me rethink my position at all. But of course, Apple isn't really targeting those people. That was mostly just a cheap shot, a jibe at all of us poor fools who haven't yet seen the light. That's why the audience laughed knowingly, and even applauded. "Using the same machine for five years? How barbaric! Thank god we live in civilized society, where everyone throws their gadgets out and buys new ones every two years."

Comments

herd manipulation to make profit

[sittingnut]

apple (and all non generic hardware pushers) needs consumers to continuously discard their old and buy its newest overpriced products with their much hyped latest features ( however unsubstantial ) in order to make profit.
this can only be achieved by social conditioning. a herd mentality is created where members of the herd feel fulfilled and happy, and be in a satisfactory social status, only when they have the latest.
so of course, they must laugh and mock at those outside the herd, make members of the herd join in laughing and mocking, more publicly the better.

Re:Don't overreact

[drinkypoo]

Huh? Useful idiots are Western leftists. The term was coined in the Soviet Union

Tee hee.

In the Russian language, the equivalent term "useful fools" (ÐоÐÐÐнÑÐ ÐÑfÑÐÐÐ, tr. polezniye duraki) was already in use in 1941. It was mockingly used against Russian "nihilists" who, for Polish agents, were said to be no more than "useful fools and silly enthusiasts".[3]

So close, yet so fail. Nice try, though.

Re: Seven Years...

[david_thornley]

The idea, I think, is to buy things in a way that doesn't cause social harm, such as by using minerals mined by child slave labor in unsafe conditions. I think we can all agree that enslaving children and forcing them to work in mines under conditions that are likely to kill them is undesirable, and as this does happen in some places, we don't want to encourage the slavers by giving them more money.

The big problem I have with it in practice is that there's no good way to see what effects your purchase has. The "socially responsible" purchaser will be told various things about what bad things go into X, which may be true, may be random unfounded rumor, or may be spread by people hostile to those who sell X. It's possible to misinterpret things, such as assuming things are produced by coercion and exploitation when the jobs doing it may be considered good to have by the people doing it. It often comes down to someone getting a bee in their bonnet about one cause and ignoring others, or assuming that, instead of buying that new MacBook Air, you would donate that money to some charitable cause.

I'd like to see things like the mining mentioned above policed by the international community, meaning that I'd have some assurance I wasn't contributing to the child slave trade (nothing's going to be perfect), and could get stuff made by people in generally humane conditions.