Slashdot Asks: What Do People Misunderstand or Underappreciate About Apple? (fastcompany.com)

In an interview with Fast Company, Apple CEO Tim Cook says people who have not used his company's products miss "how different Apple is versus other technology companies." A person who is just looking at the company's revenues and profits, says Cook, might think that Apple "is good at making money." But he says "that's not who we are. In Cook's view, Apple is: We're a group of people who are trying to change the world for the better, that's who we are. For us, technology is a background thing.

We don't want people to have to focus on bits and bytes and feeds and speeds. We don't want people to have to go to multiple [systems] or live with a device that's not integrated. We do the hardware and the software, and some of the key services as well, to provide a whole system. We do that in such a way that we infuse humanity into it. We take our values very seriously, and we want to make sure all of our products reflect those values. There are things like making sure that we're running our [U.S.] operations on 100% renewable energy, because we don't want to leave the earth worse than we found it. We make sure that we treat well all the people who are in our supply chain. We have incredible diversity, not as good as we want, but great diversity, and it's that diversity that yields products like this. What do you think?

Comments

It's a UNIX & FOSS

[0100010001010011]

Clang, LLVM, WebKit, launchd, Grand Central Dispatch. CUPS web interface went from "13 year old with HTML" to "This is usable" after Apple hired the developer.

I left Apple product a while ago. But I can say for almost certain that I wouldn't have the career I have now or a household running FreeBSD/Linux if it wasn't for OS X' underpinnings.

Ironically I've actually used some of my PPC knowledge at work because a lot of embedded automotive controllers are based on the e200 cores.

It's a crock

[Tepar]

Case in point: I was just given an iPad (company anniversary gift). It's my first Apple device. After a month of trying to get it to work for me, I'm probably going to have to turn it into a streaming/gaming device for my kids. Why?

Apple's trust model is broken. On iOS, apps are assumed to be not trustworthy, so they put them in a sandbox. This means one app can't access another app's local files. On the other hand, for some reason, the cloud is assumed to be trustworthy. If I use iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, or any other cloud provider, I can open and save files to any cloud folder.

I've spent a couple years de-cloudifying myself because as we all know, the cloud is just somebody else's computer. According to my philosophy, therefore, the cloud is inherently untrustworthy, and I don't want my data on somebody else's computer. This is why my devices have local storage: to hold my data. If I want to share it, I use Syncthing (https://syncthing.net) and I can then access it on the local storage of one of my other devices. I'm therefore not sharing todos, notes, files, or anything else I choose not to share with Apple, Google, Amazon, or anybody else who may decide at some point to mine my data.

On Android, I have the choice to configure my device this way. On my iPad, I do not. It is, essentially, then, not my device. It's Apple's. It's bound to their trust model, which says Apple is trustworthy (their apps can access the new "On my iPad" file selector), but 3rd party apps are not (even sync apps like Resilio Sync or Syncthing). Their trust model, therefore, makes the device useless to me.

Sure, what Tim Cook says has some truth to it: if I were willing to share all my stuff on other people's computers, I would be able to use the iPad without thinking about "bits and bytes and feeds and speeds." But their "whole system" means sharing personal life data to an unprecedented extent with Apple. That's not bringing humanity to computing. That's giving over our humanity to be stored by one or more corporations. It's a classic example of forging an easy path for Lemmings to go--where? And that's the problem. We don't know if we're heading for the safe exit or dropping off the cliff.

Apple is really

[oldgraybeard]

A walled garden that exhibits many of the characteristics of a cult. In fact smartphones themselves almost seem like an addiction. So one might view Apple as a drug dealer ;)

Don't get me wrong, I do have 2 macs and a Developer ID and do iOS development work for In-House deployment. In addition to the other development work i do.

But from top to bottom, it is all about regulation (by Apple) and control (by Apple). Those who have not been through the development process from beginning to end. Have no idea how many hoops you need to jump through. I think one spends almost as much time getting the app deployed. As is spent developing it. And things are changing all the time. Such that even the individuals at Apple give bad advise about how to go about things. But I will also say, this they do try to help ;)

I will also say this, while the learning curve was very steep. Now that I know my way around quite well. The 2+ years of on the side self education was worth it.

Just my 2 cents ;)

personal experience

[Tom]

Flamebait question, but I'll bite:

When I switched to Apple about 10 years ago, I thought I'd dual-boot Linux and/or Windows on it, and check out OS X out of curiosity. That I'm still buying their stuff is as good an evidence as I have that they are doing something right, at least as far as my experience is concerned.

It turned out that I never installed Linux, and the Bootcamp Windows install was used mostly for games, and then less and less, and the most recent iMac I bought doesn't even have one anymore.

So what do they do right? Stuff simply works. I've spent countless hours on my previous Linux machines (and Windows, DOS, etc. before that) configuring things just the right way, installing that tool and this to get things to work the way I need them - and still something always failed. The first thing I noticed on my first Mac was that drag & drop actually worked! At that time, on Windows, it was a gamble and half the time it did some shit you didn't want, while the other half of the time it simply didn't work at all.

The same is true for the iPhone. I bought the first one, and it was the first smartphone I owned. Had owned various PDAs and mobile phones before, but the iPhone was the first smartphone that got things right and simply worked.

Tim is right that Apple considers technology to be simply the tool that enables them to do the actual thing that needs to be done. For a nerd, that is at first difficult to get, but more normal people get it immediately. They don't buy a phone for the CPU or the graphics performance or the memory size. They buy it to make calls, take pictures, check their calendar (and today, to use whatever app is hip this week).

From my personal experience, what people misunderstand about Apple is that they use technology the way regular people use it. An airplane is something that gets you from A to B. Only airplane nerds care about wing span, horse powers, control schemes and other details. Most people want to get places and preferably not die, and all the tech is just there to serve that purpose. Apple thinks like that. In all their products and designs, you always see that they are trying to reduce, to take away, anything that is not necessary for the primary task.

Here is a huge misunderstanding about Apple

[gosand]

They're easy to use.

I have never ever found an Apple product easy to use. My brother convinced my parents to ditch their Win7 machine for a Mac. I warned them against it, saying I couldn't help them with it if they did. They got it anyway. And it's been a disaster. I get all kinds of questions that I have no idea how to answer because I don't live in that universe. I am sure a Mac person would be able to easily help them, but they got it under the pretense that it was so easy to use that you didn't need any support for it. Now it could be that it is just my brother's misguided advice, because he's a dumbass. He can't help them either, but pretends like he can.

I got my daughter an ipod a few years ago, and she used it for facetiming her friends who had iphones, as well as music. It was fine, but to get music on it was a nightmare, every single time I put more on there for her. I never ever got it to work smoothly. Since she got her own phone (android) it's simple for her to get music.

I seriously don't understand how people think their products are easy to use.
But I run linux, so i know I am likely the odd one out.