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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?
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?
This whole article is clickbait trolling, getting the fanboys out to bloviate about how the Apple ecosystem is more than the sum of it's parts, and the haters to then reply about how that is comical horseshit, proven by single anecdote; etc.
Welcome to the new Slashdot.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I am thinking it must be a slow news day and the article's title is a big fat troll to start an Apple flame-war.
From all outward appearances they are pretty much exactly the same as any of their competitors. Worse in some ways. They appear to make their products in other countries and import the products into the USA. They appear to evade paying taxes whenever possible. They try to force customers who have paid for an imported hardware product to only buy software from their store.
Which part am I mistaken about?
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.
This pretty concisely sums up everything that is wrong with the tech industry: this sort of smarmy hubris is why everybody else wants to repeatedly smack Teh Tech Bros with a length of hose.
People don't appreciate that:
1. It's much harder to create good industrial design than it is to copy it. When the Macbook Air was released, it was breathtaking. So were the first few iterations of the iPad and the iPhone. After the first big wins, it gets much harder to play the "smaller, faster, more storage and sleeker" game.
2. Technology matures. Many people rant that Apple's innovation around the iPhone and iPad has slowed. Of course it has, because all of the obvious things have been done over the last decade. It's like automobile technology -- once manufacturers figured out where all the basic components needed to go, they have cheerfully chugged along for decades with gradual improvement.
3. If you're the market leader, there is no value in going down-market. Apple does an outstanding job of maintaining margins without resorting to selling a bewildering array of phones at all price points in a desperate attempt to gain market share. Nobody wants a Samsung J3 or an LG K4. They're cheap pieces of junk that you only buy if you can't afford a decent phone.
4. Maintaining and developing iOS is a massive undertaking that Apple's competitors (with the exception of Google) don't have to undertake. We've seen Samsung's attempt at a third-party OS, and it was dismal.
We don't want people to have to go to multiple [systems] or live with a device that's not integrated
When your device doesn't integrate with anything else then your device sucks. There is a standard called USB why don't you use it? Apple is an extremely annoying company with the "not invented here" mentality. If I have to bring a different cable for every iDevice everywhere I go I will not buy your product.
might think that Apple "is good at making money." But he says "that's not who we are
It's easy to make money when you don't pay any taxes.
Apple makes a lot of money by removing freedom. People are not free to fix their devices. People are not free to use any platform to develop for iOS. People are not free to install apps from anywhere. People are not free to access a filesystem directly on iOS. People are not free to find a complete replacement for iTunes, you will always have to come back to it for some purpose. Never has any company been able to apply so much manipulation to users of their products. On top of that, they are doing everything they can to rob people of income through taxes which is something societies desperately need. It makes me sick to tell you the truth.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
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