Tim Cook Says Apple's Customers Are Not Its Product, Unlike Facebook (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an interview with MSNBC and Recode on Wednesday that Silicon Valley, and notably Facebook, should be far more careful with its customers' data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica disclosures. "I think the best regulation is no regulation, is self-regulation," he said, according to Recode. "However, I think we're beyond that here." Cook reiterated points that he and former CEO Steve Jobs made previously, that Apple's business model -- unlike Google, Facebook, and many other tech companies -- is predicated on selling physical products rather than capturing data about customers. "We've never believed that these detailed profiles of people that have incredibly deep personal information that is patched together from several sources should exist," he said, according to The Wall Street Journal. "The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer -- if our customer was our product," he added. "We've elected not to do that."

Comments

Talking about products, where's a full size tower?

[sandbagger]

Just wondering.

Re:Not their products

[lucm]

I had lunch yesterday with one of those poor souls who has a throttled "old" iPhone (because of the battery). He was looking at other people at the table, who had Google Pixels or Samsung S8s, and it was like a dog salivating in front of a juicy steak he knows he won't get.

Shitty screen, awful battery, terrible performance, bad camera, unreliable maps, no storage expansion... Someone asked him: "why are you still using an iPhone", and he replied "because of the Apple ecosystem". But you could see how he was jealous of the smooth screens and blazing fast performance on the devices other people had. We had a good laugh when he brought up the revolutionary face unlock.

What a bunch of sad fucks.