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Among all the big tech, I think Apple is probably the most resilient. The sort of brand loyalty and image they have, any company would love to have it. It makes

Among all the big tech, I think Apple is probably the most resilient. The sort of brand loyalty and image they have, any company would love to have it. It makes even the less polished products from their stable escape the sort of ire and financial impact that most other companies face. Take the example of maps, it was clearly a way inferior product to the best in market Google Maps, still a lot of users(my physical and social media circle at least) persisted with it. This gives them immense power to grow out products that can become really strong platforms in the future. Also, their ecosystem lock in is really strong. I think in due time it is really going to stifle competition. For example, it would be really interesting to see how the headphone industry adapts to this where incumbent brands like Bose, Sennheiser with their own brand power have seen their market share erode very fast. Apple has already sold 100+ million airpods.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
More than any of the others, Apple at least tries to have values. Not everyone agrees with them. But I challenge anyone to identify a positive value mainstream America would associate with Microsoft, Google or Facebook.
- actuator 6y ago
  Have a look at some of these[1]. Some of them are vacuous, but I would definitely not call a lot of them positive values mainstream America would associate with. At the end of the day they are a corporation whose job is to make profit not possibly die by being idealistic. I would even argue that the privacy thing, while commendable is a selling point more than an ideal they hold dear. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > a selling point more than an ideal they hold dear I agree. Note that I didn’t mention privacy. We both understood that implicitly. That’s partly marketing. But it’s underwritten by some truth, if not a comprehensive truth. Values, in my view, are meaningful if strived for. They don’t need to be perfectly attained to be valid. Apple has made tradeoffs and incurred costs to strive towards protecting privacy, and it’s been consistent in that aim over its history. Even to this imperfect standard, I struggle to come up with analogs for the others.
    - actuator 6y ago
      I think that's a luxury Apple can afford though and an outcome of their approach to devices. Take the example of Maps, for anyone to create a good maps experience they need a lot of money, A $1000 phone with about $200-300 actual component costs has enough margin for other things, even software. So the price is kind of included in the phone. Even if we just give $10 of this to Maps as it is a core experience, that is $2-3 billion per year. For other companies trying to compete, it is either ads or subscription. So even if you charge $20 per year, you need 100 million paying users. Apple also incurs the cost of running it but it gets hidden the price of the phone, others don't have this luxury. Though, I think certainly a company like Samsung which has significant device revenue can try this approach. Also, in case of ideals if I have to give an example of a company that tries to uphold one ideal very well would be, Google's efforts to improve diversity. https://diversity.google https://diversity.google
      - scarface74 6y ago
        Or you know, other phone manufacturers could make a product that users were actually willing to pay a premium cut.
- SahAssar 6y ago
  I think a lot of us view that as merely marketing. I don't think apple's values are any more concrete or "real" than the other companies you mentioned.
  - jeremymcanally 6y ago
    I honestly didn’t either until I worked there. It’s actually for real. They take their values and culture really seriously, which was refreshing and very cool.
  - baddox 6y ago
    How do you distinguish between "mentioning your values in your marketing" and "your values are merely marketing"? Apple's stated value of customer privacy is pretty difficult to explain as "merely marketing." They clearly put a lot of work into it and in some cases even accept the product feature limitations that come with a privacy-first approach.
    - mickael-kerjean 6y ago
      A "privacy-first company" wouldn't remove the VPN apps from the Chinese apple store, leaving their users with a device even Orwell didn't foresee.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        Should they not follow the laws of the country? Wasn’t it just found in the large ElasticSearch hack that a number of no-logging VPN providers were in fact logging?
  - macintux 6y ago
    Their commitment to accessibility certainly is much deeper than just marketing, and I’m very skeptical that the resources they invest in it are repaid in full.
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  Microsoft cares deeply about backwards compatibility, providing platform stability to large enterprises, which value such things very highly. IBM is similarly popular with big business for the same reason. Google -- for a while at least -- cared deeply about web user experience and performance. The Google start page ushered in an era of minimalist UIs that load fast and don't bombard the user with fifty irrelevant things. They came up with the trick to send more than the 4 initial packets after the TCP connect so that they could send the entire front-page content in the minimum feasible number of round trips. They're still working on protocols like HTTP/3 and QUIC with similar goals. Facebook... umm... let met think... err... I got nothing.
  - hpen 6y ago
    Yes but look at google now. Full of ads
    - fomine3 6y ago
      Google itself is still far from "Full of ads". Where do you see?
      - hpen 6y ago
        Really depends on the search. But looking for any type of product you get more ads then organic quality results
      - shurane 6y ago
        I think for some search terms, SEO and AMP support make a difference on how high your website ranks against other search results. I think it encourages a certain kind of website (referral links, modest length article with buzzwords, lists with not a lot of depth). These aren't advertisements, but I think they feel a lot like an advertisement in terms of what Google encourages others to post on their website.
        hpen 6y ago
        No I'm talking about google results that explicitly say "Ad"
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Facebook: free place for baby pictures
- scarface74 6y ago
  I am definitely an Apple fan - I have an iPhone, iPad, Watch, Pencil, AppleTV, AirPods Pro and a work MacBook. But, Apple does a lot of things that are not consumer friendly. - 5GB of free iCloud storage in 2020. I can imagine the countless number of people who have lost photos that weren’t backed up because they didn’t upgrade their iCloud storage plan. 50Gb should be the minimum when you buy a new phone. - subscription apps not at least being able to say something vague like “go to our website to create an account”. - not being able to change the default mail, browser, calendar, maps, music app. Some of that will be correctly in iOS 14. Apple’s pro-privacy stance in merely a strategy credit. That’s not their business model. Just like FB can say with a straight face that they won’t put data on servers in non democratic countries - they aren’t allowed there anyway. Cook also kissed Trump’s golden ring and let him tell lies about Apple’s US manufacturing plans during a photo op.
jiggawatts 6y ago
> any company would love to have it. But few companies would love to do what it takes to get it. Things like protecting customer privacy and taking security seriously. I once saw a 1 hour presentation on the cryptography design of the iPhone compared to an Android phone. The IOS design used layers of fine-grained encryption and was obviously carefully thought out to protect the consumer from: device theft, misbehaving apps, illegal searches by law enforcement, and even nation-state levels of spying. The Android phone had a feature that basically said "Encrypted: Yes". That's the difference. I see that difference everywhere, with every organisation. The right attitude gets rabidly loyal customers, the wrong attitude relegates you to the low-cost section of the store.
- kd913 6y ago
  I can agree they have the perception of protecting privacy and taking security seriously. Then I see issues like this. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/29/macos-high-sierra-bug-apple-mac-unlock-blank-password-security-flaw https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/29/macos-hig... I see major privacy design violations like this. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/gpqzju/apple_is_tracking_all_executables_the_first_time/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/gpqzju/apple_is_tr... That privacy violation is ridiculously terrible design which leads me to believe it's mostly marketing gimicks over business priorities.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- what_ever 6y ago
  > I once saw a 1 hour presentation on the cryptography design of the iPhone compared to an Android phone. The IOS design used layers of fine-grained encryption and was obviously carefully thought out to protect the consumer from: device theft, misbehaving apps, illegal searches by law enforcement, and even nation-state levels of spying. When was this? Do you have a link? Was this like the usual grandiose presentations that Apple usually does? Cause I don't think this how it is for last few years. Disc: Google but nowhere close to Android other than using an Android phone.
shmerl 6y ago
It's also one of the most toxic and unhealthy for the industry. As you pointed out, they are proponents of extreme lock-in and anti-competitive behavior. And it's not good when such toxic company also has such pools of money. They can do too much damage.
- actuator 6y ago
  I am not sure of what can be done though in hardware at least. Software, certainly there can be regulation to keep the playing field open so companies like Spotify can survive on their own merit. Hardware, maybe by enforcing APIs to be accessible to all hardware manufacturers. But at the end of the day, if they build a new successful product either inhouse/acquisition, should it be stopped just because they have money/brand loyalty. I don't agree with that.
  - shmerl 6y ago
    They did a number lock-in driven things that clearly have global damaging effect. Like they refused to support Vulkan, they were the main force behind sabotaging using SPIR-V for WebGPU, they also were quite harmful for DASH and a number of other Web related standardization efforts, just because they wanted to cement their lock-in control. Same applies to their ban on competing browsers in their application store which should have been simply forbidden by anti-trust a long time ago. When a company so consistently behaves in such nasty manner, I'd say they don't deserve any respect, let alone loyalty.
    - actuator 6y ago
      Ah, they certainly don't have my loyalty, or any company for that matter. I try to diversify the devices/services I use so that one company doesn't have power over my daily life and I can switch over easily if I want.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    You know Spotify also charges the music industry the same 30% to be on their platform that Apple charges? Can I pay a $99 one time fee and bypass Spotify’s 30% and get my share of all of Spotify’s users subscription fee? Like Spotify does with respect to Apple?
deleted 6y ago
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prewett 6y ago
I use Apple Maps for turn-by-turn navigation because Google Maps confirms the need to turn at exactly the moment I already need to be turning, which is not helpful, especially on the highway where "next exit" is a little ambiguous (to me, anyway; I think "next" is the one after "this" exit). Apple Maps confirms the need to turn some 500 ft ahead of any turn. No need to ask myself "have I gone 1.2 miles yet?". It was even worse driving in the UK. Google Maps told me "at the roundabout take the 3rd exit on St. George St.". Well, does the driveway-looking exit, or the store entrance count as #1 or do I ignore that one? Also, their street names may be precisely correct, but streets on the roundabout are not labelled by their names, but by the city/town that the road goes to next. Apple Maps, by contrast says "exit the roundabout at the 3rd exit going towards Canterbury" (or something like that). I can't remember if they said the exit number or not, but all you had to do was confirm that the exit with the sign saying "Canterbury" was more or less the 3rd exit and good to go. Then there is the problem where I'm not using navigation and looking for a street name. Google Maps used to label major streets, but now they do nothing of the sort. You might get the major highway if you're lucky, and there will be a minor street with a label somewhere, but the major street off the freeway exit? You can't find the name until you zoom in until the street is the only thing visible, and then I guess Google Maps decides that they might as well display that useless street name, since there's nothing else that can be displayed. Mind you, Apple Maps is only marginally better for that, but still. Google Maps is better for finding things, but I fired it for navigation.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

More than any of the others, Apple at least tries to have values. Not everyone agrees with them. But I challenge anyone to identify a positive value mainstream America would associate with Microsoft, Google or Facebook.

actuator 6y ago
Have a look at some of these[1]. Some of them are vacuous, but I would definitely not call a lot of them positive values mainstream America would associate with. At the end of the day they are a corporation whose job is to make profit not possibly die by being idealistic. I would even argue that the privacy thing, while commendable is a selling point more than an ideal they hold dear. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > a selling point more than an ideal they hold dear I agree. Note that I didn’t mention privacy. We both understood that implicitly. That’s partly marketing. But it’s underwritten by some truth, if not a comprehensive truth. Values, in my view, are meaningful if strived for. They don’t need to be perfectly attained to be valid. Apple has made tradeoffs and incurred costs to strive towards protecting privacy, and it’s been consistent in that aim over its history. Even to this imperfect standard, I struggle to come up with analogs for the others.
  - actuator 6y ago
    I think that's a luxury Apple can afford though and an outcome of their approach to devices. Take the example of Maps, for anyone to create a good maps experience they need a lot of money, A $1000 phone with about $200-300 actual component costs has enough margin for other things, even software. So the price is kind of included in the phone. Even if we just give $10 of this to Maps as it is a core experience, that is $2-3 billion per year. For other companies trying to compete, it is either ads or subscription. So even if you charge $20 per year, you need 100 million paying users. Apple also incurs the cost of running it but it gets hidden the price of the phone, others don't have this luxury. Though, I think certainly a company like Samsung which has significant device revenue can try this approach. Also, in case of ideals if I have to give an example of a company that tries to uphold one ideal very well would be, Google's efforts to improve diversity. https://diversity.google https://diversity.google
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Or you know, other phone manufacturers could make a product that users were actually willing to pay a premium cut.
SahAssar 6y ago
I think a lot of us view that as merely marketing. I don't think apple's values are any more concrete or "real" than the other companies you mentioned.
- jeremymcanally 6y ago
  I honestly didn’t either until I worked there. It’s actually for real. They take their values and culture really seriously, which was refreshing and very cool.
- baddox 6y ago
  How do you distinguish between "mentioning your values in your marketing" and "your values are merely marketing"? Apple's stated value of customer privacy is pretty difficult to explain as "merely marketing." They clearly put a lot of work into it and in some cases even accept the product feature limitations that come with a privacy-first approach.
  - mickael-kerjean 6y ago
    A "privacy-first company" wouldn't remove the VPN apps from the Chinese apple store, leaving their users with a device even Orwell didn't foresee.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Should they not follow the laws of the country? Wasn’t it just found in the large ElasticSearch hack that a number of no-logging VPN providers were in fact logging?
- macintux 6y ago
  Their commitment to accessibility certainly is much deeper than just marketing, and I’m very skeptical that the resources they invest in it are repaid in full.
jiggawatts 6y ago
Microsoft cares deeply about backwards compatibility, providing platform stability to large enterprises, which value such things very highly. IBM is similarly popular with big business for the same reason. Google -- for a while at least -- cared deeply about web user experience and performance. The Google start page ushered in an era of minimalist UIs that load fast and don't bombard the user with fifty irrelevant things. They came up with the trick to send more than the 4 initial packets after the TCP connect so that they could send the entire front-page content in the minimum feasible number of round trips. They're still working on protocols like HTTP/3 and QUIC with similar goals. Facebook... umm... let met think... err... I got nothing.
- hpen 6y ago
  Yes but look at google now. Full of ads
  - fomine3 6y ago
    Google itself is still far from "Full of ads". Where do you see?
    - hpen 6y ago
      Really depends on the search. But looking for any type of product you get more ads then organic quality results
    - shurane 6y ago
      I think for some search terms, SEO and AMP support make a difference on how high your website ranks against other search results. I think it encourages a certain kind of website (referral links, modest length article with buzzwords, lists with not a lot of depth). These aren't advertisements, but I think they feel a lot like an advertisement in terms of what Google encourages others to post on their website.
      - hpen 6y ago
        No I'm talking about google results that explicitly say "Ad"
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Facebook: free place for baby pictures
scarface74 6y ago
I am definitely an Apple fan - I have an iPhone, iPad, Watch, Pencil, AppleTV, AirPods Pro and a work MacBook. But, Apple does a lot of things that are not consumer friendly. - 5GB of free iCloud storage in 2020. I can imagine the countless number of people who have lost photos that weren’t backed up because they didn’t upgrade their iCloud storage plan. 50Gb should be the minimum when you buy a new phone. - subscription apps not at least being able to say something vague like “go to our website to create an account”. - not being able to change the default mail, browser, calendar, maps, music app. Some of that will be correctly in iOS 14. Apple’s pro-privacy stance in merely a strategy credit. That’s not their business model. Just like FB can say with a straight face that they won’t put data on servers in non democratic countries - they aren’t allowed there anyway. Cook also kissed Trump’s golden ring and let him tell lies about Apple’s US manufacturing plans during a photo op.

jiggawatts 6y ago

> any company would love to have it. But few companies would love to do what it takes to get it. Things like protecting customer privacy and taking security seriously. I once saw a 1 hour presentation on the cryptography design of the iPhone compared to an Android phone. The IOS design used layers of fine-grained encryption and was obviously carefully thought out to protect the consumer from: device theft, misbehaving apps, illegal searches by law enforcement, and even nation-state levels of spying. The Android phone had a feature that basically said "Encrypted: Yes". That's the difference. I see that difference everywhere, with every organisation. The right attitude gets rabidly loyal customers, the wrong attitude relegates you to the low-cost section of the store.

kd913 6y ago
I can agree they have the perception of protecting privacy and taking security seriously. Then I see issues like this. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/29/macos-high-sierra-bug-apple-mac-unlock-blank-password-security-flaw https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/29/macos-hig... I see major privacy design violations like this. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/gpqzju/apple_is_tracking_all_executables_the_first_time/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/gpqzju/apple_is_tr... That privacy violation is ridiculously terrible design which leads me to believe it's mostly marketing gimicks over business priorities.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
what_ever 6y ago
> I once saw a 1 hour presentation on the cryptography design of the iPhone compared to an Android phone. The IOS design used layers of fine-grained encryption and was obviously carefully thought out to protect the consumer from: device theft, misbehaving apps, illegal searches by law enforcement, and even nation-state levels of spying. When was this? Do you have a link? Was this like the usual grandiose presentations that Apple usually does? Cause I don't think this how it is for last few years. Disc: Google but nowhere close to Android other than using an Android phone.

shmerl 6y ago

It's also one of the most toxic and unhealthy for the industry. As you pointed out, they are proponents of extreme lock-in and anti-competitive behavior. And it's not good when such toxic company also has such pools of money. They can do too much damage.

actuator 6y ago
I am not sure of what can be done though in hardware at least. Software, certainly there can be regulation to keep the playing field open so companies like Spotify can survive on their own merit. Hardware, maybe by enforcing APIs to be accessible to all hardware manufacturers. But at the end of the day, if they build a new successful product either inhouse/acquisition, should it be stopped just because they have money/brand loyalty. I don't agree with that.
- shmerl 6y ago
  They did a number lock-in driven things that clearly have global damaging effect. Like they refused to support Vulkan, they were the main force behind sabotaging using SPIR-V for WebGPU, they also were quite harmful for DASH and a number of other Web related standardization efforts, just because they wanted to cement their lock-in control. Same applies to their ban on competing browsers in their application store which should have been simply forbidden by anti-trust a long time ago. When a company so consistently behaves in such nasty manner, I'd say they don't deserve any respect, let alone loyalty.
  - actuator 6y ago
    Ah, they certainly don't have my loyalty, or any company for that matter. I try to diversify the devices/services I use so that one company doesn't have power over my daily life and I can switch over easily if I want.
- scarface74 6y ago
  You know Spotify also charges the music industry the same 30% to be on their platform that Apple charges? Can I pay a $99 one time fee and bypass Spotify’s 30% and get my share of all of Spotify’s users subscription fee? Like Spotify does with respect to Apple?

deleted 6y ago

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deleted 6y ago

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prewett 6y ago

I use Apple Maps for turn-by-turn navigation because Google Maps confirms the need to turn at exactly the moment I already need to be turning, which is not helpful, especially on the highway where "next exit" is a little ambiguous (to me, anyway; I think "next" is the one after "this" exit). Apple Maps confirms the need to turn some 500 ft ahead of any turn. No need to ask myself "have I gone 1.2 miles yet?". It was even worse driving in the UK. Google Maps told me "at the roundabout take the 3rd exit on St. George St.". Well, does the driveway-looking exit, or the store entrance count as #1 or do I ignore that one? Also, their street names may be precisely correct, but streets on the roundabout are not labelled by their names, but by the city/town that the road goes to next. Apple Maps, by contrast says "exit the roundabout at the 3rd exit going towards Canterbury" (or something like that). I can't remember if they said the exit number or not, but all you had to do was confirm that the exit with the sign saying "Canterbury" was more or less the 3rd exit and good to go. Then there is the problem where I'm not using navigation and looking for a street name. Google Maps used to label major streets, but now they do nothing of the sort. You might get the major highway if you're lucky, and there will be a minor street with a label somewhere, but the major street off the freeway exit? You can't find the name until you zoom in until the street is the only thing visible, and then I guess Google Maps decides that they might as well display that useless street name, since there's nothing else that can be displayed. Mind you, Apple Maps is only marginally better for that, but still. Google Maps is better for finding things, but I fired it for navigation.