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One of my coworkers shared an interesting thought with me the other day. Apple is positioning itself as The Privacy Company today, but they've benefited immens
by gen220 6y ago
One of my coworkers shared an interesting thought with me the other day.
Apple is positioning itself as The Privacy Company today, but they've benefited immensely from the attention economy over the last 15 years.
They would not have sold as many millions of iPhones, iPods (heck, even Macbooks) in the last decade, if Instagram & Facebook weren't there to suck people in to their platform (clearly, the same is true for Android). Now that the iDevices are a self-sustaining status symbol with mass adoption and institutionally-ingrained utility outside of social media, Apple no longer needs to trade user privacy to build their moat, and they can pretend that they've been on the user's side all along.
Don't get me wrong, Apple's motions here are very good. But the entire mobile computing industry was bootstrapped with addiction. Facebook and its ilk might have been the perpetrators, but they were not the only beneficiaries.
- Mc_Big_G 6y agoI doubt the iPhone's long-term success was dictated by Facebook et al whoring out user data. There are plenty of useful apps that don't hinge on violating the privacy of users.
- rehitman 6y agoI think there is also another part to it. The smart phone market has so many options for users, and there is a limit to camera improvements they can make. For many people (including me) privacy can be another reason to chose IPhone over Pixel. With so many options differences like this matter.
- prepend 6y agoI think it’s really the only true difference they can have with Android. Google can’t provide privacy that users want as it would bankrupt them. Apple can. Other than that, they can both do the same hardware, software, apps, etc. I’m surprised it took them this long to really start driving it home. I think they were either trying to figure out if monetarily they wanted to start selling data. Or the buying public finally started caring.
- xiphias2 6y agoInstagram was created by 10 people, and it was already good enough at that stage to get hypergrowth. The truth is that all the huge advertising revenue is just a plus for the investors, the apps would have been created anyways, and then network effects take care of the content.
- zepto 6y ago> They would not have sold as many millions of iPhones, iPods (heck, even Macbooks) in the last decade, if Instagram & Facebook weren't there to suck people in to their platform I really don’t see the logic in this. It’s pretty obvious these devices were useful for many things - messaging and the web would have been enough to guarantee growth. I think you have the causality the wrong way round. People only use Facebook so much because the iPhone put it in their pocket rather than on their desk.