5 ms·

Apple can definitely do wrong, but the companies manoeuvring against them are an order of magnitude worse. I pay Apple and I’m their customer. I’m the product

Apple can definitely do wrong, but the companies manoeuvring against them are an order of magnitude worse. I pay Apple and I’m their customer. I’m the product of almost every other company that is even vaguely related to mobile devices — especially the companies pushing to force Apple to stop protecting their users from their depredations. “It’s unfair we can’t exploit your customers to our own advantage!” seems to be the entirety of the arguments. PS: I stopped buying Epic games years ago because of their generally sleazy behaviour. I just got an iPhone 16 Pro because Apple is the only company I can trust not to abuse AI mercilessly to my detriment. I’m sure that one or more people at Epic are working on using AI to better addict children to loot boxes or whatever, right now.

vortegne 2y ago
What about Apple's behaviour makes you think you're not the product?
- threeseed 2y ago
  Apple makes money from selling products. Google and Meta makes money from selling your profile to advertisers.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Apple makes double money by doing both.
  - mdhb 2y ago
    The idea of who you think Apple are in your head and who they are in practice are two wildly different things. https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-new-ad-product-pushes-closer-google https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-new-ad-product-pushe...
    - jiggawatts 2y ago
      I've never heard of "emarketer.com", and it seems less than 100% reliable as a journalistic source at first glance. I may be missing something, but graphs with three-digit precision out to 2025 (next year!) is made-up-bullshit, not research: https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-looks-boost-app-store-ads-with-ai-powered-buying-tools https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-looks-boost-app-stor... Let's look at actual data, such as Apple's annual report, which is an 80-page document that uses the word advertising only 4 times. Clearly a focus of the company. Sales of "services" in 2023 was $85B of $383B total. This includes the various iCloud subscriptions, Apple TV, Apple Pay, Apple Music, the App Store, etc... and advertising. Your "eMarketer" source thinks Apple's ad revenue was $5B the same year. So... just 6% of services sales, and 1.4% of total sales. Wow, Apple truly has become an ad-tech company at heart! Not at all like Google or Facebook which makes... checks notes... all of their sales revenue from ad-tech, minus a rounding error for some gadgets designed to spy on you to feed the ad machine. (I kid, I kid... no wait, I don't. Google's numbers for 2023 are nearly the reverse of Apple, with only 19.5% of their revenue coming from non-ad-tech sources, of which nearly half is Google Cloud Platform. That's almost a separate business, so ignoring that, the core Google company revenue is 90% advertising. But we all knew that.)
      - mdhb 2y ago
        It’s truly amazing how your reading comprehension and information processing skills seem to change in the face of evidence that doesn’t support your argument. You know full well Apple is in the same surveillance capitalism business and instead you want to talk about 3 digit precision numbers or what percentage of their current revenue is makes up as though it was somehow relevant. How exactly does that help users privacy knowing that the company also happens to have other revenue streams? It’s not even remotely relevant you either engage in the practice or you don’t.
        jiggawatts 2y ago
        You chose to link to that source to back up your arguments. I just read the content. Was I not supposed to? I'm genuinely confused about what point you're trying to make here.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  Other than paying them for hardware that has no discernible advertising revenue for Apple... My personal favourite example is device encryption. Briefly, I worked in the mobile device management (MDM) space when that was a very new thing, and all the major manufacturers had to start adding device encryption to meet enterprise policy requirements. (At the time, all new Windows laptops used BitLocker.) So the vendors did that. They added encryption to their devices. The Android spec sheet added a line: Encryption: Yes Apple had a tech day talk where the guy in charge of device encryption dev team talked for an hour about the four layers of encryption on an iPhone. How it decrypts the bare minimum when booting, and keeps itself in a partially-decrypted mode while locked. How there's a bunch of fine-grained keys so that app-specific data can't leak out. So on, and so forth. The aim was to prevent state-sponsored groups pulling apart locked-but-powered-on phones and extracting plain text secrets directly from the flash, cache memory, or whatever. They had thought of everything. It was as good as encryption could be made without compromising on functionality. I dabble in the Enterprise PKI space also, and the only time I had seen a design this thorough was the internal Ethernet network of the Boeing 787 plane[1]. Afterwards I paid more attention every time there was some fight between a government agency like the FBI and Apple. Each and every time, Apple chose the side of their customers, locking things down further with secure enclaves, anti-hammering protections, in-house security-critical silicon design, and more. As a reminder, Google's level of encryption is simply "yes". A checkbox tick to meet a requirement, that's all. They really, really don't care about your data security, and it shows in the way they act in practice. I see similar customer-centric design elements in Apple AirTags. I read the whitepaper on the cryptographic algorithms they used. These very cleverly provide the maximum possible functionality with the minimum possible user data exposure. It's private and useful at the same time. Google has never published anything of that sort, ever. I'm pretty sure of it. If you disagree, please link to a whitepaper outlining privacy-guaranteeing technology that they developed and have included in a product that they sell. Or Epic. Or Facebook. or anyone else. [1] Yeah, yeah, Boeing is a bad company with bad leadership, but their engineers know their stuff.
  - dns_snek 2y ago
    > Each and every time, Apple chose the side of their customers, locking things down further with secure enclaves, anti-hammering protections, in-house security-critical silicon design, and more. With Apple, you're allowed to have privacy unless, of course, you're trying to promote democracy in Russia [1], organize anti-government protests in China [2], or otherwise communicate privately without government's approval [3]. Of course, all of that security is a theater as far as government agencies are concerned because Cellebrite, an US-allied firm, can unlock the devices a few months after each iOS release [4] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-navalny-app-election.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-naval... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65830185 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65830185 [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/19/apple-whatsapp-threads-china/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/19/apple-w... [4] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24833832-cellebrite-ios-document-april-2024 https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24833832-cellebrite-...
- LtWorf 2y ago
  Their shills on reddit keep repeating it.
wiseowise 2y ago
You know you can respect Apple products without simping for them, right?
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  Recognition of good behaviour isn’t “simping”. I really want to know… how did Apple hurt you? I’m being serious. There’s a group of people here on HN (and Reddit) that have a seething hatred for Apple, but always for vague unstated reasons. The few reasons that are stated are always something like “they’re spying!” — said by people that prefer Google Android instead because clearly that is the paragon of user privacy. So I ask you: please engage in conversation instead of name-calling.
  - meiraleal 2y ago
    > The few reasons that are stated are always something like “they’re spying!” You are completely out of your mind. That is never the argument used against Apple. As mentioned before, you can like your iPhone without simping for them.
    - jiggawatts 2y ago
      What is the argument against Apple then?
      - meiraleal 2y ago
        Did you read the article? It is about the App Store.
  - wiseowise 2y ago
    Most of tech at my home is from Apple. My gf uses Apple exclusively. I have seething hatred for Apple simps and blind fanatics that think their Cupertino dictator can’t do wrong. They’re just an extremely rich company that produces quality products - nothing more.
makerofthings 2y ago
You're not allowed to like apple, this is hackernews. Didn't you read the rules?
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  There's some interesting cliques in various subreddits and Hacker News, and it's always entertaining to see these groups get riled up when I defend their favourite boogieman. My favourite is the small army of ex-Twitter employees frequenting HN who have a visceral hatred for Elon Musk and will rabidly hound anyone that says something even vaguely positive about anything he's ever touched. There ware some entertaining foaming-at-the-mouth rants about how SpaceX is destroying wildlife with tap water.
  - LtWorf 2y ago
    Elon musk? Isn't he the guy that accuses of paedophilia anyone who dares disagree with him? Yeah I think he's an outstanding guy. Can't understand why anyone would dislike him really.
dns_snek 2y ago
That's an odd bone to pick given that Apple (along with Google) are the primary beneficiaries of gambling and other addictive/exploitative features provided by apps on their own platforms. Apple haven't banned exploitation (e.g. loot boxes), they're just demanding a 30% cut of it.
- appendix-rock 2y ago
  Would you mind amending your comment to refer to the part of OP’s comment that you were actually referring to? Because I can’t for the life of me work out how what you’ve said remotely refutes anything they said. Classic whatbaoutism, which is especially absurd when the comment started off with saying that Apple is certainly not perfect. They made their specific point.

vortegne 2y ago

What about Apple's behaviour makes you think you're not the product?

threeseed 2y ago
Apple makes money from selling products. Google and Meta makes money from selling your profile to advertisers.
- immibis 2y ago
  Apple makes double money by doing both.
- mdhb 2y ago
  The idea of who you think Apple are in your head and who they are in practice are two wildly different things. https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-new-ad-product-pushes-closer-google https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-new-ad-product-pushe...
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    I've never heard of "emarketer.com", and it seems less than 100% reliable as a journalistic source at first glance. I may be missing something, but graphs with three-digit precision out to 2025 (next year!) is made-up-bullshit, not research: https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-looks-boost-app-store-ads-with-ai-powered-buying-tools https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-looks-boost-app-stor... Let's look at actual data, such as Apple's annual report, which is an 80-page document that uses the word advertising only 4 times. Clearly a focus of the company. Sales of "services" in 2023 was $85B of $383B total. This includes the various iCloud subscriptions, Apple TV, Apple Pay, Apple Music, the App Store, etc... and advertising. Your "eMarketer" source thinks Apple's ad revenue was $5B the same year. So... just 6% of services sales, and 1.4% of total sales. Wow, Apple truly has become an ad-tech company at heart! Not at all like Google or Facebook which makes... checks notes... all of their sales revenue from ad-tech, minus a rounding error for some gadgets designed to spy on you to feed the ad machine. (I kid, I kid... no wait, I don't. Google's numbers for 2023 are nearly the reverse of Apple, with only 19.5% of their revenue coming from non-ad-tech sources, of which nearly half is Google Cloud Platform. That's almost a separate business, so ignoring that, the core Google company revenue is 90% advertising. But we all knew that.)
    - mdhb 2y ago
      It’s truly amazing how your reading comprehension and information processing skills seem to change in the face of evidence that doesn’t support your argument. You know full well Apple is in the same surveillance capitalism business and instead you want to talk about 3 digit precision numbers or what percentage of their current revenue is makes up as though it was somehow relevant. How exactly does that help users privacy knowing that the company also happens to have other revenue streams? It’s not even remotely relevant you either engage in the practice or you don’t.
      - jiggawatts 2y ago
        You chose to link to that source to back up your arguments. I just read the content. Was I not supposed to? I'm genuinely confused about what point you're trying to make here.
jiggawatts 2y ago
Other than paying them for hardware that has no discernible advertising revenue for Apple... My personal favourite example is device encryption. Briefly, I worked in the mobile device management (MDM) space when that was a very new thing, and all the major manufacturers had to start adding device encryption to meet enterprise policy requirements. (At the time, all new Windows laptops used BitLocker.) So the vendors did that. They added encryption to their devices. The Android spec sheet added a line: Encryption: Yes Apple had a tech day talk where the guy in charge of device encryption dev team talked for an hour about the four layers of encryption on an iPhone. How it decrypts the bare minimum when booting, and keeps itself in a partially-decrypted mode while locked. How there's a bunch of fine-grained keys so that app-specific data can't leak out. So on, and so forth. The aim was to prevent state-sponsored groups pulling apart locked-but-powered-on phones and extracting plain text secrets directly from the flash, cache memory, or whatever. They had thought of everything. It was as good as encryption could be made without compromising on functionality. I dabble in the Enterprise PKI space also, and the only time I had seen a design this thorough was the internal Ethernet network of the Boeing 787 plane[1]. Afterwards I paid more attention every time there was some fight between a government agency like the FBI and Apple. Each and every time, Apple chose the side of their customers, locking things down further with secure enclaves, anti-hammering protections, in-house security-critical silicon design, and more. As a reminder, Google's level of encryption is simply "yes". A checkbox tick to meet a requirement, that's all. They really, really don't care about your data security, and it shows in the way they act in practice. I see similar customer-centric design elements in Apple AirTags. I read the whitepaper on the cryptographic algorithms they used. These very cleverly provide the maximum possible functionality with the minimum possible user data exposure. It's private and useful at the same time. Google has never published anything of that sort, ever. I'm pretty sure of it. If you disagree, please link to a whitepaper outlining privacy-guaranteeing technology that they developed and have included in a product that they sell. Or Epic. Or Facebook. or anyone else. [1] Yeah, yeah, Boeing is a bad company with bad leadership, but their engineers know their stuff.
- dns_snek 2y ago
  > Each and every time, Apple chose the side of their customers, locking things down further with secure enclaves, anti-hammering protections, in-house security-critical silicon design, and more. With Apple, you're allowed to have privacy unless, of course, you're trying to promote democracy in Russia [1], organize anti-government protests in China [2], or otherwise communicate privately without government's approval [3]. Of course, all of that security is a theater as far as government agencies are concerned because Cellebrite, an US-allied firm, can unlock the devices a few months after each iOS release [4] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-navalny-app-election.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-naval... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65830185 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65830185 [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/19/apple-whatsapp-threads-china/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/19/apple-w... [4] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24833832-cellebrite-ios-document-april-2024 https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24833832-cellebrite-...
LtWorf 2y ago
Their shills on reddit keep repeating it.

wiseowise 2y ago

You know you can respect Apple products without simping for them, right?

jiggawatts 2y ago
Recognition of good behaviour isn’t “simping”. I really want to know… how did Apple hurt you? I’m being serious. There’s a group of people here on HN (and Reddit) that have a seething hatred for Apple, but always for vague unstated reasons. The few reasons that are stated are always something like “they’re spying!” — said by people that prefer Google Android instead because clearly that is the paragon of user privacy. So I ask you: please engage in conversation instead of name-calling.
- meiraleal 2y ago
  > The few reasons that are stated are always something like “they’re spying!” You are completely out of your mind. That is never the argument used against Apple. As mentioned before, you can like your iPhone without simping for them.
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    What is the argument against Apple then?
    - meiraleal 2y ago
      Did you read the article? It is about the App Store.
- wiseowise 2y ago
  Most of tech at my home is from Apple. My gf uses Apple exclusively. I have seething hatred for Apple simps and blind fanatics that think their Cupertino dictator can’t do wrong. They’re just an extremely rich company that produces quality products - nothing more.

makerofthings 2y ago

You're not allowed to like apple, this is hackernews. Didn't you read the rules?

jiggawatts 2y ago
There's some interesting cliques in various subreddits and Hacker News, and it's always entertaining to see these groups get riled up when I defend their favourite boogieman. My favourite is the small army of ex-Twitter employees frequenting HN who have a visceral hatred for Elon Musk and will rabidly hound anyone that says something even vaguely positive about anything he's ever touched. There ware some entertaining foaming-at-the-mouth rants about how SpaceX is destroying wildlife with tap water.
- LtWorf 2y ago
  Elon musk? Isn't he the guy that accuses of paedophilia anyone who dares disagree with him? Yeah I think he's an outstanding guy. Can't understand why anyone would dislike him really.

dns_snek 2y ago

That's an odd bone to pick given that Apple (along with Google) are the primary beneficiaries of gambling and other addictive/exploitative features provided by apps on their own platforms. Apple haven't banned exploitation (e.g. loot boxes), they're just demanding a 30% cut of it.

appendix-rock 2y ago
Would you mind amending your comment to refer to the part of OP’s comment that you were actually referring to? Because I can’t for the life of me work out how what you’ve said remotely refutes anything they said. Classic whatbaoutism, which is especially absurd when the comment started off with saying that Apple is certainly not perfect. They made their specific point.