I loathe Apple. We have this absolutely incredibly powerful, world changing invention in all of our pockets now, and Apple is doing everything they possibly can to suck every single penny out of it, at huge economic burden, just to become wealthier. Apple has always been bad, but this is just a next level of evil. I will never buy an Apple product, and I will make sure no one close to me does either.
I just bought my first ever Apple device - a second hand iphone. After seeing the Apple's behavior in the last couple of weeks, don't think I'm going to buy another Apple device.
On the flip side I love Apple. I want a privacy focused company with a stellar reputation to monitor security and fight the data mining monsters on my behalf. I want a thoughtless instrument that I can use with abandon for important day to day activities. Why shouldn’t they have overflowing coffers if they can manage to pull that off for me?
If you don’t reward invention you get China, where inspite of everything, can’t seem to come up with new ideas of significant impact.
Apple is simply playing by the rules of capitalism, which are as follows: extract as much value as possible from your customers, employees, etc, for the purpose of enriching capital (shareholders). Apple will follow the law to the letter, but they will do so in whatever way will be maximally best for their own interests. Way she goes.
People keep falling for the just-world fallacy[1], and companies exploit this through the use of propaganda (ads, marketing, yadda yadda) and most people eat it up. No company (not Spotify, not Apple, not the woke-est, most DEI company out there) cares about anything other than profits at the end of the day under capitalism, because capital rules everything and politicians are not exempt from the rules of capital.
> Apple is simply playing by the rules of capitalism
This is reductionist, like saying all biological behavior is about reproducing. Yes there’s a primary goal. No, that does not define or dictate the how. There are people making decisions about what to fight and where to spend the effort. Fighting and weaseling pro-consumer regulations is a choice, obviously, since Apple is being a much bigger crybaby than even other big corporations.
You're trying to add layers of complexity that don't exist. The universe is remarkably uncomplicated, much like biology (which, you correctly assert, only exists to replicate itself). Humans like to anthropomorphize and we have a tendency to see things that aren't there, and we're also highly suggestible and easily manipulated by marketing tactics.
You hang around HN not to reproduce, but i bet if there were a fertile female ovulating near you you would not choose to browse HN instead of impregnating here. (I assumed your gender)
Really? I have not got that impression so far. I sure don't. I would guess, that it is actually more people are here for tech news and reading like-minded people's thoughts. Keeping up to date with development and technologies.
I guess we can all believe what we want to believe. But Y Combinator (who sponsors this website) is a venture capital firm, which seeks to generate returns on capital by investing in companies. This website, therefore, is designed to reflect and encourage the interests of capital. You can pretend Y Combinator is something other than a venture capital firm if you want, but one day you'll realize that they too only care about getting money.
These aren't "the rules of capitalism" they are just maximally self-interested hubristic behaviours by companies with monopolies. Capitalism doesn't have rules; states have rules. Capitalism has market incentives and stakeholders.
Capitalism is just a system based around the belief that capital appreciation is the ultimate end goal, and the ends justify the means. Everything is fine so long as the GDP keeps going up.
But in reality capitalism does coexist alongside other value systems, no?
Purdue Pharma (opiates) is a good example of a company following its incentives that eventually was brought down for violating broader common sense values.
The values Apple are violating come close to being just as widely held ("something I buy should be mine") though perhaps you need some expertise or professional experience with tech to see the violation clearly enough to be as horrified.
Still, values held within communities of experts (like this one) can also have the power to correct incentive-chasing behavior when it runs amok, if only because sufficient misbehavior can make it harder to hire and retain the best experts. So it's wonderful this conversation is happening here!
Yes, which is why I loathe them. They aren't just playing by the rules - they are destroying endless economic opportunity behind them with their rent seeking and desired monopolization. Those things are not compatible with capitalism.
They have decoupled their incentives from their users incentives to extract more profit, and then they lie and use scare tactics to gaslight their users into thinking this what they want.
I don't think capitalism is inherently bad, but the system we have is bad. Adam Smith wrote a lot about this, in particular he loathed landlords and entities that suck value out of the system while offering little in return. Apple is a weird case, because arguably they do create a lot of value, but currently we have a problem where that value isn't returned to the broader society, instead it goes into the hands of a small minority of people and groups.
Asymmetries need to be balanced, such as the balance between labour and capital. Unions help labour, but thanks to a decades-long propaganda campaign against unions, we no longer have that push back against capital.
Personally I think the problem will only get worse, so I'd suggest buying the S&P 500 with as much cheap leverage as you can afford.
This topic is about Apple, but I'm happy to talk about how much I loathe Google in another thread. But at least I can install custom ROMs, 3rd party stores, don't need notarization, don't need to pay Google for the privilege of using the device I own, etc.
I think Google is gradually steering the Android ecosystem in the direction of Apple, especially with their flagship phones which are increasingly locked down every software update.
I do appreciate the ability to control the software on my devices but I'm worried that soon you won't be able to do banking without an official fully locked down device.
Being allowed to do whatever I want with the computer I paid for and own, without unnecessary 3rd parties rent seeking in the middle on transactions that have absolutely nothing to do with them.
Imagine if your refrigerator charged your grocery store $0.50 every time you opened the door?
Fun to imagine such a dystopic setup but entirely unrelated and not even close to equivalent.
Food producers and sellers need to meet certain standards to sell their food. We take these standards for granted but they aren’t without cost. We like the standards because it means that we can generally trust the safety of the food we buy without needing to know much about it.
This is the point Apple sells on. Users are able to download apps and configure their phones without _any_ concerns of compromising their device.
Not everyone wants these guidelines and protections but for a large number of people they are worth a premium.
Imagine if every time you installed software on your Mac, they charged a $0.50 fee to the software maker. Even for a shell script.
How is that ANY different?
They're only doing this with iPhone/iPad because they can, because by the time they realized it could be a profitable business for Mac the expectations with their customers had already been established, and they had too much competition.
As soon as they had a competitive edge with iPhone, they resorted to rent seeking.
> They're only doing this with iPhone/iPad because they can, because by the time they realized it could be a profitable business for Mac the expectations with their customers had already been established, and they had too much competition.
That's not historically accurate, and I worked in a core engineering group at Apple. An early concern on battery-dependent devices was that the software running on them would not deplete battery wastefully, and the famous/infamous offender giving rise to what you (understandably) question was the Flash runtime. The upshot of poorly written software (which gave rise to attempts to test and charge for access, which you dislike) was customers in a competitive landscape (Symbian and Android) thinking Apple hardware sucked, while that was not the hardware reality.
So, I get your perspective but it's overlooking the early and very real problems which caused this gateway/gauntlet to attempt improving user experience as a higher priority over developer inconvenience.
You may be surprised to learn that the overwhelming majority of people, and thus the overwhelming majority of Apple customers, have precisely zero interest in any of these things. Part of the value proposition Apple offers is that they will work to keep your device secure and free of malware. That inherently means restrictions around code execution.
> Part of the value proposition Apple offers is that they will work to keep your device secure and free of malware
This is pure marketing talk, and something I'm not sure people actually ask for. People have been buying PCs forever, where you can install anything you want without permission from anyone.
While I have other machines, I still run Windows 7 on my main PC, often install random freeware on it and guess what? It's not just that the world doesn't end -- nothing happens.
The main purpose of this endless talk about "security" is to scare people into compliance.
You are in the top 0.01% of computer users. I simply don't think you understand the average user.
It's not marketing talk. My mom is terrified of clicking on the wrong thing on her PC. She doesn't know what she can trust. Ads masquerading as official Windows notifications, etc.
She is totally comfortable browsing and installing from the app store.
It's really almost like HN has learned nothing since the infamous Dropbox comment.
Is your mom also terrified of the phone, because Apple can't supervise every call? Does she get cagey about opening Safari because there's nobody checking every website for scams?
The iPhone is already dangerously capable, Apple can't have their cake and eat it too.
My response was wholly based on my own observations. My mom sends me stuff from online all the time, I've watched family members and friends install emulators and YouTube alternatives like it was riding a bike. I'm very sorry if your social circle has forgotten how to do these things.
The only person I've ever known who exclusively used Apple-native apps was my ex-boyfriend who wrote Mac software. I've never known anyone else who refused websites or calls on the basis that Apple doesn't review it - I think that mindset is far in the minority.
> You may be surprised to learn that the overwhelming majority of people, and thus the overwhelming majority of Apple customers, have precisely zero interest in any of these things.
Why would you think someone who knows about the (evidently) minutae of what Android advantages over Apple are would be surprised at that?
I was connecting your original comment to your reply:
> Apple is doing everything they possibly can to suck every single penny out of it, at huge economic burden
The advantages you list, which are supposedly creating huge economic burden, are actually the very reasons that Apple is a huge economic success both for itself and its customers. Many people have decided they get more value by not having these things. And people like you who do want these things have great alternatives .
This is the definition of functional market and is how economic value is created.
EDIT: sorry, thought it was COGlory who replied. The rationale is the same.
At least Android is open source and doesn't restrict sideloading. Even if you don't like the Google version, you can always install something like GrapheneOS.
Open source with big asterisk. AOSP grows more anemic by the day as more and more of the Android that ships on consumer devices becomes proprietary, even on Google devices.
While custom ROMs exist you’re then at the mercy of cat and mouse hacks to evade security checks from bank apps and the like, something that many don’t have the time or energy for.
Eh I love Google. A company that gives me email, YouTube, maps, search, docs, sheets, translation, collab, chrome, fiber, meet, drive, my calendar, photo repository, earth, android etc. for free is alright in my book.
Note that Apple will track what country you are located in so that you don't accidentally install an alternative application store outside the European Union.
