Is Apple Turning Into the Next "Evil Empire"? 722
jira writes "'You may think you own your iPad or iPhone but in reality an invisible string links it back to Apple HQ' writes John Naughton. He adds: 'Umberto Eco once wrote a memorable essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven.'"
Present continuous tense is unnecessary (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes and no (Score:5, Insightful)
I would had wanted to argue "what is there to discuss?", but nevermind.
Is apple _turning_ into the next evil empire?
No, they already are.
Now what?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's like being at school (Score:0, Insightful)
Can we stop supporting absurd corporations because we have a lack of personal identity and an absurd ignorance of technical matters?
What (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Present continuous tense is unnecessary (Score:4, Insightful)
The 'flamebait' was when Apple decided that '1984' was an instruction manual.
Re:not only evil (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think they are overpriced, after all they don't operate in a supply/demand type chain. Apple sets the price based on the development, design and manufacturing costs, plus whatever profit margin they want. If they were overpriced then a lower priced competitor would come into the market and take some market share... like Android has done quite successfully with smartphones, except that the market is not yet saturated.
As for their other stuff, well personally I like their computing equipment enough to think that it's worth the extra you pay (and when I priced up my macbook it was actually cheaper / on par with the competition). On the other hand an iPhone is overpriced for me because I don't see the value in what it does, same with the iPad. But for plenty of others it's obviously not overpriced. If they try to control OSX as they have iOS, then I'll move to Linux if it doesn't work for me, and they'll lose my custom.
I really don't like what Apple are doing in the content space with walled gardens etc. However, that doesn't make them overpriced. Evil perhaps, or maybe just normal corporate. I don't think Anonymous are the weapon to use here, and I didn't like the tone of your comment, people are allowed to buy into Apple equipment and services if they choose to do so. Try your wallet as a weapon instead.
turning? (Score:0, Insightful)
Turning? Like they were not?
I guess nothing interesting is going on in tech... (Score:4, Insightful)
...so shit gets selected for the front page. Sigh...
Re:Present continuous tense is unnecessary (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you really think his post is about grammar?
Re:Yes and no (Score:2, Insightful)
It depends on what you mean by evil. I've been a Mac user since what feels like forever and I can definitly see that something have changed over the passed few years starting about the same time Apple started to become really popular. They are building what people often refer to as a walled garden where everything is controlled by Apple and if that's okay with you it actually works. I could definitly recommend the Apple solution to people that want to user computers and mobile devices in order to do things but don't want to worry about how everything actually works. I don't think that doing so is particularly evil. I think that most people that choose the Apple way is well aware of what it means and choose it with their own will. Apple actively choose to focus on these customers. For people like me that means that Apple is fading away as not being interesting anymore. Apple knows that. They don't want me as a customer anymore.
Re:An interesting question. (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that this question is being asked is, in my opinion, a sign of the times. I never thought I'd see the day when Apple is considered an "evil empire", and Microsoft is kind of the underdog/good-guy.
People have been saying this for over twenty years now. Nothing new here. What would be interesting is if common perception is that this is a valid question, and it's most definitely not.
forcing the end user to buy their hardware
No one has ever been forced to buy Apple hardware. In fact, most people don't buy their computers.
I think that we're going to see a repeat of the 90's here somewhat shortly with respect to mobile devices (aka "the next frontier"). Apple will insist on selling iPads and iPhones at $500 - $800 each, and Google will allow their OS to be placed on any device the consumer wants, decoupling the OS and hardware and ultimately "owning" the mobile marketspace, just like Microsoft beat Apple in terms of marketshare and continues to do so to this day.
Three problems...
1. Market share of the OS is a simple, but incomplete metric. Apple makes more money than any other PC maker, and is just shy of greater profits and revenue than MS. So claiming MS has "won" is not so cut and dry.
2. You are comparing iPhones to Android. You should be comparing iPhones (and other iOS devices) to Android phones and other Android devices. That an iPhone costs $199 and $299, but the Android OS is free is meaningless. iOS is free on iPhones too.
3. iOS has outsold Android. So your conclusion has yet to come to pass. But even if it ever does, you end up with the first point, how has that benefitted Google greater than iOS has benefitted Apple? Even if Android outsells iOS 5 to 1 (and it most certainly does not, and won't any time soon), how is that an example of Google beating Apple? Apple will still make far more from iOS than Google will be making from Android.
And, more on topic, what does this have to do with Apple being "evil"?
Apple is nicer now than it ever was in the past... (Score:2, Insightful)
to it's shareholders. Which is the only metric that matters.
Apple isn't evil. It's very good at making money. What other criterion is there with which to judge the actions of a company? I don't like the product they sell so I don't buy their stuff. Apparently, however, some people like the walled, Apple taxed, restrictively licensed, closed products that they sell. The fact is, many people don't care that the platform is closed and Apple can take huge sums of money from them. It doesn't make them less nice, just not a company that I want to deal with.
If you think of companies as nice or not nice, good or evil, you will be constantly disappointed. They are judged on profitability. The products that they produce; however, can be judged as good or not good.
Re:What (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, in the year they released the phone that revolutionized the mobile market that has drawn to date over 100 million willing customers, they became more evil than ever because of this...
This idiotic bullshit of calling Apple (or any other company*) "evil" is one of the things that makes Slashdot seem childish and insignificant. Geeks are the ultimate drama queens.
* There are very few companies one could reasonably argue as being evil, or at least being major proponents of evilness. Monsanto and Halliburton come to mind. But calling Apple "evil" is absurd. Do you even know what the word "evil" means?
monopolies (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never been too afraid that Apple would hold onto any dominant market position indefinitely because Apple's one size fits all philosophy simply cannot make everyone happy. Apple success has shown however that consumer electronics supports a one size fits all philosophy infinitely better than the business market where Microsoft trounced them.
Apple has kept their overpriced ipods on top largely by providing consumers with the most physically attractive product. And physical attractiveness has also played a role in adoption of their laptop line as well, especially the Air. Yet, I doubt the iPhone will carry the day on looks.
All the phone manufactures are far more habituated to producing a beautiful product that either laptop or mp3 player makers. Android lets them focus much more so on the looks problem. And people don't want to all look exactly alike.
Apple isn't likely to dominate any markets that actually matter. Yes, tablets remains an open question. Yet, we're seeing iOS's retarded design limits here. Maemo's widgets and integration made it a better tablet operating system than iOS. And that made Maemo ultimately a better phone operating system too. Apple may've needed to approach the problem from the other direction to escape the desktop metaphor, but ultimately iOS is inferior to Android with it's widgets.
We should ideally just pass a law that compiled code isn't protected under copyright law unless the source code is available to anyone who purchases the product of course, i.e. mandate open source licenses. Good luck! lol
Turning into? Have we NOT been paying attention? (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple's general SOP has ALWAYS been "evil empire". They simply weren't as financially successful as Microsoft. So Microsoft kinda took lumps for general tech company bad-neighborism.
Believe me, Apple WISHES they'd had Microsoft's success and capital. Had they done so, home computing would be an irrevocably stunted market.
Word! (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll try as much as possible to stay neutral in this debate, assuming there is something to debate about.
But I find it quite amusing how one day I read "Apple is insignificant. Apple has no market share. No one care about Apple in the world. 's products are much more accepted / popular / better." and the next day I read from the same people "Apple is evil. Apple will ruin everything and make our life miserable."
So. Which one is it? Either they're insignificant or they are so significant we have to worry about their every doing, but it can't be both.
Re:What (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, and pedantically griping over the use of a harmless cliche is not childish at all! ;-)
Bah (Score:2, Insightful)
It is not a religion. :)
After many years with DOS, OS/2, Windows, misc. Linux desktop pc's, I now have a Apple computer, phone and tablet at the moment. But it is not a static thing. I might have a android tablet and phone in the future. I might even get Linux on my desktop, who knows.
But at the moment the most important thing for me is to have devices with maximum stability so I dont have to spend my percious sparetime tinkering/fixing them.
I am beginning to get a bit annoyed at the stupid limitations of the iPhone such as why are wifi scanning tools now banned and why am i not "allowed" to download more than 25 mb filesize over 3G, I have a good data plan. Otoh it is not really a problem but i think i should be able to so perhaps my next phone in a year or two is not iPhone, know knows.
Re:Yes and no (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember back in the 90s when Microsoft was evil because they locked people in to their products? Proprietary document formats, incompatible HTML extensions, secret APIs that only they could use? Ring any bells?
Apple are trying to go one further by not even allowing competing products on their platforms. Opera had to fight to get on to iOS devices, Google Talk was initially rejected... MS products were terrible but because Apple products do mostly work reasonably well (in a limited way) they somehow get away with it.
hysteria (Score:4, Insightful)
While I do think Apple has gone quite a way down the road towards being a corporate control freak, I think this is a bit exaggerated. They haven't come even close to the kind of manipulative behavior the MS started pulling in the mid-90's. MS basically had the entire IT industry under its thumb for many years. They could kill other products just by making a vapor ware announcement. Good luck trying to get a system with Windows installed from anyone. Good luck trying to find a computer publication that didn't grovel before their feet and lick their boots. Apple has never enjoyed that kind of power with the possible exception of the mp3 player market. They may be a bit restrictive and manipulative with their own products but hardly "evil". I've had owned two Macs but I'm hardly a member of their cult as some see it. There's nothing on their platform that restricts you unless you go there voluntarily. I have migrated all of my data over to one of my Linux machines and lost nothing in the transition. No lock there. That said, I wouldn't tether myself to anything from their iTunes store.
If you want to talk about evil corporations, google some of articles on the stuff Monsanto, Haliburton or many of the Wall Street banks have done for profits. Once a business is in the business of selling stocks, the company is no longer about products or services or anything other than shareholder value. All other activities are merely means to achieve the end of increasing profits or share value. There is no morality once this path is chosen only expedience.
Re:monopolies (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple has kept their overpriced ipods on top
Millions of people buy them: they're not overpriced, and in fact they're probably pretty close to optimally priced.. An overpriced product is one whose price is high enough that reduced volume means less revenue overall. An underpriced product is one whose price is too low to earn a profit for its producer.
Re:Yes and no (Score:3, Insightful)
You can like or hate Apple any way you like, but they are not locking you in or out of non-standard proprietary document formats or secret API's in any way, in fact they use open and commonly accepted and interchangeable formats and technology almost everywhere.
How come I can't plug my MP3 player into my car? (Hint: If iPods were Mass Storage Devices and they used a regular USB cable like mine/most others do, this would work.)
Re:Yes and no (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:monopolies (Score:3, Insightful)
Dude, I hate Apple. I hate their business practices, their monopolistic intentions, their use and abuse of Free Software while pretending to be friendly with it, it's censorship, and the religious following of its fans. Probably the last factor is the worst, I sincerely agree with your signature, and, while I'm an Atheist and anti-religion, I'm not only against religions with invisible guys in the sky. Religious-like behavior is just as dangerous as organized religion. Apple's followers have faith, and that is disturbing. Faith is the poor cousing of reasoning, and drives people to do some really awful things.
That aside, you are underestimating Apple. Sadly, hardware manufacturers just plain don't get it. I spent all night working on a custom firmware for a tc8902-based android tablet. I own a small software development company in Argentina, and we are importing a decent amount of tablets from China. I've seen them all. I estimate there are at least 40 different tablets being made in China right now (I know thousands are reported, but many are just identical designs being made by different manufacturers with slightly different cases. I've tried them all. Each has its upsides, but none of them quite nail it. You have a beautiful aluminum tablet like the wopad, with an awesome capacitive multitouch screen, and a crippled chipset like the rk2808 that only runs android up to Froyo because the company refuses to release OMX driver's source so we can port Ginger or HC onto it. Then you have this Telechips I'm currently working on, that is awesome in every sense, but I can't port anything better than Eclair onto it because Telechips has been ignoring the GPL for years, and they seemed to comply in Dec 2010, but the source they released doesn't generate a working kernel, and it's missing big chunks of code, they also refuse to release OMX drivers. Then you have an incredible 10'' tablet with an awesome capacitive screen, 512 of RAM, a samsung chipset that runs at 1.1Ghz, and overally hardware very similar but actually better than the ipad1, but it comes in a cheap plastic casing with a crippled froyo install and the battery sucks badly. How can they manage to fuck up an awesome product like that? Well, they are all screwing it. The Xoom is awesome, also, more expensive than the ipand, and I haven't seen any source code from motorola either. So, don't underestimate Apple. They are getting right everything the rest are getting wrong, while having the very same closed attitude the rest of the manufacturers have. I care about freedom, so I don't buy their products. Most people don't care at all, and if they don't buy apple is because they can't afford it.
>>> We should ideally just pass a law that compiled code isn't protected under copyright law unless the source code is available to anyone who purchases the product of course, i.e. mandate open source licenses. Good luck! lol
I've been saying that for years. The default position is no copyright protection. Do you want copyright protection? Ok, you have to release source code. You can have either drm-like protection on closed source, or legal protection from the state. Choose one. If you want, you can opt-out of copyright protection, and then you are free to do whatever you want. If you want legal protection, be a good citizen and release your source under certain licenses, and after a reasonable period (5 years) it goes straight into the gpl. Of course, it ain't gonna happen.
Re:What (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not idiotic, just look at all the damage that Apple has done to the electronics market. Now, people no longer expect to own their devices, and look who is prominently pushing for increased control of the customer's products, well if it isn't Steve Jobs.
They've been getting more and more into undermining consumer rights for years, that alone justifies being called evil.
And yes, I know what evil means, somebody posted a definition earlier in the thread and this definitely qualifies.
But then again, I doubt very much that you're capable of acknowledging that Steve Jobs isn't God and that Apple isn't perfect.
History lesson needed... (Score:4, Insightful)
They decided to tie their hardware and software together, forcing the end user to buy their hardware - at a drastically increased initial investment cost - in order to get their software.
Apple lost their initial lead because the Apple 3 was a complete lemon, not because of their business model!
Microsoft came along and blew that concept out of the water,
Not exactly. MS's big break was getting DOS adopted over CPM/86 for the IBM PC. IBM were slow getting into PCs but they already had a huge locked-in customer base in corporate business systems - customers with nice suits who didn't want to buy computers with psychedelic logos from hippies.
What everybody seems to conveniently forget is that The IBM PC was a closed, proprietary system - yes, the word "open" was bandied around at the time, but it didn't mean then what it means today (I think it basically meant that if you paid IBM lots of money they'd let you build plug-in cards). Yes, it ran MS-DOS and other MS-DOS systems were available, but software compatibility was restricted to command-line programs with character I/O. Any sort of remotely modern user interface, color, animation etc. required access to the IBM BIOS which was very much strictly (c) (r) IBM and only available on a kosher IBM PC.
Then some bright spark found a legal way to reverse-engineer the IBM BIOS and, several lawsuits later, cheap IBM compatible clones appeared. Wouldn't happen today, of course, since you can't clean-room your way around software patents. Of course, the only reason people wanted those clones was that IBM's huge captive corporate market had already turned the proprietary IBM PC, warts and all, into the "industry standard" system with a huge software/hardware base.
Of course, that was the beginning of the end for IBM (for any smaller fry it would have been the end of the end) so a few years later they sold off their last profitable PC line to Lenovo, renounced evil and became the fluffy, lovable champions of Open Source they are today.
Microsoft, of course, still got paid for every copy of MS DOS sold and lived happily ever after. However, this wasn't just because they were a software company who stayed out of the hardware business - they were a software company who managed to license their software to a near-monopoly holder just as the corporate PC market went exponential. Nice work if you can get it - but I don't think its available.
The other thing worth noting is that, at least through the late 80s and early 90s, Apple was using more advanced hardware than the PC world (proper 32-bit 68000 vs. the 086/186/286, then switching to PPC when 68k got old, built-in LAN and network printing) - which was pretty important when their main market was DTP and pro graphics. System 7 on a 80286 would not have been a big seller, I suggest (certainly not on the PC architecture with the 640K limit). You might also bear in mind that while the first Mac portable was a bit of a turkey (although, ISTR, it did introduce the world to active matrix screens) the first Powerbook pretty much defined the modern laptop (with the back-set keyboard and pointing device in front) and one of Apple's important selling points ever since has been that they made damn nice laptops. OK, now they are using essentially the same platform as MS, but if you don't think they've still got the edge in product design (albeit with a more cosmetic than technical bent than in the past) then you should have gone to Specsavers.
The other little historical wrinkle to remember is that Apple have already tried licensing their OS - round about the time they nearly went titsup and had to be rescued by Jobs. Did the licensees make "economy" Macs to vastly expand the customer base? Of course not - they made high-end workstations that just undercut Apple's models and punted them to existing Apple customers (Trying to remember if I ever saw a StarMac advertised outside of a Mac specialist magazine...)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:An interesting question. (Score:4, Insightful)
3. iOS has outsold Android.
How do you come by that? Android has a much larger market share than iOS, already:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Smartphone_share_current.png [wikipedia.org] - they're now the largest mobile OS out there. In a few years, it's relatively safe to assume that gap will be even larger, as Symbian tends towards 0.
There are tons of problems with this. First and foremost, it's iPhone, not iOS. I'll list the others, but I don't want this first point to be lost, because it's really all that *needs* to be said.
But also, Apple reports actual sales numbers, while Android sales numbers are solely based on consultant firms' estimates, and even with the most recent estimates, going with the *highest* numbers by one group, Android OS, last quarter, did not outsell iOS, last quarter. And I also said "has outsold", not "does outsell" (although that is presently true as of the most recent numbers, I was trying to avoid debunking this whole thing. I should have known there are far too many Slashdotters here who think Android has outsold iOS for that to happen). Let's say that this quarter Android finally ships on more devices than iOS does, for the quarter, that won't catch them up over all the quarters in which they did not. Especially since many of those quarters they shipped zero. Apple has just sold over 100 million iPhones, and significantly more iOS devices (I could dig through numbers to come up with a specific amount, but it's probably somewhere between 150 million and 200 million).
So, yeah, iOS has most definitely outsold Android.
One must assume Google gets more than a buck or two for each phone you buy with "with Google" written on the back, like mine does.
And whatever Google gets per Android, one must assume Apple makes significantly more. That's why I said, later in this post, that even if Android were to ever outsell iOS 5 to 1, Apple would still make more money because of iOS than Android does because of Android. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Google doesn't actually make more from iOS devices presently than they do from Android devices.
Presumably, that adds up. Given Android's open nature, it has more companies developing for it
What the shit? iOS has *significantly* greater developer support.
which means Google gets benefits without even trying (as hard) as iOS. So I would say Google is already doing damn nicely out of Android and will continue to do so. In business speak, that's a "win". It's not even too far removed from getting "something for nothing".
The topic wasn't whether Android is a good business move for Google, it's whether Google has "won" (or is "winning" or will "win") over iOS. That's definitely not true now, and may eventually be true, but is definitely not the foregone conclusion so many here seem to think. Like I said above, even were Android to have a 5:1 market share lead over iOS (and that's an absurdly high number, btw), it won't be clear that Google as "won" over Apple. Presently, it's like Google is collecting dimes and Apple is collecting dollars (not a specific ratio, just that it's definitely a significantly skewed ratio. 10:1 in favor of Apple is probably an understatement). If Google ever collects more units (dimes) than Apple (dollars), that's not enough.
Back in 97, when MS bought into Apple, Apple had around 7% of the PC market. In 2010, Apple had about 8% of the PC market - so in the last almost 15 years, they have basically made no inroads at all. Dell, on the other hand, have 15% market share. In fact, the top 5 PC sellers are HP, Dell, Acer, Lennova and Toshiba. All of them doing basically zero research into the OS. This is basically true for mobile phones too, with Nokia, Samsung, LG, Rim and Sony taking the top 5 seller by manufacturer positions, all of them now movi
Re:monopolies (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? Apple iPod touch 8 GB (4th Gen) : $204.99 [amazon.com], Refurbished: $178.99 Sansa Fuze+ 8 GB MP3 Player (Black) : $69.00 [amazon.com] SanDisk Sansa Clip+ 8 GB : $49.99 [amazon.com] Sandisk Sansa Fuze 8GB : $97.68 [amazon.com]
Odd comparison there, comparing a wifi-capable, full-touch screen iPod capable of running all the iOS apps, to a few models of audio-only, non-touch screen players. Why not compare to the iPod Nano 8GB at $149? Non-expandable, but half the size of any of those, which may be more important for some consumers.
The iPod line outprices nearly every other manufacturer of mp3 players, includes the cheapest headphones, has poor sound and is not expandable. The only thing it has going for it is chic-factor, name-recognition and the app store. Perhaps that has weight with some, for myself, I want my music player to have a long battery life, and play music well.
The specific one you're citing has a multi-touch screen and the ability to run hundreds of thousands of applications, which you conveniently left of your "only thing it has going for it." Perhaps you're making a false comparison for the purpose of trying to bolster your losing argument?
Re:monopolies (Score:4, Insightful)
CrashNBrn compared iPod Touch pricing to the Sansa Fuze and Clip. I can only assume you have the presence of mind to not be seriously equating an iPod Touch with those players based on your freedom canard. That would be the equivalent of saying that an 8-bit uC IC development board is better than a TI because you can upgrade it much like a PC, install any program you like, use any standard peripheral, bla, bla, bla, while your TI can't.
Freedom can be important but it is completely irrelevant to the technical capabilities of these devices and their subsequent pricing.