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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

It makes you wonder how much of the privacy features are a marketing act too.

Not really. With recent articles talking about their push more deeply into health, privacy is a core feature and basis of trust. Very different than the marketing speak we get from other gigantic companies that are fundamentally ad brokers: privacy is at odds with their core business. Privacy is not at odds with where Apple is or is going, so there isn’t the business incentive there for them to violate it.

Their core business is propagating vendor lockin to tastefully designed highly-priced hardware of middling competence (but very good inter-operability). Privacy is something of a sauce. It's there, some people like it, but if you took it away I'm not convinced it wouldn't still sell. Their core audience by and large doesn't care about it at all.

I can assure you the message is consistent internally with action. It’s not just marketing.

Disclosure: I work for Apple.

Seconding this. I also work at Apple but I don’t want to associate myself with my day job here.

How could you possibly know this? Every company I've every worked at is compartmentalized, and my experience is that Apple is especially compartmentalized, with secrecy and measures similar to governmental security clearance around various projects.

Because I experience it with the requirements on my own work, hear it internally in discussions, and see it addressed in upcoming work.

Why is Apple so resistant to making repairable products? What is the obsessiveness with making ever thinner products?

I remember starting a job 2014 and choosing a macbook 2012, because of the macbook 2012 being more repairable. It seems to have served me well. Still using it, might consider upgrading to macbook 2015. But won't go beyond that before I hear from others that the current hardware issues have been resolved or the macbook turn more repairable.

Apple has definitely lost some of my trust.

I also wonder why Apple stick with their butterfly keyboard despite it having all of these issues. I would really appreciate any insight into this from you or any other Apple employee.

EDIT: To me having products that are not repairable goes quite counter to the narrative of doing your best for sustainability.

> Why is Apple so resistant to making repairable products? What is the obsessiveness with making ever thinner products?

I think the two are not connected. I think that they don't really care that much about repairable products, despite what they say, even internally, because as Upton Sinclair said:

> “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

Regarding the thinness angle, I used to think the same way. But their focus on thin (and also small) does drive the industry forward.

Random example from the present day: smartphones are becoming thinner and thinner. As a result, now we can almost have a pocketable flexible device. Besides the AMOLED tech needing to be invented, the device would be no use if each half of the flexible display would be 20mm thick. You couldn't realistically carry around a 4cm thick device (proof: we don't really carry books in our pockets). Well you could, if you were an NBA player wearing cargo pants. But everyone else couldn't, realistically.

Making devices smaller makes them more portable and users don't really care about marginal computing power gains as they do about marginal portability increases. VR/AR tech needs more computing power and better software but it also desperately needs a portability boost.

Random example from the present day: smartphones are becoming thinner and thinner.

Yeah, and in order to do that they ditched the universally used 3.5mm jack.

This is a killer argument for me never to buy an iPhone. At least not one of their recent models.

> Why is Apple so resistant to making repairable products?

I think it's a rhetorical question and we all know the answer to it.

> What is the obsessiveness with making ever thinner products?

Comparing a thicker and thinner version of the same product, the thicker ones always seem more old-fashioned. I still own my Titanium PowerBook, and when it was new it was so sleek I couldn’t believe it was real, and now it feels so thick and old I can barely believe how I used to feel about it.

Well, that’s because consumers have grown to associate thickness to age, precisely because vendors have put a lot of effort in reducing it.

Why then has iOS tracked our frequently visited locations by default for years?

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-see-your-iphone-locat...

According to Apple, “in order to provide useful location-related information in Maps, Calendar, Photos, and more. Significant Locations are encrypted and cannot be read by Apple”.

And I can assure you once people lose trust, they started to question everything. And sadly there are increasingly lots of area where people find Tim Cook's Apple are very inconsistent.

Do you have an example of that action? Environmental problems start overwhelmingly at consumerism. Apple is releasing new devices every two years. These devices purposefully made to not be repaired, and apple certainly spends a lot of money into advertising.

That's no different from other companies, but apple is lying about it.

The person you're responding is only commenting on their privacy stance.

Not sure what repairing of devices has to do with that.

Ah Yep, I got mixed up. Hn doesn't thread well in large chats visually It seems.

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