Apple dismisses Google’s criticism over turning privacy into a ‘luxury good’

You can develop for the iPhone using an anonymous pre-paid credit card.

And Apple absolutely led the way in privacy. Differential privacy, secure enclave, rotating ad identifiers, randomising MAC address, UI prompts before apps can access data, on device ML models. And their implementation of fingerprint and facial recognition was significantly more secure than their competitors.

> Nobody can offer a concrete reason for why Apple devices are better for privacy

"Google servers communicated significantly lower number of times with an iPhone device compared to Android (45% less). However, the number of calls to Google’s advertising domains were similar from both devices - an expected outcome since the usage of 3rd-party webpages and apps was similar on both devices. One notable difference was that the location data sent to Google from an iOS device is practically non-existent. In the absence of Android and Chrome platforms—or the use of any other Google product—Google becomes significantly limited in its ability to track the user location."

https://digitalcontentnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/DC...

How? Google respects privacy more than Apple does.

Isn't it because Apple isn't able to make web services that use user data in an effective way? See the failures of Apple Maps, iCloud e-mail, iAd, etc.

People look at older models as older models, even though they may be good enough and may provide software updates for longer compared to many Android phones in that price range. It also looks odd (to the purchaser) when one is buying something that's a four year old model. Android phones, with the range of hardware differences, don't yield to such simple comparisons, and many of them offer slightly better hardware Year on year at the same price points.

Apple probably needs to come up with newer, refreshed (hardware), low priced models to beat this. But I wouldn't hold my breath on such a move happening.

Right, that’s exactly the brilliant insight that made Steve Jobs the genius he was: offer a product that is unquestionably luxurious, yet somehow also widely attainable. Result: the richest, most successful people in the world are sporting the exact same iPhone as my mom.

Perhaps the term is premium.

Gruber has a great quote from Andy Warhol on the subject some years ago: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/01/03/warhole-coke

Hehe. Apple _is_ the Gucci equivalent for phones. There are no better products. And while it's an affordable product for many US citizens this is not case for some EU citizens.

> 'Apple's installed base is 1.4 billion devices. 1.4 billion of any consumer product isn't "luxury".'

it's reasonable to argue that apple isn't a luxury brand ("upmarket" maybe), but citing global sales here isn't very compelling. for instance, 1 device per person would be less than 20% of the world's population, and probably heavily skewed to the richest 20%, so it's hard to accept that on its face.

global median income is on the order of $1,000/year, so most people around the world consider apple a luxury brand, out of reach of the common person.

i'd suggest refining your argument, rather than essentially resting on your perception of "everyone's intuitive understanding".

I think a very coarse but useful way (for me at least) to think of consumer goods is that they tend to sort out into 3 markets: mass market, premium, luxury. In general, mass market is the 80-90% solution for most people, in which products are commodities and the big players tend to compete on price. Mass market products tend to have very low margins but make up for it with high volume.

The premium market is almost all of the remaining 10-20%. Premium should (ideally, but not always in practice) mean that nothing about the product is compromised or half-assed, while still costing not-insane amounts of money compared to the mass market alternatives. A consumer pays a premium price because they like the thing and/or they like being able to assume that it's premium quality even with respect to things they don't know enough to care about. Premium products tend to have fatter margins and lower volume than mass market products, but generally have the greatest success if they can justify themselves to premium consumers. Competitive advantage within a premium market is often value, ironically- best bang for the buck overall, there's just an assumed higher cost of entry vs mass market.

The luxury market is exactly as Despegar wrote. Tiny companies selling very small quantities of tremendously expensive baubles. Value is almost meaningless here. It's the opposite of mass market- it's the other extreme of trying to maximize (margin * volume).

I think the three tiers of mass market/premium/luxury represent local maxima that companies naturally gravitate towards by applied market forces, with perhaps a global maximum somewhere in the premium range. These sweet spots represent healthy places for businesses to be, for the companies, their customers, and their shareholders.

For example, the auto industry: Toyota and VW are mass market, Lexus and Audi are premium, and Bugatti and Ferrari are luxury.

Steak places: Sizzler and Black Angus are mass market, Ruth's Chris and Flemings are premium, and some place in Hong Kong that doesn't advertise or even have a name and that I will sadly never learn about or be invited to is luxury.

All of which is a very long-winded way for me to say that yep, 1.4bil devices is definitely not luxury. Mostly premium (in the higher-cost-of-entry-but-better-long-term-value sense) but still a huge number. Vertu was luxury, and they completely sucked on top of that.

> exploitation of user's private data

You don't understand privacy. If Apple collects the same information as Google, that is just as bad for your privacy as Google collecting that data and doing something useful with it (e.g., allowing you to search your images by content or providing reasonable spam filtering). Of course, Apple collects more information, so it is actually worse (e.g., banking details for developing apps for your own device and location data for AGPS that cannot be disabled).