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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

> aboyt how much Apple cares about users

No company cares about anything. A company is not a person.

Apple, because of its privacy-marketing, is incentivized to be the privacy player in the market. But only so far as consumers keep them honest about it.

They got away with this loophole because it stayed under the radar; if it gets enough attention and enough customers show that it matters to them, it could change.

On the other hand, it's possible that because we have a smartphones duopoly, Apple only needs to maintain a position where people will say "well at least it's not as bad as Google". I'm upset about this personally, but I'm not ditching my iPhone. Of course, this does cement my decision to never pay for iCloud, for what that's worth (much less, but not nothing).

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> No company cares about anything

It's a common misconception that corporations are amoral incentive-driven machines impervious to ethics, morals or mission.

Corporations are run by leaders.

Many leaders choose to pursue unethical and immoral activities to maximize profit. They justify their actions by saying "it's just business", or "we have a fiduciary duty to the stockholders to maximize earnings per share by whatever means necessary".

Other leaders realize that an ethical purpose can often deliver outsized profits over the long term. Leaders with a moral mission make decisions that sometimes sacrifice short-term profits with the intent to build an organization and a brand for long term.

>t's a common misconception that corporations are amoral incentive-driven machines impervious to ethics, morals or mission.

Not really, those leaders are pretty quick to hide behind the corporate veil when it's convenient for dodging questions of moral (or even legal) responsibility.

The whole point of corporate legal structure is to create an entity that is _separate_ from the humans that occupy offices. That entity is not a person.

OK, but isn't this largely semantics? Saying Apple doesn't care about customers may technically be true, but that is taking it quite literally. The statement can also be meant to imply the people in Apple care, of course no one would speculate that a non human corporate entity would care.

I also largely agree that the Apple meme of privacy being trotted out lately doesn't quite jive with this news, but at the same time surely there are people who care about it at Apple, and maybe as a whole they even prioritize it more than others.

But I also don't know how much I really disagree with the FBI's position. In general I have seen this kind of access to be used in the right situations (IE collecting communications of criminals). I understand this can be a slippery slope, but should we trade that for leaving clear evidence against criminals unturned in the name of "privacy"?

The people at Apple who write the code usually do care about privacy. Their bosses and execs? It is harder to tell.

From the information I have, the majority of Apple employees do care about values such as privacy and ethical business practices, as well as product quality and usability, but those values can sometimes be undermined by executive decisions based on business and monetary motives.

That doesn't matter one bit if they continue to work there when their ethics and values are not aligned.

> "That entity is not a person."

the (current) supreme court doesn't agree, and their opinion carries a tad more weight. corporations are basically super-persons in the eyes of the court, since corporations intrinsically funnel the resources of its many consituents, unlike individuals.

instead, any entity exerting outsized power, like corporations, should be held to higher standards of duty and transparency. that's an inherent value embedded in the US constitution that is absolutely being trampled over by power-seekers (commercial, political, or otherwise).

From a distance, to me it's interesting to read about fears of the FBI snooping in our phones and email, and see how quickly the discussion jolts to how immoral (or amoral) corporations are because one of them is not completely defying government.

(part of) how we mitigate unfettered power is pitting powerful entities against each other. the answer isn't "government!" or "law enforcement!" or "corporations!" but rather more even distributions of power, and lacking that, powerful entities in opposition.

that we also rationalize the actions of a corporation (to understand them) doesn't necessarily imply complicity. lacking more evenly distributed power, we should want apple to be pitted against google, the fbi, and the chinese government to funnel apple towards a privacy-oriented stance that it might not otherwise have.

incidentally, (many) americans vehemently support 2nd amendment rights as a way to have some semblance of power in an otherwise overwhelming power structure.

Thinking about long-term profits instead of short ones, and sacrificing profits for some greater moral purpose, are not at all the same thing.

It's entirely possible to do immoral things for the sake of profit while still being prudent about your company's future.

As for sacrificing profits to a moral end: private companies may do this occasionally. Not often, but sometimes. But the CEO of a publicly-traded company expressly does not have the option of sacrificing profits for any higher purpose, unless that directive comes from his shareholders. And in today's world, the shareholders of most major companies are of such a large number and have so many layers of detachment between themselves and the actual company (I don't even know what companies Betterment has me invested in; they can change every day) that the only common goal they can agree on is almost always profits.

An interesting exception to the norm is Facebook: despite being publicly-traded, Zuckerberg maintains both a majority holding and the position of CEO, and is therefore free to go on his crusade of "connecting the world", mostly ignoring what the other shareholders might want.

>> But the CEO of a publicly-traded company expressly does not have the option of sacrificing profits for any higher purpose, unless that directive comes from his shareholders.

This is not true AFAICT. In practice it might be.

to go a little deeper, corporate charters set out the values and goals of the company, as amended by the board from time to time, so it's whatever the (amended) charter says (it doesn't have to be solely profit-seeking). executives are judged by their ability to deliver on the goals of the charter.

baords are largely controlled by the various (professional) shareholders, and most, if not all, of them explicity seek profits above all else. that's one way markets get dominated by profit-seeking companies.

the other common argument is that in capital-oriented markets, not-primarily-profit-seeking corporations are at a competitive disadvantage over time, as the extra profits of greedy corporations can push them faster/further along the technology adoption/innovation curve (or economies of scale/scope).

so it's hard for such companies to survive. i don't think in practice that this is a dominant factor in competitive markets, but it's an argument often made (in business schools, for example).

If the CEO goes against the shareholders' wishes, he or she will simply be fired. The CEO works for shareholders and has no independent authority.

>Leaders with a moral mission make decisions that sometimes sacrifice short-term profits with the intent to build an organization and a brand for long term.

Shortly before being dragged off the stage by the stockholders. Careers have been ruined over not over-performing enough, let alone leading multi-million dollar enterprises off into the desert.

Worth noting that there are benefit corporations, or B-Corps, which get around this 'profits and nothing else' ideology. Some examples include Patagonia, Kickstarter, and Allbirds.

> On the other hand, it's possible that because we have a smartphones duopoly, Apple only needs to maintain a position where people will say "well at least it's not as bad as Google". I'm upset about this personally, but I'm not ditching my iPhone. Of course, this does cement my decision to never pay for iCloud, for what that's worth (much less, but not nothing).

Agreed, and I am likely going away from Android and into iOS for my next phone. It's still a setting you can change so it's not forced into their cloud thankfully.

I wish Microsoft hadn't backed out. A Surface Phone would be kind of cool. I guess too much stigma about Microsoft has held them back from being competitive. I think they shoulda waited for their Microsoft Store to grow much more organically, then release the Windows Mobile phones.

The other issue is Google's agreements.

They botched the original Windows Phone through a failure of management. They botched subsequent pushes on it because the bootstrapping problem around apps had grown too deep. At this point, if they tried to give it another go, there would be trust issues: "Am I investing in a phone ecosystem that's going to be dead in a few years?" Not to mention how much they've gone all-in on Android development.

A Surface-branded Android phone wouldn't be out of the question, but my gut tells me it would die a quiet death from thin margins and differentiators that aren't big enough for people to get excited.

They botched the original Windows Phone through a failure of management

This. I had some Windows Phones besides my iPhones, because I liked very much what they were doing. Windows Phone 7, despite being technically weak (it was based on Windows CE), had an awesome UI. Nokia had some really affordable phones that were really well-built for the price and Windows Phone was getting traction. Quite a few friends/colleagues bought a Windows Phone, because it was the hip thing after the iPhone. The development story was also great, they used .NET and XAML (IIRC), which also made it possible to demo applications on web pages through Silverlight.

Then they screwed over all the early adopters by completely deprecating Windows Phone 7, doing one final release (7.8). None of the Windows Phone 7 devices were upgraded to Windows Phone 8. Most of the traction they had up till that point was lost and they were basically starting over with Windows Phone 8. Windows Phone 7 was already late to the market, the hard WP8 cut set them back even more years. And then it was simply too late.

There were technical reasons for WP7 -> WP8 (such as moving to the NT kernel, adding multi-processing support). But the hard cut was a catastrophical mistake. Either they should have started with the NT kernel in the first release or they should have had a gradual migration route from WP7 to WP8.

And underpinning all of that was the unfortunate fact that this truly innovative and lively new area of development at Microsoft found itself happening at the tail end of Ballmer's tenure.

There was this spark of energy around Zune, and then Kin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin), and then Windows Phone that was just completely orthogonal to the stagnant money-printing strategy that Microsoft followed before Nadella. It was this little glimpse of an Apple-like spirit somewhere deep in the behemoth. It was exciting. But it was always treated as a side thing instead of being placed front-and-center. It's now been diffused into Microsoft's various consumer products, most obviously the Surface, but Windows Phone was already dead by the time things started to change.

Aside: despite all the jokes about it, the Zune (2nd gen and forward) was awesome. It was a little late to the game - it really nailed the traditional mp3/video player right when the iPod touch had just come out - but I think it may've been the peak of that category. Everything from the UX to the hardware buttons was so meticulously considered, the screen was much bigger than an iPod Video, it had momentum scrolling that worked really well despite lacking a touch screen, etc. It did not at all feel like a Microsoft product of the time. It was even one of the first services to offer all-you-can-download, subscription-based music. And you could download songs over WiFi.

I completely agree. In an environment where everyone was just copying the iPhone UI, some of the design ideas that were coming out of Microsoft were really refreshing and exciting. There was really nothing else like it (and nothing like it ever since).

I would love to see how Windows Phone would’ve matured.

Oh man, I had the second gen Zune. It really was so good.

To this day I still think about that little touch/d-pad, and wish something similar had caught on with more devices...

It's very much like the current Apple TV remote. Unfortunately, the latter:

- Doesn't have the hard directional buttons underneath

- Isn't really helpful because you aren't scrolling through hundreds of items like you do in a music library

   They botched subsequent pushes on it because the bootstrapping problem around apps had grown too deep.

I don't really think that is necessarily accurate. Lots of smaller developers would be more than happy to have a green field for app development if another player were willing to put the effort into assuring the device isn't a POS, and is priced reasonably. Some of the larger apps (netflix for example) already have a dozen diffrent versions because they support not only ios/android but a pile of similar devices (TV's/etc) and likely don't have a problem with another platform if it has a future and has the prereqs (widevine or similar DRM for example).

Microsoft literally paid developers to port their apps to Windows Phone: https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/15/4433082/microsoft-paying-...

It's that chicken-and-egg problem where people don't want to use it because it doesn't have the apps they need, and developers don't want to make apps for it because it doesn't have enough users. Microsoft tried to throw money at the problem to middling success. But I think it was too little too late.

I'm not sure why paying developers is a problem to bootstrap the ecosystem. Although, if they were paying for temple run (as the image might suggest) that seems odd. Mostly because presumably they should be targeting the apps everyone uses that don't have good replacements (aka netflix/prime streaming/etc).

I would guess that they aren't the only ones. Do you think LG/Sony/Samsung/roku/apple tv/firestic/etc all got the netflix app ported for free? Maybe. Plex probably isn't getting paid, and they do it too..

But MS was a special case, it seems to me that every time I looked at CE/Mobile/etc they were tossing existing app compatibility aside for the latest and greatest toolkit that went with some not particularly good set of phones.

> But MS was a special case, it seems to me that every time I looked at CE/Mobile/etc they were tossing existing app compatibility aside for the latest and greatest toolkit that went with some not particularly good set of phones.

Their (forward) app compatibility was actually very good. I wrote a WP7 Silverlight app in 2011 that still works on the last release of Windows Mobile 10.

But that was basically quite late in the game, microsoft had been making a phone OS's for ~ a decade at that point. In 2011 it seemed like MS was already putting it on life support.

It was not just any anonymous developers, it was Google specifically making Gmail and Youtube not working on the Windows Phone. They refused to port their apps, and when Microsoft created clones (i.e. Microsoft built Youtube apps) Google made them not work on the back-end and threatened to sue MS.

It was just monopoly abusing its walled garden and being anticompetitive, nothing else. Not that Microsoft would behave any differently, if the positions were switched.

> A Surface-branded Android phone wouldn't be out of the question,

It could run chromium based Edge right away logically.

Microsoft already announced a Surface Android phone: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/microsofts-first-and...

It's supposed to come out later this year.

There's definitely a differentiator, at least. Apparently they've forgotten what happened to the many previous attempts at dual-screen phones and tablets.

Yeah, I forgot about that one, although it's not really primarily "the Surface of Android phones"; it's an experimental form factor that happens to be lumped under the Surface brand because why not.

> A Surface-branded Android phone wouldn't be out of the question, but my gut tells me it would die a quiet death from thin margins and differentiators that aren't big enough for people to get excited.

It's coming.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/3/20895268/microsoft-surfac...

I'd argue that Android, without the Google stuff, is still the best option if you care about privacy and security.

This is not accessible for average Joe, but I'm pretty certain the majority of readers here can use the tools to load an alternative ROM. That you can enable and use F-droid just fine. And are knowledgeable enough to know what apps to avoid.

Ironically, the best phones to do that are Google's own Pixels - to give credit where it's due, at least the phones have unlockable bootloaders (unless you buy the Verizon variants).

eg GrapheneOS currently only supports Pixel 2, 3 and 3a:

https://grapheneos.org/releases

> A Surface Phone would be kind of cool.

They've announced that they'll release a Surface phone this year. But it'll run Android.

> No company cares about anything. A company is not a person.

Personification is a useful concept. Companies do have some mechanisms that lead to consistently different decisions compared to other companies in similar situation.

You're like the thousandth person objecting to the concept of HN, with always the same air of revelatory smartitude. But it's not contrarian insider knowledge. It's simply the inability/unwillingness to understand basic symbolic speech.

Apple cares about me paying $999 for another iPhone in a couple years, along with trying to sell me iCloud storage (that sweet, sweet reoccurring revenue). Now I’m never going to purchase iCloud storage because the feds could snoop in it.

If there is a more secure alternative available then I’ll go with that. Also iCloud backup is now turned off, no need to enable the surveillance state.

> No company cares about anything. A company is not a person.

You're splitting hairs over the definition of 'cares'. I think we all understand what that word means in this context.

> I think we all understand what that word means in this context.

No, we don't, and that's exactly the point.

We tend to anthropomorphize companies. "Good Guy Google" has become "Evil Google". "Micro$oft" has become "Altruistic, OSS Microsoft". Apple has become "Defender Of Privacy". But all of these are illusions created by marketing departments; there is no real sentiment behind any of them that can be used to predict future behavior. And it takes constant vigilance to remind yourself that those narratives are empty.

Persons [edit: I don’t mean in the legal sense] they are not, but do you think it is reasonable to model companies as non-person _agents_? (In the sense of “thing which has goals/preferences, (and beliefs?) and acts so as to further those goals/preferences”.)

If it is useful to model such organizations as non-person agents, then while they of course would not “care”, in the sense of emotions, about things, it would be coherent to say that such an organization e.g. “has protecting privacy as a goal”.

Err, I guess I’m eliding the distinction between “being useful to model as an agent” and “being an agent”, which may be a mistake. I suppose what I should say is “if it is useful to model as an agent, it is useful to treat as coherent the claim that it has goals of e.g. privacy stuff.” .

Even at this late date in the advance of capitalism I think it's still a useful reminder.

With all of the carefully crafted marketing aimed at bypassing the forebrain and making people feel as though corporations care, it doesn't hurt to keep the fact that they don't at the forefront of the conversation.

Corporations can care, they're groups of people; they choose not to on the whole.

"because of its privacy-marketing"

No, it's because they can't effectively leverage your data to sell you stuff, they don't need it.

Thus follows the privacy marketing.

If Apple did find your data useful, they wouldn't be able to leverage that marketing angle.

Companies are made up of people, who care about people, and also, corporate objectives are not evil, generally. Working with the FBI might raise your eyebrow, but it may not for others, and it's an ambiguous question to most.

In the end, the balance of power has not fundamentally shifted. Most people have little to worry about, some criminals may have more to worry about. Of course the problem arises when innocents are needlessly entangled - hopefully this can be minimised. It's not like the FBI has instant and easy access to your phone, thankfully.

Isn't Android at this point a more secure OS? The price for zero days at least is signaling that.

As far as I know the consensus is still that iOS is more secure. Of course there are different definitions of that. Certainly Android is more ripe for abuse by apps downloaded from the store, for example; they can run freely in the background and do things like draw UX over other apps.

Also, privacy != security. iOS is absolutely in a better position on privacy, even after this new development.

iOS has been worse for privacy for a very long time. You cannot even develop apps for your own device without telling Apple who you are or download apps without creating an Apple account. You cannot get your location without also sending it to Apple. Android suffers from none of these problems.

It could be signalling one is a far more attractive target to exploit, because e.g. harden shell, soft interior (M&M architecture). Or maybe Apple patches quicker and gets them out quicker, so exploit lifetime is shorter. Just to be clear, I don't know if that's true, but it's equally plausible explanation for the exploit price

That's a good point- there are nine times as many Android devices out there as iOS devices, making exploits for the former more valuable in certain ways.

The people with iOS devices probably have 9-times the money mind you?

Theoretically, maybe, I have no idea. Realistically, not at all, considering that even flagship Android phones tend to receive updates with an insane delay (except Pixel ones), not even talking about non-flagships or any android phones that have been released 2+ years ago.

Last Android phone I have bought was Galaxy S8+, just a few months after the release. Had to wait about half a year (if not more) for the next major Android update after it had already dropped for Pixel devices.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22108429.

Agreed. Once a company goes public, it is obliged to maximize its profits. The investors can literally sue you if you don't. So, anything considered legal is on the table.

A company does care about things in that it has objectives.

But a corporation is a person.

The inconsistency in that is telling. Corporations demand the rights of persons, yet do not tend to shoulder the responsibilities that come with it [0]. Given how gigantic they are, the consequences are way too costly for the society.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/if-corp...

I think the GP was being sarcastic

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