Comment by jb1991 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jb1991 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't really understand the tone here. Do people really believe there is "evil" motivations in Apple? How about Tesla and its control over your vehicle? Windows also phones home frequently and has advertising built-in.

I get that many in the hacker crowd don't like this, so the obvious solution is, don't buy those products.

But for everyone else, it's not this big downer of a problem. This is the only time this has happened to me personally, and probably to most, and the way it affected the machines has been pointed out by many to be a bug that will likely get patched. Will it still phone home to Apple? Probably. But if there is an outage, it will not likely cause problems like this in the future. And personally I don't care if my machine phones home to Apple. Life is too short and I get too many other benefits from using a mac to care about this.

People are confusing their own individual preferences for the technology they wish to own with the larger motivations of the masses.

> Do people really believe there is "evil" motivations in Apple?

I prefer them not to give them a chance to be evil, rather than trust them not to be.

You're right, life is too short to be upset about it, but at the same time, it's not something you should feel comfortable with.

> I prefer them not to give them a chance to be evil, rather than trust them not to be.

That's a good way of putting it.

It's safe to say a sufficiently large company doesn't care about good and evil, or any other kind of moral question, pretty much by definition. They care about making money. They'll do anything legal they can for that goal, as well as continually test and push the boundaries of what is legal, and lobby for different laws at the same time.

A very small company might care about other values, but I simply don't see that happening when you get to the stage of venture capital and shareholders.

Edit: Likewise, a hungry bear isn't evil.

> People are confusing their own individual preferences [...] with the larger motivations of the masses.

No, I don't think we are. We're lamenting the motivations of the masses.

Most people want something that 1) looks pretty, and 2) "just works". The advantages of something objectively better (let's assume there's a metric we can agree on) would have to be exponentially greater than the effort to make it work in order to make most people bother with the switch.

On top of that, it's a psychological defense mechanism to simply ignore bad things. Certainly if the effort to fix them is great.

And that gets us to "I don't care if I'm spied on."

It's not that I want to spied or don't care, it's more that it just doesn't overwhelm the decision to use Apple products. I don't care enough about it for it to affect my choices. And the reason for this is: the alternatives. There are none that are genuinely better. There are trade-offs. Can I use my Adobe suite on Linux? Not really. I'm enamored by the relative purity of Linux but I know it would use up a lot more of time in my short life to do certain things compared to a commercial OS, and my time is my greatest commodity.

Is Windows overall a better choice than mac? No, it's just different. Every Apple product I've owned has outlived products from other companies by an average of 2x, so I'm also saving a bundle in costs over the long term. (I used an iPhone for seven years before I upgraded to the iPhone 10, and my old iPhone still works perfectly but just doesn't support the latest OS).

I think the problem is that motivations widely vary and there is nothing wrong with choosing something that "just works" the vast majority of the time.

It's the hypocrisy of Apple using privacy in their marketing and then turning around and doing this.

That’s not really hypocritical if apple is doing this to help ensure that malicious applications are not running.

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