Ask HN: Why hasn't Mark Zuckerberg banned Apple products? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why hasn't Mark Zuckerberg banned Apple products?

10 pointscarlycue21 comments

Zuckerberg has made it very clear to his employees that Meta and Apple are in a philosophical war and only one can be the winner of the AR/VR future. Apple also put a massive dent in their ad business (-$10B yearly income) with the introduction of Do Not Track in iOS.

The question becomes, why haven't he banned Apple products in their offices? You can see employees with MacBooks and iPhones everywhere inside Meta and Instagram.

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Because even if Meta itself or its employees contributed $50M in revenue through the purchase of apple products in the office the difference is negligible to Apple's bottom line so the associated loss of productivity or even mild annoyance of employees wouldn't be worth it.

I wont work on windows. I suspect a bunch of the industry feels the same way.

I would say you can use Linux desktop, but after being convinced by some fanboys that the days of hardware incompatibilities are a past if you don't use the latest hardware - I tried installing it on my desktop. Downloaded fedora, booted into a black screen - won't even show display output on my Nvidia 1050 GPU with display port output. Unfortunately Windows has gone downhill with 11 and CLI is still shit on Windows, Powershell is wonky, cygwin and msys2 are a constant source of headache.

MacOS is just miles ahead of competition these days if you need a stable OS with nix userland, my only complaint is docker performance is garbage.

Yes I tried recently too. Then I realized that all my work and problem solving energy should go to work not setting up my workstation.

When I was younger in my career I enjoyed this, but not so much anymore.

Sorry for answering with a question… but it’s an obvious one: how would Meta benefit from banning Apple devices?

They would certainly lose a lot of money in the process with no clear win. Other than, perhaps, an authoritarian “Zuck said so” posturing that might make a few disgruntled individuals feel temporarily satisfied.

What would that achieve except pissing off employees?

That would be a great way to upset enough employees to meet their attrition goals.

Some employees are going to need to use Apple products because of their job, obviously. Others have strong preferences. Others may not want to deal with a forced migration.

facebook needs employees far more than the employees need facebook, most of them could probably get a job in another megacorp pretty easily. you don't want to get the reputation of being a "petty bullshit" place to work.

Look up the percentage of US cell phones that Apple makes. They're also something of a status symbol, so a higher percentage of high paid Metazoans will own iPhones.

He just can't, a lot like some high tech companies can't do drug tests.

Because they aren’t competing in the hardware sector. And as others pointed, it would annoy the many employees who use iProducts. Also it would add to the narrative of Zuckerberg becoming slowly unhinged.

Meta is not a hardware company. They make software for iOS, macOS, Safari (Apple), Android, Chrome (Google) and Windows (Microsoft).

I bet you also didn't know that Apple uses Samsung parts in their devices, or that Ukraine is transporting natural gas for Russia and get paid for it. It's a whole new world out there when you are not blindly zealous for no reason.

Meta most definitely is a hardware company - Oculus (selling lots), Portal (not so much), etc. It's obviously not their biggest source of revenue, but denying its existence is ... weird.

I indeed forgot about those, but to be fair the VR market is a niche. VR doesn't have a broad appeal. AR might make it, but Apple has a big advantage there.

It's the same problem and fate adobe had. Adobe should have STOPPED all flash/photoshop/reader products to apple early like 2005. Instead they played along and slowly died. You will hear the same reasons "security!".

I am trying to break down your response and none of the parts make sense. Adobe should have discontinued its OS X lineup in 2005 and only decided against that in the name of security? And now in 2022 because of that fateful decision Adobe is dead?

Adobe removing support for their products in Apple products would have just created a void that someone else would have filled.

Adobe isn’t dead

They still need their apps to run on Apple platforms. The ban you’re thinking of might have some benefit for VR tech, but even then they’d lose insight into their competition. Does Samsung even ban iphones?

Because he’s not 12 years old.

Probably the same reason Tim Cook doesn’t ban Facebook for Apple employees.

The other Facebook Inc. enemy is Google.

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