Tim Cook, Making Apple His Own
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
As a tech person I'm excited and impressed by Apple products, but let's not forget the serious wrongs they have done and continue to do. I personally choose to vote with my dollars and stay away from Apple for this and other reasons.
The crimes in the listed article don't seem that terrible, the exceptional thing about them compared to other companies seems to be the direct CEO involvement and brazen lack of subtlety and subterfuge with which they were done. I'm not saying that these actions were right or that they shouldn't be punished but if you feel that way about Apple I wonder what your thoughts are about Samsung.
Out of interest what tech companies do meet your ethical requirements?
It's the same effect as the Chinese factory workers conditions all over again. Forget that workers at the Microsoft and Samsung factories have worse conditions and lower pay, the story is all about Apple, as always.
Comments like this are not conducive to anything other than trolling or ranting. It might leave you feeling better/good about yourself, but it doesn't help to change the world around you in any meaningful or at least positive way.
I in no way claimed that it was 'ok to kill migrant workers.' I offered an explanation for why people focus on Apple more than other companies. When someone (Apple) paints themselves as 'hip' and 'progressive' (via marketing), people will fall over themselves to point out hypocrisy when they find it. It's just the way that people work.
Get your facts straight: that particular recruiter went to a top VP at Apple, offered them the COO position at Google which didn't exist. Once Google CEO learned of that, yes, they fired that super-pro-active recruiter. This is an instance of a mad recruiter who'll promise the moon to get someone interested in a bogus position. Firing sounds like a reasonable answer to such behavior.
EDIT: I got Apple and eBay confused, as pointed out by comments below. The Apple firing did happen as well, in the now infamous "smiley email".
The original report on that story says “a Recruiter for the ‘Google.com Engineering’ team formerly known as the ‘Site Reliability Engineering’ team” nothing about COO or any other exec position, just engineering. — http://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-st...
2) The incident involving Google and Apple was between a recruiter and an engineer at Apple. Not some VP, executive, etc. http://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-st...
Yes, it's clear revisionism.
For example, Jobs didn't believe in donating to charities. The first thing he did when he rejoined Apple after the NeXt debacle is to cancel all charity donations. After his death, restoring charities was one of the first things that Tim Cook did.
There's also ample evidence that Apple treated its employees very poorly, especially compared to the other Silicon Valley companies (for example, Jobs refused for years to provide commuting shuttles to its employees despite heavy complaints and internal petitions).
There is a reason why Apple has never been even in the top 100 companies to work for.
What could be the reason behind Jobs refusal for this facility?
Shuttles on the other hand, are a controversial elitist perk.
A company requires more than 'pays well' to be a great company to work for, if that's what you're suggesting.
Well, your comment doesn't seem to contradict that point, to be fair.
- Donation policy doesn't relate to employee equality.
- Shuttles: Jobs himself didn't use a shuttle. Employee equality checks out.
So disappointing it was the second best selling smartphone in the US! Is it a law that every article about Apple must adhere to a certain number of press-created fictions?
It is not misleading in the least to say that the 5C was a disappointment. It did not do a particularly good job of living up to its all-but-stated goal of penetrating the lower-income market in the developing world, namely China[0].
As GP said, you would be hard-pressed to find someone either inside Apple or outside who would seriously make the argument that the 5C was anything other than a disappointment.
[0] Nor did it even do a particularly good job of selling to lower-income households in the US (which wasn't even the goal in the first place, but since OP mentioned the US, let's address that). It's hard to say, but inferring from the movements in market share, it seems the 5C ate into 5S sales more than it converted Android or Windows Phone users.
Nope, that's not what they said. What they said was:
>I don't think many people inside or outside of Apple are arguing that the 5C was a disappointment sales wise.
> Speaking to analysts during Apple's Q2 earnings conference call, chief executive Tim Cook stated that 69 percent of iPhone 5c buyers were new to iPhone, while 60 percent had switched from an Android phone. For the cheaper iPhone 4S, the ratios were even higher (although the sales volumes were much smaller): 85 percent were new to iPhone, while 62 percent switched from Android.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/04/26/apples-iphone-5c-a...
What do you mean "its predecessor in that tier"? The all-but-stated goal of the 5C was to break into a new market that they'd previously been priced out of.
For weeks (if not months) leading up to the release of the iPhone 5C there were news reports of Apple's attempt to break into China by releasing a cheaper iPhone. Sure, these were based on "rumors", but since Apple almost never announces their strategy directly, this is how most of our understanding of Apple's strategy has always worked.
Apple's been able to take some market share from ZTE, but not from any of the other main players (Samsung's market share has increased since the release of the 5C).
(Also, your quotation doesn't actually refute the statement I made earlier. I didn't say that the 5C didn't sell to new iPhone users - I meant that, for those new users, the 5C sold to people who otherwise would have bought a 5S (thus eating into their potential profits). That's neither here nor there, though, since the main issue is how the 5C sold in China, not the US.)
Why do you keep using that phrase? You don't get to judge a company's achievement of goals that you have ascribed to it. Or, you can, but to do so is nonsensical.
This is where the fiction lies. You actually don't know what the goal was, but with a statement like this you can manufacture one that hasn't been met.
I think the 5C is part of a strategy that will ultimately allow Apple to address a larger market, but the goal of the 5C was not to cause that to occur immediately, but rather to conservatively introduce a second iPhone without destabilizing the whole product line.
If you consider the number of elements needed to make that happen: new design, new manufacturing, carrier agreements, marketing, etc, the goal here was to establish this second apparatus in a controlled manner. This is why the 5c internals are essentially the same as the 5 - i.e. the engineering element of the strategy is unchanged from before.
The 5c is the beginning point of the strategy, not the end.
The only people who think that the 5c was a disappointment, are those who think slashing prices is a 'strategy'.
http://www.loopinsight.com/2014/06/15/the-new-york-times-sun...
For another totally unbalanced and very hard to dismiss comment (because he's got his facts straight) I'll quote Mr. Dilgers latest piece:
“Unsurprisingly, the article's authors Matt Richtel and Brian X. Chen have to admit early on that Cook "declined to be interviewed for this article." It's not hard to understand why.
Richtel may be best known for his bizarre hit piece castigating Apple for working to sell iPads to schools in 2011.
Chen even more famously skewered Apple for even attempting to sell its iPhone in Japan, where he assured his Wired readers that the nation hated it. He even crafted quotes from people in Japan saying how "lame" the iPhone was, even if those quotes were actually completely fabricated.
Then of course, there's the New York Times itself, the publication Richtel and Chen are currently writing for, which printed its "iEconomy" series exclusively blaming Apple for everything wrong in the industry.”
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/06/15/new-york-times-see...
> With the iPhone 5C Apple may well have created what will prove to be the most popular smartphone in the world
And Apple would have made a lot of money if that turned out to be the truth, both by selling cheaper hardware, and by selling more phones when they bring the 5c down to its knees with software bloat in the next years.
Instead of sitting on its money, Cook is choosing to use some of Apple's cash stockpile for good such as by building 100% clean energy datacenters and beginning to open up to donation to charity/education as well as working to force its supply chain to be more fair on the humans it relies on.
It's a great new direction for Apple; critics could say it's not enough, but it's better than the company was under Jobs in terms of philanthropy.
But that's just like my opinion, man.
It's a specific attack on a specific company that has a long history of hyperbole about its position in this world. I don't swallow things that don't taste good, mang.
But what can Apple "bring to the table?" Well, to quote the variably-attributed saying, "quantity has a quality all its own." Apple can produce something compatible with an ENORMOUS installed base of active users, and can make a difference. Just getting people to exercise more would be great. By the end of the year they could have 10X the number of users fitbit does. Nobody else can do that.
Note I'm not trying at all to claim they are angels: they are definitely out to make a buck. And they can make a great product or they could make a lousy one. They've done both. However I think, based on where they are right now, they will try to make something actually useful and beneficial.
You could do much much worse than to keep the distinctiveness and high standards of Jobs's Apple while weeding out the bad idiosyncrasies a tyrant can leave behind. And doing that while preventing the oversize egos of a bunch of 3/4-scale Jobs wannabes from exploding over each other. Tim Cook's Apple is less random, but otherwise much the same as Jobs's, and that's good.
Isn't it enough to be the competent keeper of a visionary's flame without turning a business into a museum, or a self-parody? Eventually Apple will need to be really different from Jobs's Apple. But not for a while.
They have a limited number of SKUs. Apple makes a few good products, each one representing the Apple brand in all its glory. The vertical integration from hardware, to software and cloud is something nobody else can do except maybe if Microsoft if it gets serious about the Surface (despite the poor sales).
It might be true that we see less of the innovation that the Steve Jobs era was known for, but they haven't changed at the heart. They're keeping their design quality, their finish, and the vertical integration. Apple isn't making any junk and exploiting its brand and deceiving its customers with shitty products.
Having said that, it doesn't mean that Apple's products are for everyone. I don't like iCloud and I don't particular like iOS, but even so I can see the value in what they're doing.
As compared to...who, exactly? They have an ad network, and they have a cloud product - by definition they're holding onto as much of your data as any other company in those businesses.
Huh? Who are you comparing Apple against? It sounds like Google/Facebook/Twitter but they are advertising honey-pots rather than product companies.
The more accurate competitor category includes Microsoft, Samsung, Dell, Sony, HTC etc. Like Apple, their first business is to sell product... but they will sell adverts too if they can.
http://www.macrumors.com/2014/02/18/apple-iad-stingy/
"Apple's unwillingness to share large amounts of consumer data is hurting its iAd business, according to Madison Avenue media buyers that spoke with AdAge. The company is said to be "downright stingy" with the information it shares, too slow at developing ad products, and "too reticent to foster relationships." "
For all the promises of "only seeing ads for things you're interested in", data-mining based advertising has been a colossal flop from my perspective as a consumer. We've surrendered a tremendous amount of personal information and gotten hamfisted targeting attempts and obnoxious "viral" campaigns in exchange. It makes me nostalgic for the stupid but well executed beer commercials of the 1980s. Not giving away all your personal information is not the same as not being good at advertising.
The privacy implications of their respective offerings are quite different. Gmail actively scans your email looking for keywords, while iCloud is not ad-supported and does not read your email. AdWords makes your web searches follow you on the sites that you visit; iAd does not allow your Internet activities to affect the ads that are displayed. Google's servers log what I searched for, and Apple's do not. Etc.
If you genuinely think they give a tiny shit about your privacy you're incredibly gullible.
While this would represent just a fraction of Apple's overall profits, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
The Apple fan club on HN is strong and tolerates no dissent.
This is also technically correct: let’s assume Apple made $500M in iAd revenue in 2013 (his upper bound); they made about $150B in revenue in the same year, which makes iAd 0.3% of the revenue. That is clearly what’s driving the business.
He isn't technically correct. The GP provided a factually correct statement.
> That is clearly what’s driving the business.
By no interpretation is that statement even technically correct.
> Apple makes money from you buying their products, not from selling ads. They therefore want to respect your privacy, compared to, say, Google.
was poorly worded. More precisely, TazeTSchnitzel used “makes money from” instead of “exists thanks to” or some more appropriate phrase. The response
> Apple made $125 million from their ad network iAd in 2012.
replies to that wording error, ignoring the bigger argument. This could've been an honest mistake—the parent did use figure of speech instead of precise term, after all—or an intentional use of fallacy.
Then the thread spirals into discussing whether TazeTSchnitzel or JohnTHaller is correct (both are and both aren't), and now ends up with HN meta-discussion.
Literally every other company selling you hardware?
>by definition they're holding onto as much of your data as any other company in those businesses.
Retaining information and letting others see that information (privacy) are not mutually exclusive. Swiss banks store all sorts of private information, but are known for protecting their customer's information and privacy. Implying that Apple storing that information is the same as them letting someone who isn't you see it is dishonest and wrong.
Because almost all of Google's products are server based, they gather far more information about your behavior than Apple. Where is Apple's equivalent of Google Analytics, Adsense, and Search History, tracking you all over the web?
Also, when it comes to personal data such as email, Google openly reads your data to support selling your attention to the Advertisers who pay the most to influence you.
Apple doesn't examine your data to support the interests of third parties.
I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'.
"Apple has graciously relaxed its NDA for new technologies, meaning that we don't have to wait to talk about all of the shiny new toys we have to play with."