Sorry Apple fans in advance for what I'm about to say

[nicelymanifest@mastodon.social]

@eniko What business can operate with a bewildering disinterest in a trillion dollars accumulating in the bank while still overcharging customers - by intent?

Amazon treat staff, and presumably also suppliers and competitors badly too often, but at least they try to serve customers well.

[tacitus@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@eniko

Apple's philosophy has always been "my way or the highway" and, for the people who liked Apple's way, this worked, all th decisions were made for them. But now they are seeing what everyone else saw, when you don't jive with the One True Opinion, you're SOL. It's love it or lump it in the Apple ecosystem.

[jameswidman@mastodon.social]

@eniko but in the space of companies that ship CPUs that are suitable for development (so, a decent number of high-performance cores)...

are there any non-bad guys?

like, Lisa Su attends the same dinners as Tim Cook. AMD is manufacturing exactly the type of gen-"a.i."-supporting hardware that should never have been built (and which we must now organize to dismantle).

so while apple's leadership is clearly horrible, it seems more like they're *a* bad guy as opposed to *the* bad guy

[jameswidman@mastodon.social]

@eniko like, sure, the *walled* garden clearly makes apple one of the bad guys, but if every manufacturer is directing its resources to support "a.i." to such an extent that most people can't afford to place themselves in *any* kind of garden...

[malwareminigun@infosec.exchange]

@eniko @catsalad this is a carrot and stick, and Apple took away the carrot.

[kevingranade@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@eniko @deshipu yea they pretty much went straight from "breaking in to the industry" around apple II era to "immediately pivoted to being world leaders in extractive practices".
The thing they've been super good at all along is PR and image management so they don't get the hate directed at companies with similar practices like Adobe and Oracle.

[nazokiyoubinbou@urusai.social]

@eniko People will fight you tooth and nail to defend Apple's position on the pedestals they have built for them.

Apple has had one of the most successful business marketing campaigns I have ever seen in my lifetime. Even some like Bose who actually literally cheated (building special sets to make their products sound better than they were) has been less successful than Apple who has created such diehard fanboys that they will literally camp out a week in advance in the cold to buy it at 6am on release day when a new product is announced.

You tell them "but it's locking you in to this walled garden where you pay 2-3x as much for 3x less and you can instead just do this other stuff that gives you all sorts of options and control over your own purchases" and they go frothing at the mouth.

[nazokiyoubinbou@urusai.social]

@tacitus @eniko It's not even "my way or the highway." It's just "my way." That's the whole purpose of the walled garden. They don't even want to let people leave if they don't like it...

See the recent case where someone found out the hard way that if their account is locked because of a bad gift card they no longer have access to any of all the stuff that they have only inside their Apple account...

The sickening thing is, they teach people to set that lock on the gate themselves. It's Apple's lock, but it's the person themselves who actually shuts it even though they don't have the key.

[nazokiyoubinbou@urusai.social]

@lesley @eniko Yeah, Apple started off as the alternative to big business. See the famous superbowl ad where they do a whole anti-1984 style of thing. It was a valid point. At the time.

Then they switched it. Now they're the 1984, everyone gathered together doing what the company leader tells them.

It was a long time ago now, but they sort of rebranded themselves a long time ago. I'd say in particular, when started focusing more on fashion, making everything prettier, etc. It became less about offering the product that gave legitimate alternatives and more about getting people locked inside the walled garden more and more from there on.

People remember those iPods, clear shell Macs, etc etc with nostalgia and fondness, but they were (more than anything else) where this started.

[freeagent@mastodon.sdf.org]

@eniko I hate that phone choices these days come down to Google or Apple. There is no good guy option (at least anywhere close to mainstream).

[foriamcj@infosec.exchange]

@eniko

< fire emoji .gif >

[brazmogu@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@aeva @eniko they even had "Do No Evil" in their terms of- wait, no, wrong evil corporation