[dahfizz]

Apple comes to mind as a company with some degree of long term vision and strong leadership. They are meticulous about maintaining their brand, and so far have resisted the enshitification.

They also have more cash than they know how to spend. So maybe the pressure to increase revenue this quarter is just lower in general.

[Nemi]

If you don’t think that this goes on at Apple, I have a bridge to sell you.

Just food for thought - why do you think that the ipad (with the same processor as the laptop) has not gotten more capable over the years? They can’t figure out how to do it? No one on the ipadOS team has the brains to make it happen, or it just hasn’t occurred to them? Or maybe there has been an internal conversation and they realized that it would drop the sales of Mac machines below a threshold where fixed costs outweigh the mac team’s ability to stay afloat (pure speculation on my part)?

Make no mistake, Apple is no paragon of virtue here. I love their products (though they also frustrate me), but the company is largely the same as Google and Microsoft in ethics.

[dahfizz]

I am not personally a fan of Apple products for exactly this reason. I think the user experience on all their products (iphone, ipad, mac) is not good out of the box and is really restricting in what you can do.

But, I still believe Apple is trying to make the best products they can. Their design philosophy is heavily opinionated, and therefore a lot of people don't like it. Google's core mission is to slurp up user data & sell ads, and they are willing to make their products worse for the user to satisfy that goal. I don't think Apple would intentionally make a product worse to boost some short term metrics in that same way.

> why do you think that the ipad (with the same processor as the laptop) has not gotten more capable over the years?

I think Apple has consistently shown that they don't really care about power users. Why can't I snap windows on a mac? Why can't I customize the launcher on an iphone? Apple doesn't care about that use case. They stuck an m1 into the ipad because they already make them and its a super power efficient chip; they still have the same product vision for the ipad.

> Make no mistake, Apple is no paragon of virtue here.

Certainly, no company is virtuous. I think its more about incentives. Apple is incentivized to make good products and maintain their brand. Google is incentivized to sell as many ads as possible.

[wizzwizz4]

They also destroy perfectly good computers with their trade-in system, reducing the resale and spare parts market. This would be the plot of one of those environmentalist children's cartoons.

[TradingPlaces]

They resell them here https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished

[wizzwizz4]

From that page:

> If your device isn’t eligible for credit, we’ll recycle it for free.

Per https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphon... (2017, so it might have changed since):

> Apple rejects current industry best practices by forcing the recyclers it works with to shred iPhones and MacBooks so they cannot be repaired or reused—instead, they are turned into tiny shards of metal and glass.

> "Materials are manually and mechanically disassembled and shredded into commodity-sized fractions of metals, plastics, and glass," John Yeider, Apple's recycling program manager, wrote under a heading called "Takeback Program Report" in a 2013 report to Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. "All hard drives are shredded in confetti-sized pieces. The pieces are then sorted into commodities grade materials. After sorting, the materials are sold and used for production stock in new products. No reuse. No parts harvesting. No resale."

Recycling is not a good thing: it is an expensive and intensive industrial process. Recycling is a last resort: if you have to make new stuff then sure, recycle, but it's better to avoid making new stuff by (a) not needing stuff in the first place, and (b) maintaining and repairing old stuff for as long as possible. Whatever happened to “reduce” and “reuse”?

[dahfizz]

> Recycling is a last resort

It sounds like that's exactly what Apple is doing though?

>> If your device isn’t eligible for credit, we’ll recycle it for free.

If they can, they will resell the device. But a 5+ year old phone with a busted screen and dead battery is just trash. There is nothing to do but recycle it.

[wizzwizz4]

Scrapping the phones for spare parts would still be possible. This is usually standard practice for electronics recyclers, but the recyclers working for Apple are (were?) forbidden from doing that.

[lazide]

There are no true saints in the world. But some monsters are much worse than others.