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by WorldMaker 734 days ago
At the heart of it: I feel like I'm Apple's customer in a way that I never feel like Google's customer (in everything they do it always seems like their real customers are Ad Buyers, even when you are ostensibly paying for services). (And Microsoft is in the middle and all over the map where some divisions treat you like a customer and others don't depending on the prevailing winds and the phase of the moon.)
2 comments
dfxm12 734 days ago
What leads you to feel this way?

They are anti right to repair & they have their walled garden on their mobile devices. Their vertically integrated model also leads to unusually high prices. This website in particular would also directly feel the pain of Apple killing apps to implement themselves later, the greedy apple store cut and also not allowing use of hardware features that Apples themselves can use. Consumers feel this indirectly (higher prices, less competition).

Also, don't get it twisted, Apple is still collecting all of your data, even if you ask them not to [0].

0 - https://mashable.com/article/apple-data-privacy-collection-l...

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WorldMaker 734 days ago
There's absolutely several axes in play here. You have very different concerns than I do, and that's valid.

Their vertically integrated model leads to very good customer service. I don't pay extra for Apple Care and I still get treated like an adult if I show up to an Apple Store with some need.

Even when Apple makes a mistake and collects more data than they should, I don't expect that data to influence ads that I see or to be sold to the highest bidder. (As a developer myself, I find that I can be quite lenient on app internal telemetry.) I can also see that ad review is barely a small side hustle to them in their Quaterly Reports and I can also see that most of their ad revenue is from untargeted campaigns. (Microsoft is a bigger ad company than Apple. Google is an ad company deep into its DNA at this point with everything else a side hustle.)

There is a beauty to a well maintained walled garden. Royalty invested a lot of money into walled gardens and Apple maybe doesn't treat you exactly like royalty, but there's a lot of similar respect/dignity there in their treatment of customers, even if they want you to trust them not to touch the flowers or dig below the walls too much. They want you to have a good time. They want their garden to be like a Disney World, safer than the real world.

You may not appreciate those sorts of comforts and that's fine. Plenty of people prefer the beauty and comfort of a walled garden than the free-for-all of a public park (or the squatter's rights of an abandoned amusement park if you don't mind playing unpaid mechanic more often than not). There's a lot of subjective axes to evaluate all of this on.

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dfxm12 734 days ago
I don't expect that data to influence ads that I see or to be sold to the highest bidder.

You should temper your expectations: https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-france-ads-fine-illegal-dat...

France’s data protection authority, CNIL, fined Apple €8 million ... for illegally harvesting iPhone owners’ data for targeted ads without proper consent.

If ads are a small percentage of Apple's quarterly reports, that isn't sound reasoning; after all, they make a lot of money in general in a lot of areas.

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disgruntledphd2 732 days ago
And if ads are leading to services growth (which they are), you should expect them to do more, scummier ad related things over time.

Fundamentally, ads is an incredibly high margin business with lots of room for growth (particularly when you own the platform and can handicap your competitors) so over time, all tech companies will become ads companies.

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rekoil 732 days ago
Holy shit that is so depressing...
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rekoil 734 days ago
Yeah that's pretty much how I feel as well.
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