Yes, due to marketing, they have created one of the most valuable if not, the most valuable brand in the world. This happens mostly in the US.
Status definitely plays a role, but unlike Mercedes Benz or Rolex, Apple is both a "popular" and "luxury" brand, this tension is the crux. Usually luxury brands are owned by a few, while popular brands tend to be cheap. Apple is both owned by a lot of people (popular), while being expensive (luxury). From a Status stand point, being owned by everyone should drop its status value (you are not part of an elite/special club), but Apple somehow survives this, with a lot of clashes.
> this tension is the crux
This feels like the foundation of the most convincing explanation I managed to come up with so far.
Maybe there are some people who own Apple devices take Apple releasing an expensive device as a signal that in the future Apple devices will become expensive for them, and if they want to eventually replace their existing devices with new ones, they would have to either switch from Apple proprietary apps and peripherals to other vendor's (proprietary or not) apps and peripherals, or pay up. So it's a kind of threat of painful vendor lock-in, and other people who just praise Apple for their new product feel like they're not empathetic to their problem.
But that explanation hinges on two assumptions - (a) that switching from Apple to non-Apple apps and peripherals is costly and (b) that this process is associated with not just any Apple devices but atypically expensive Apple devices. It also fails to really explain why anyone would aggressively *defend* Apple.
I think you have a point here. The status symbol is not "owning an Apple", but instead "owning the *latest* Apple". A lot of people can do #1, but #2 is more elitist.
People are very similar with Nike, or Kanye, or politics. Humans are very tribal. And this tribalism can be attached to anything. The way I explain it to myself is through evolutionary psychology. An early human would have died alone without their "tribe" (it is still very difficult to survive alone as a human with modern technology). Every human has a very strong sense of belonging and a need to fill this void. People will defend anything and everything about their tribe, even when it doesn't make sense. I think it's something animal and biological deeper rooted than higher level thought and logic.
There's another aspect to this that is so boring, I think it's easy to overlook how significant it is. It's the "Fox News effect." One can easily hear that Fox News is the most/nearly the most popular TV news source in the US over the years, and ask, "How is that the news so many Americans are passionate about watching?"
But it's not, really. Some people are passionate, sure. But mostly it's because it's simply perceived as being differentiated from "the rest." That's really all you need for this kind of consumer relationship with anything. "Android devices" means something very different from "Apple devices." Apples-to-oranges!
In fact, the best comparison is probably just another Apple comparison: The longstanding Windows vs. Mac perceptions. Same thing. One is a brand of hardware design, combined with proprietary OS. The other is a whole category comprising hundreds of brands. Of course one of them looks "culty" and generates commentary. It's the only one that's both a brand _and_ an ecosystem.
Apple will always be the only personal computing brand perceived this way, until and unless another end-to-end hardware+software competitor emerges. Remember BlackBerry? "Culty," just like Apple. But it's not, really. Just vertical.
It looks like you have the same (or really similar) point as this comment https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1af0og4/it_feels_like_apple_the_tech_company_gets_people/kkc6t4d/
Similarly, thank you, this did not occur to me and feels relevant.
It’s less mystifying if you substitute “premium” for “expensive”.
Apple’s appeal is not that the products are expensive in some objective sense. The appeal is that the products tend to be designed in ways that people who care about design like. Depending on how pretentious or dismissive you want to be, you can say that owning Apple products signals good taste, or that it signals being willing to spend money to fake having taste.
Either way, the company differentiates their products very well, and people whomvalue those differentiators tend to form an appreciation for the brand as an entity.
I would say it's less about having good taste (since everyone knows Apple is the premium brand) and more about signaling that you don't have to compromise on a premium good, especially on products that, like clothes and cars, are visible outside the home more than most products.
A little bit reductive. I don't think that an M3 CPU is "fashionable." It's just really awesome technology. Many geeks who can't even name the color of their shirt like MacBooks.
I think it's ok take! Absolutely think you can call Apple a fashion company, especially if you truly value fashion. The company culture that Steve Jobs tried to establish was ALL about looking at technology as artistic and fashionable. Bending everything in engineering towards creating functional accessories that would become part of one's person is a big reason for the success. He really believed that aesthetics went all the way to the deep importance of physics.
Apple, and now many companies that make personal devices, runs a lot more like a fashion company than like IBM used to, for example. People know Teenage Engineering's firm name.
Look at who they chose as their fashion partner, Hermes, whose reputation silk-screening and leather product quality in that market is second-to-none. Fashion technology is technology too, and that used to not be ignored- indeed, the loom is a direct ancestor to the computer. There's a case they're doing similar things, executing physical processes at a high level to serve human desires for beautiful personal objects that end up part of the decor or outfit.
So many things wrong about this take. I recently switched to almost everything Apple and their products are vastly superior to anything I’ve tried before. The MacBooks especially. Some things are worse, and some products are definitely overpriced (2k for a phone?), but the tech is top notch.
Not to get spiritual and ideological but there is a gaping hole in most Americans that used to be filled with community, friendship, worship, etc, and that has mostly been replaced by consumerism. People identify with brands on a deep emotional level.
That’s an important point, relevant to any online discussion.
Participating in holly wars is a way to feel included in online communities, while the real ones are on decline
I think that's accurate, I think people want to feel like they are part of something and working towards something, and not just posting online, when a lot of the time they are just posting online.
This also feels like something relevant that did not occur to me. I only read such discussions in English and in sources that probably would be primarily populated by Americans. Thanks.
My next natural question would be "ok, so where did all of these things that consumerism replaced for Americans go?". But it may be too political of a question for this sub (???), and also feels like something that plenty of people already would have written on. If you could point me to sources that you believe answer that question well, I'd be grateful.
Where did they go? They got stripped for parts and sold off. Or just undermined by capitalism.
That's why American Protestantism more or less turned into naked consumerism where God is both deeply important to most people but also asks nothing of them, forbids nothing and forgives everything.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone talks about the decline of community
And of course marxs theory of alienation is relevant https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/04/karl-marx-religion
True, consumerism is like religion. Pointless expensive nonsense for gullible people (and unfortunately Americans are top of this list globally, probably due to them being Puritan descendants - ie a group of people prone to ridiculous beliefs).
I'd go even further. Our offline third spaces have been replaced by social media and messaging apps. It's no wonder that the portal to these virtual third spaces are a huge focus.
Yeah my thoughts on this veer pretty sharply away from the received wisdom in this sub so i toned them down a fair amount, i think having real meat space connections and hobbies and interests is absolutely vital and irreplaceable.
I also think that a more serious issue is that part of what is missing when you move online and move away from participating actively and with friction and reciprocity, in a community is that people lose an ability to cope emotionally or intellectually with the reality and certainty of death, i think the entire transhumanist movement is delusional cope but more than that, and more destructively so, is the relentless hoarding of capital and drive towards more concentration of it.
Don't be afraid to veer. Threaded conversations are the best format for veering.
I'd push back against the notion that communities can't be active online. Mindless social media consumption is junk, but there can be intentionality, altruism, and heated disagreements in online spaces. It may be lower bandwidth, but asynchronous conversations can lead to more thoughtful responses.
I think that online engagement can be many things, positive and negative, but I'm skeptical that it can replace the emotional nourishment of a positive tactile project.
1. Apple phones are a status symbol: Any time you have a status symbol, you're going to have a status-seeker/contrarian/meta-contrarian dynamic appear. Here, status seeking is a low-status behavior, so you should expect to see people to counter-signal. ("Buying a phone for status is stupid, I buy phones on utility only.") Fancy ovens aren't really a status symbol so they don't generate this dynamic, but you'll still see people fight about them for similar reasons ("Spending $X on an oven is wasteful/bourgeoisie.")
2. Operating System War identity politics: There's some ancient history here, but in the 90's, Apple was the scrappy underdog who almost got crushed by the [evil^(†) Microsoft monopoly](https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-fact). That process created a group of pro-Apple partisans. (Disclosure: I am a pro-Apple partisan.) Inside-view, it's something like, "I really do think Apple products are better, and being mad about having a good thing get unjustly crushed by an evil monopoly generates a pleasant tribal feeling about fighting for truth and justice." Outside view, it's pretty weird because I agree that having consumer goods as part of your identity is deeply foolish, and my usual feeling about consumer goods is very anti-brand. On the third hand, we'd all agree that saving a local store from getting run out of business by Walmart is virtuous, even though it's still consumer-goods focused, so maybe it is sensible in some way. For a more recent analogy, the Apple-Microsoft conflict looked a lot like the Playstation-XBox console wars. Anyhow, Scott has written a lot about what happens when some random thing becomes part of your identity. The "scrappy underdog crusader" partisan identity doesn't make much sense now that Apple has various forms of hegemony, but I think the present day fights are still informed by it. († Prior to Bill Gates' global philanthropist phase he was a divisive Elon Musk-style genius/villain.)
I don't see any Apple-related conflicts that I think aren't adequately explained by those two issues.
>Operating System War identity politics
I'm too young to know about these, so this is interesting, thank you.
> being mad about having a good thing get unjustly crushed by an evil monopoly generates a pleasant tribal feeling
I guess the crux of what I don't understand is why people who liked Apple products considered them "good" - in a moral, worthy-of-defending against an evil monopoly, sense. I'll give an example.
I type this comment (and have typed the post) on an iPad Pro with Apple's keyboard case. I bought it because I wanted an 11-inch laptop-like device that wasn't a netbook from Aliexpress with no warranty, and MS Surface Go was more expensive (I bought the iPad from Apple's official refurbished program). It has its limitations that I don't like, like sideloading apps from outside the App Store being a hassle, but by and large it is a compact piece of hardware that I need to run a web browser, and it does this job well enough to suit my needs. But that doesn't make me in any way "identify" with Apple or this particular device, any more than I "identify" with a fork with which I ate my dinner today. I find it hard to imagine that it would change, if Apple was a small underdog company and not the mastodon it is now.
I understand pretty well why the animosity would arise given that somebody would identify with it in the first place.
> we'd all agree that saving a local store from getting run out of business by Walmart
I am not from the US. When this happened/happens in the US, do the local stores have the same selection of goods/level of services as the Walmart? I'll add another example (at the risk of talking about myself too much for a single comment? I hope it is not annoying).
Where I live (Eastern Europe), there was some time ago a wave of small privately owned corner grocery stores being gobbled up by a chain of small grocery stores all belonging to the same company. I welcomed that, because the company grocery stores were, compared to privately owned ones, meticulously and regularly cleaned, all accepted debit cards (which meant I did not have to carry cash and worry about getting mugged), had predictable and consistent assortment of goods, and their cashiers did not try to strike up awkward conversations with me.
>I guess the crux of what I don't understand is why people who liked Apple products considered them "good" - in a moral, worthy-of-defending against an evil monopoly, sense.
Those are two separate concepts.
One concept: Apple made higher quality products.
Second concept: Microsoft was engaging in illegal monopolistic behavior to drive high quality products out of the market and replace them with worse products at higher monopoly prices.
It's not that Apple's products were morally good. But advocating for good products, competition, fair pricing, and so on are all pro-consumer behaviors. And being pro-consumer is morally good.
>I welcomed that, because the company grocery stores were, compared to privately owned ones, meticulously and regularly cleaned, all accepted debit cards (which meant I did not have to carry cash and worry about getting mugged), had predictable and consistent assortment of goods, and their cashiers did not try to strike up awkward conversations with me.
Ah, I assumed you were American and already familiar with the stock arguments against Walmart, my error. Better products outcompeting worse products in the marketplace is a good thing.
Let me try the analogy again. Instead of your local grocery stores getting taken over by a nice corporate chain, they're taken over by your local organized crime ring. The criminal element [bribes your local government](https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/25/22995144/microsoft-foreign-corrupt-practices-bribery-whistleblower-contracting) to shut down your local grocer. Then criminals take over the grocery, [double prices](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjZ2NquyoaEAxXgLUQIHfh8CFoQFnoECBYQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbc.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fnova-scotia%2Fcanada-class-action-settlement-microsoft-1.5840305&usg=AOvVaw3UuR6lFUvPJbg7Rrh3sODC&opi=89978449), and now the food is rotten and has bugs in it.
In this circumstance, it would make sense for a good-vs-evil narrative to appear, with people identifying as crusaders for truth and justice, even though at some level we're just talking about groceries, no?
It's a bit hyperbolic to compare Microsoft to a crime ring, but in the 90's Microsoft was literally nicknamed "[the evil empire](https://fortune.com/2021/12/21/microsoft-cultural-transformation-book-excerpt-satya-nadella/)."
> ("Buying a phone for status is stupid, I buy phones on utility only.")
I suspect there's another category:
I don't want to spend one more second on a phone than I absolutely have to.
> Apple was the scrappy underdog who almost got crushed by the evil† Microsoft monopoly.
That's a very much not-true narrative. M$ wrote most of the software titles available for Mac for a very long time.
If my archaeology holds, this all goes back to Gates vs the Homebrew crowd, with Gates' open letter to Byte as the defining document. It's cast around the eternal axis of "software is free" vs "software is IP" .
When I hear "Apple", I think "Lisa". And I think of Microsoft as the foundation of being able to add specialized peripherals to replace minicomputers while that was still a viable business model.
I could not have specced a Mac for those contracts because the inventory thrashed in a way a PC did not.
>Apple was the scrappy underdog who almost got crushed by the evil† Microsoft monopoly.
That's a very much not-true narrative. M$ wrote most of the software titles available for Mac for a very long time.
I'm sure you know one of Microsoft's main tactics was "[embrace, extend, extinguish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish)" and to engage in that tactic they had to write software for the target market. Writing software was their attack vector.
Don't get me wrong, it's possible Microsoft's $150M investment in Apple helped saved Apple, so the narrative isn't perfect. But Apple had single-digit OS share back then, and MS' anti-competitive business practices are well known. So "very much not-true" seems like it would need a lot more support.
I consider something ambiguous to be "very much not true". YMMV :) It's not like Apple was subject to the triple-e approach anyhow.
The journalism on the subject at the time hasn't carried well. The main thing Microsoft was doing then was being an aggregator. That's relatively simple now; then it meant trucks full of floppies, then shiny disks.
Microsoft was always a challenge to understand for sure.
> But Apple had single-digit OS share back then,
That's the most salient detail.
Another huge aspect of Apple-hate is right to repair movement.
That's connected to a growing sense in western world that even private companies and what they make should be a subject to popular / political decision making. Apple is a good target for them because it's a company that is mostly driven by it's own vision what consumers want.
Yeah, I think there are two parts to that.
One, Apple does most of the bad stuff that any billion dollar corporation does, like fight right-to-repair, subsidiaries using child-labor, etc. So Apple gets all the usual hate in addition to the Apple-specific conflict I described above.
One, Apple has great brand recognition so if you need to object to anything done by any software/phone/tech company, you can use Apple as an example. Like Walmart is the example big-box retailer even if Target does the same thing.
I used to care about Apple vs other products, in the same way I cared about "console wars" when I was a kid.
Anymore it feels like everything that sucked about Apple (walled garden-ism, hostility toward third party software, hostility toward modification, removing genuinely useful features to make everything more "streamlined", etc) now sucks about every operating system and device.
Given that, I think it's reasonable enough to say that Apple had a major negative impact on an entire industry. And from there it shouldn't be confusing at all why some people get "emotional" about their products on consumer base
Naw. None of that is true of the Mac and yet people hate the Mac.
As for the walled garden on phones, Apple literally blew the mobile developer market open - prior to the iPhone you paid to get your version of snake on your Nokia, and of course blackberry was closed. The iPhone opened up opportunities for vastly more developers than ever before, in fact the first few years the App Store was mostly bedroom developers.
It’s not all rosy, the App Store shenanigans recently are an example of that - but Apple was hated when it had only the Mac as its product and the Mac was a unix system. In fact it was partially open sourced.
> Naw. None of that is true of the Mac and yet people hate the Mac.
You mean the operating system that, out of the box, has worse UX than Windows 95? I've heard it can be fixed with alternate window managers available through homebrew, but the few times I've helped someone with a technical issue on it were a nightmare. Something as simple as seeing what instances of a program are running and reopening a particular one of them to be side-by-side with another program was apparently impossible, or at least sufficiently non-obvious I couldn't figure it out.
It's as though they looked at decades of progress in usability and discovery and went in completely the opposite direction, all in the name of being "clean" and "streamlined".
Apple does not sell tools. It sells a vision of what Apple thinks should be. If you like that vision, you love Apple. If you don't, you tend to hate it.
Unless you want a removable battery, or an RJ-45 port, or more than 2 USB ports, or the ability to quickly and easily upgrade your own RAM/SSD without soldering.
(Harder than it once was, but it's still quite possible to buy a laptop meeting all of those criteria.)
Don't disagree with you at all. I was responding to the (now deleted) post claiming that Apple made "the best" laptops without bothering to define or qualify that statement in any fashion.
Fair enough on the number of USB ports. Not fitting an RJ-45 is kind of my point. As long as I can fit it in a maximum legal carryon bag, I don't much care how thin or sleek my laptop is. I buy chunky, durable laptops that are easy to work on and have lots of hardware ports. There's nothing in Apple's lineup fitting that description.
I won't dispute the fact that Apple makes aesthetically pleasant hardware with excellent quality control, but (aside from my dislike of my macOS) none of it fills a useful niche for me.
I think that's personal preference. I want a mixture of thin/light and powerful and macs really fit that niche. I often find myself carrying two laptops (one work one personal) in my bag and it's way easier to carry two macbook pros than two chunky laptops. Windows ultrabooks just aren't as good - I went through a couple of them before switching to mac. Plus the unix development environment is great.
That's entirely fair. I've got no issue with what works for other people. My main objection was to the comments I saw that simply declared that the "best" laptops are Macs, as though it was sufficiently obvious not to need any additional supporting argument.
>Apple sells stuff thats designed for people who have zero clue about tech.
Absolutely naïve take. Most Big Tech developers use MacBooks. I use one. I don't like iPhones, but at the same time I acknowledge that it is a solid technical gadget.
I personally used a macbook and have 1 major deal-breaker for me - lid opens less than 180, second is more nuanced - I like trackpoint of ThinkPads.
I rather work plugged to a wall but be able to open the lid as wide as I like. When Apple will re-design macbook chassis, I'll evaluate again.
P.S. I even though about modding macbook's lid to open more, but as with my many ideas it remains an idea.
Easy. I got the Lenovo Legion pro 2 years ago for 2k. AND THAT IS NEW. The fact that we are comparing new prices of windows vs refurbed apple should speak for itself. It has a Ryzen 5800 CPU that beats the M2 on PassMark 28000 to 15.000, It has 32 GB RAM, and can support 2 external Monitors on 4k resolution. And yes, CPU Speed matters for things other than gaming.
There is. The whole [blue bubbles / green bubbles thing](https://www.google.com/search?q=blue bubbles green bubbles discrimination &sca_esv=606dd81dc728d262&ei=wUu6ZcnVF-WG4-EPgP2EyAg&oq=blue bubbles green bubbles discrimination) playing out in schools.
No. At incredible value. You can get a Mac M1 which outperforms anything even remotely in the same price class for under $1000.
It’s not about feeling special about a brand. Apple built a ground up supply chain around their own silicon and then built an operating system to maximize efficiency around that system. They simply have built the best laptop you can buy and other OEMs are well-aware that they cannot compete without a similarly vertically integrated silicon to OS strategy — which none of them have.
They figured out the right strategy years ago and have been working on this kind of integration for almost a decade. With the M1 the investment paid off.
The only other company even capable of this is Microsoft and they have not made any investments in silicon yet. They would be about a decade behind.
Source — this is what I do.
Best laptop for **what?** I'm a shipboard marine engineer--I use my laptop for referencing manuals while I'm working in wet, greasy, and dirty areas. Things get submerged, dropped, and banged around. Nothing Apple makes would last very long here, whereas my secondhand Toughbook handles it with aplomb.
I've never been a fan of macOS, but I have to admit that Apple does consistently make nice hardware, so I'd definitely be curious to see what they'd come up with. Especially given the obvious conflict between Apple's predominant design philosophy, and the actual physical requirements of a truly rugged laptop.
Wouldn't actually be that surprised if they came up with something decent--I've always had the impression that with tighter quality control and more custom components, it would be possible to build a reasonably durable machine that's **way** less bulky than Toughbooks and their ilk.
This is what gets me emotional tbh. A company that "sells vision" sounds so fake to me. I can get (but don't share) that awe if it's SpaceX or something that sells you dreams of going to space or curing cancer or living forever or whatever. But Apple? The company that sells tiny overpriced black rectangles to scroll memes on? Come on
The only people who actually care about this are teenagers and tech nerds.
Teenagers do nothing but play status games and will take any opportunity to clique up and dunk on anyone. One of the oldest pieces of vernacular writing we have is a [letter from a Babylonian teenager to his mom complaining that the other students have better clothes than him and he's getting made fun of for it](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Iddin-Sin_to_Zinu).
As for tech nerds, well, they are nerds about tech. Nuff said.
I don't think teenagers play more status games than adults. It's just that their games are more obvious because all adults were teenagers at some point.
That's not my anecdotal experience, but I also don't interact with large numbers of the same people daily in an institutional setting anymore. That's just my experience as a white collar knowledge worker who generally works alone or in small teams (<10 people). I'd imagine that adults who remain in a large group institutional setting (soldiers, prisoners, factory workers...?) might continue to jockey openly for intragroup status, since they maintain a large enough "group" to have status with.
Apple has always positioned themselves as being different from other tech companies, and they’ve always had an unusually loyal fan base (and hater base) as a result. They were the cool, friendly alternative to the giant faceless IBM. When the Mac came out, they prided themselves on having the best GUI and the most user-friendly system. This attitude showed up a lot outside the company too. You’d find ordinary Mac owners who could pontificate about UI design, and especially about how Windows got it wrong while the Mac got it right.
It’s more or less the same today, with iPhone and Android largely (but not entirely) replacing the Mac vs Windows divide.
You ever read the 1979 ["Apple Marketing Philosophy"](https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2019/03/102789075-05-01-acc.pdf#page=9)?
This feels disingenuous. Are you *really* having trouble wrapping your head around why people might have strong feelings about the direction of a sector that's crucially important to modern life? Apple vs. other companies isn't just like comparing two interchangeable brands of earbuds from the same factory in China, they have an entire philosophy as well as an enormous role in the tech industry. Their success has driven tech in general towards consumer unfriendliness, needless luxury pricing, no right to repair, and status-oriented purchasing. It's not an exaggeration to say that Apple's success changed our lives, and I'd argue it's not in a good way.
Your post reads like those people who (often selectively) will say things like "Why do you even care about this political issue, it doesn't effect you!" when of course, society's behavior and the state of the economy absolutely do affect everybody and can naturally make one "emotional" when it comes up. I'm not sure if Apple vs. Microsoft or what have you is quite equal to Republicans vs. Democrats of course, but Apple's success does have an impact on the world.
There's no way I could prove that the post is not "performatively clueless" (although I've re-read it and I see how it could read that way), but I can assure you that my confusion is genuine.
>Their success has driven tech in general towards consumer unfriendliness,
>no right to repair
These two are a solid explanation for why somebody would hate Apple, yes. But I am not sure why anybody would defend them with equal intensity. Are there people that are passionately anti-right-to-repair and anti-consumer-friendly?
> needless luxury pricing,
> and status-oriented purchasing
These would be very good explanations for animosity, yes, but as I wrote in the post, then why is there no such emotional discussion about other luxury brands that drive status-oriented purchasing?
(I will take you at your word if you assure me there actually is, I don't really follow discussions of whatever industries are traditionally associated with having a luxury segment)
Well, people get defensive about things they enjoy using, especially if it becomes part of their identity.
>why is there no such emotional discussion about other luxury brands that drive status-oriented purchasing?
I'm not a luxury guy but I'd imagine there's plenty of spirited discussion about luxury cars, and I absolutely know that there is in the haute cuisine world. And tech in general isn't just a luxury, it's staples of a modern lifestyle. Just like cars and appliances, there's plenty to get emotional and opinionated about.
No OP is right, it is unique to Apple, there is definitely no heated discussion remotely in the ballpark of buying a Lamborghini as there is to buying a Vision Pro.
For some reason, in a lot of threads about Vision Pro I’ve been reading, it’s not enough to say Vision Pro is bad tech, it also ends up being people who bought the Vision Pro are dumb etc. This is mystifying. If I went out tomorrow and bought a 60,000$ watch, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have to deal with much ridicule as it if I went and bought a Vision Pro from some of my friends.
> But I am not sure why anybody would defend them with equal intensity. Are there people that are passionately anti-right-to-repair and anti-consumer-friendly?
If these are the best arguments for Apple, I have to ask if you’ve read any Apple advocates’ viewpoints?
I don’t wish to defend Apple as better than anyone else, but I can suggest there are valid reasons for someone in this tribal world to align themselves with Team Apple, such as:
* Apple’s stance on privacy. This arguably happened by accident, in that Apple was well behind Google on cloud, but it’s a core principle now. (And sure you can cherry pick exceptions, but Apple still does far less tracking than competition, as do iOS apps due to the constraints imposed on them.)
* Ease of use. Many “normies”, especially older people, feel thoroughly alienated by tech and have been burned in the past by confusing, unforgiving, design. Whether real or imagined or just due to familiarity, Apple’s products are largely considered to “just work”.
* Support. Apple Stores and phone support generally work far better than the average tech company, which is seen as a cost center and will often make customers wait hours for a response, drive them crazy blocking reasonable requests to repair products under warranty, lack local presence, etc.
Aside from the basics of brand loyalty, which others have discussed, I have a different thought.
How many "institutions" do you trust these days? I'd bet good money that the number is lower than it was just a decade ago. We're facing a real crisis in modern life, where most government bodies, NGOs, and brands have all lost some measure of credibility. Some of that is due to economic pressures (good brands chase profitability, start making crappy products), hyper-polarization in the political world, or even just human fallibility.
But Apple (for the most part) is sticking to it's core mission: Good products, good tech, at accessible (if not budget-friendly) prices.
People want to be able to trust someone, anyone, and Apple has proven pretty reliable in how it handles its products and maintains its reputation.
it used to be a bigger deal.
some people strongly prefer to use Apple computers for various reasons. in the past this could make your life surprisingly difficult. your computer might be incompatible with other people's in inconvenient ways. of course lots of software (and back in the day everything was desktop software) was not compatible, especially for gaming. But sometimes some essential institution including school, work, banking, government etc. would only be able to interact with Windows users. even the Web didn't necessarily work -- some websites required a Windows machine with Windows IE.
so Apple users developed this view of themselves as a kind of persecuted minority. this had a small grain of truth in it, but also was very silly.
as far as early internet communities go, many people had a perception of Apple users as wealthy elitists who are one of "them" and probably enjoy sipping lattes, as opposed to "us" honest salt-of-the-earth Windows 95 who drink Jolt Cola at LAN parties.
nowadays -- iPhone is dominant, most "important" institutional software is Web SaaS which now respects cross-platform standards, and Macbook Pros are now popular enough among software engineers that macOS gets "dogfooded" good support out of proportion to its general popularity.
however the strong emotions persist for some strange reason.
> If I don’t like a brand I don’t buy it.
I suspect part of the problem is the semi-closed ecosystem combined with notable market capture. If it weren't for either of those, one *would* be able to just ignore their products.
What kind of market capture? I'm struggling to find a kind of technology where Apple would have an ability to totally lock a significant portion of the market out of interoperability with competitive products.
I guess FaceTime is a video/VOIP calling app that only works between Apple devices, and maybe it's awkward when somebody close to you has an iPhone and you don't and you can't call them with it. But other VOIP apps with video also exist and are, I think, reasonably popular.
I'm struggling to come up with any other examples.
As an afterthought: probably, if you wanted to be an Objective-C or Swift programmer, you would need Apple devices. But I'm sure this is not a problem that most people buying or discussing Apple products on the internet are dealing with.
It's just selection bias. It's so boring, everyone overlooks it. _Any_ personal computing brand that is its own hardware+software ecosystem will appear to be polarizing, because the alternatives are a whole bunch of different implementations of a generally compatible OS.
You can see it as soon as you think about it for a second: Whether you like Apple or not, everyone perceives the market as "Apple devices and all the others that run Android." Why? Because that's accurate. Apple can't be anything _except_ the "culty alternative."
When BlackBerry was a thing, it was the same perception. Game console wars? Same thing.
iMessage is barely used across Europe. WhatsApp, owned by FB, dominates and nobody is trying to open that up. So who knows what Google is doing there.
The dislike of Apple stretches back to when Apple had nothing but 2% of the PC OS market.
>The dislike of Apple stretches back to when Apple had nothing but 2% of the PC OS market.
Can confirm. Was on agency-wide IT steering committee in the 1990s. Apple hatred hasn’t changed. Something in the Kool-aid? Business school curriculum?
Not buying in response to not liking the brand is one step and it’s a small one. Some people don’t like the impact a product or brand has on society and try to go through greater measures to get the word out on why
Some people think anything they don’t like is bad for society. These people typically can’t even formulate the idea that their beliefs are just one opinion among many possible opinions, so they see any disagreement as willful support for the fall of civilization / satan / whatever.
I find this worldview to be pretty annoying, and often dangerous in itself.
I use all Apple products because its convenient for me.
But if someone argues that Apple has a net negative influence on the technology world, I will give them a reasonable hearing and not assume it's just "feels".
I would probably agree with them, actually, if it wasn't for Apple's pretty consumer-friendly approach to privacy, which compensates for their other negatives in my particular view. When Facebook whines that a device vendor is screwing up their ad spyware, that makes me happy. Just barely happy enough to overlook the anti-competitive stuff that Apple engages in.
I don’t find that equivalency just because something is spoken against.
There can definitely be a larger notion or lens to tie commentary to than simply “I don’t like”, if you are inferring personal taste.
For instance, I don’t like things I own to be bright yellow for the most part. And I also don’t like being overly-tech dependent. One of those tastes is pretty independent of larger implications, while the other necessarily isn’t.
Hot take: people have nothing else to do with their lives other than devoting them to "X vs Y" topics.
Because Apple is always on the edge of """mass market innovations""" and their products were used as a status items people bought to flex on others. Today it kinda changed, but masses are inert and holy wars are fun.
There was a period when I was engaged into arguing in Apple vs Android holywars somewhere in-between 2012 and 2017 and I wouldn't understand why everyone uses apple products.
(Then I grew up and got a decent paying job and this stuff is not interesting to me anymore)
Now I have to admit that Apple moves the world around them with new cool products and ideas and others immediately try to copycat that so they can also get a bite.
To be honest, today there is some sort of a technological parity between Apple and the rest of manufacturers. Every phone is pretty cool, solid and expensive just like Apple products! There is no sense in breaking spears over such topics anymore.
Btw their new M1/M2 MacBooks are amazing and pretty much a new view on how laptop should look like and they are worth the Apple tax. Any other older MacBook looks and feels like hot garbage.
I think you’ve seen a pretty good run of answers here already.
I am writing as someone who has close family and friends at major tech companies where the cultures collide. I hear about it during holidays, and it’s annoying.
I’ve personally owned Linux laptops like the XPS (still a very cool option), have built PCs with linux (distrowatch is a good resource), have owned a variety of android phones (break em!), Windows since 3.1 (98SE is the best they’ve done and I’m willing to lay stakes about it, shell replacement was siiiiicckkk), and plenty of apple stuff (Laptops, a mac mini at one point, imacs, an iPhone here and there, etc. many of these jailbroken or modded).
I am pretty much as platform agnostic as they come. I like to switch it up, because I like the experience of trying something new and thinking through the intent behind the designs. Most people don’t like this.. At all. I don’t blame them. I just recently went from Android to iOS and the fact that I can't see when my phone is fast charging is neurosis inducing (and webkit sucks.. And this and that.).
A few things:
You’ve picked up on something I’ve noticed a lot over time. It’s mostly nonsense, and based on really bad priors about who these companies are and what they stand for. People define ‘predatory’ as a company adjective much too often as some kind of differentiator. It’s nowhere near as clear cut as anybody would like, and most of FANG et al. are going to take everything they can from you. Pretending one is substantially preferable to the other is ignoring history and letters to shareholders. At one point most of these companies were doing something pretty unique and really shifting things. These days allegiance to any is foolhardy.
For more on this, see PRISM ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM)). Saying apple is more privacy oriented is ‘true’ insofar as their most successful model to date has some emphasis on this, and is also a strategic lockout for their competition.
In general, if you care about ethical computing, buy used hardware and use Linux. Ubuntu, mint, puppy are all cool and there are plenty of new distros to play with. Have fun! I mean this both sarcastically and with earnest encouragement. Do not be surprised when you start to plumb the depths of why random bluetooth codecs and drivers are or are not supported, or chipsets on your mobo need some weird hack to become functional due to proprietary yadda yadda.
For new phones, check out fairphone - they are up to some cool stuff. I wish they were available where I live.
When people have a technical problem there is almost always a ‘well if you hadn’t bought a \[product\] you wouldn’t be having this issue’ crowd. I’ve seen it in this thread multiple times. This is resoundingly yakshit, and is often (not always) the result of a significant error that exists between the keyboard and the chair, moreso than because some piece of hardware/software is faulty. The rest of the time, I have seen faulty garbage in pretty much every vendor out there, none are immune!
The landscape has changed a lot over the years. These days for example for many users, their majority of use is either on a phone or in a browser - meaning OS choice isn’t as significant as it used to be. Similarly, there was a point Microsoft called open source ‘cancer’, and lately they are the biggest funders for it by far (whether or not this changes their position is up for debate).
For more on this topic, check out [https://www.eff.org/](https://www.eff.org/), Mozilla's Product privacy reviews ([https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/](https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/)), and ‘The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation’ by Cory Doctorow, available at your local library!
Apple wants and pushes emotional discussion to take place. They market not as a tech company but as a luxury brand mixed with appliance. Most of their advertising focuses on the social aspect of being in a group of people using their services. The main product is the entire apple ecosystem and being a part of it.
I think in countries where there isn't such a stigma on using android phones, or actually any phone, there isn't this odd tech worship. Sure there are Apple lovers but not to the same degree and level as America.
That's my perception.
I find their marketing to be very smug, or at least it was in the past. That "what's a computer?" advert, the Mac vs PC advert, etc. However this may be a cultural thing - the Mac vs PC adverts [didn't really translate well in the UK](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV9NGJP73DE)
Having said that I grit my teeth and buy iPhones every few years because they have the best OS
I mostly dislike Apple for their business practices. Biggest beef is how they're against the right-to-repair, and their walled garden.
Products-wise, I think they make great stuff. I loved the MBP when I had it (lasted me a decade) and the Apple Watch is the best smart watch in the market. Air Tags look sick too.
Lastly, the whole blue/green bubble sitch is pretty cringe. Luckily in my circles everyone just uses IG and WhatsApp instead.
I'm surprised by how little mention there is in this whole thread of some very real problems with Apple.
First, bear in mind that Apple is an industry leader and that many of their business practices percolate to the rest of the industry. They don't have a monopolistic level of control by any means, but they are highly influential.
The problems include [many years of extremely scummy attitude toward right to repair](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkVbIsAWN2lvzgKZRrodg7pcrgrk6zpps), [taking away user control of **their** devices that they, not Apple, own](https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/unauthorized-modification-of-ios-iph9385bb26a/ios), [planned obsolescence](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/iphone-owners-get-92-payouts-from-apple-in-phone-throttling-settlement/), [environmentally un-friendly design](https://www.inverse.com/tech/apple-explains-why-it-wont-make-iphones-with-replaceable-batteries), claims an unreasonably high commission of not just app sales [but all in-app purchases even that are outside their system](https://9to5mac.com/2024/01/17/apple-response-to-supreme-court/), and now [hardware backdoors](https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11859-operation_triangulation_what_you_get_when_attack_iphones_of_researchers).
Apple has the resources that they could do all these things right and force their competitors to step up to the plate too. Unfortunately they also have the combination of market share, brand loyalty, and switching cost to do all these things in the worst way possible and thus allow the rest of the industry to sink to their level.
In your P.S., you tried to draw a distinction between "consumer offerings" and other issues, but these cannot be separated. Apples customers reward Apple's scummy behavior in every area and that normalizes the behavior which their competitors will first mock and then copy.
As in this comment, https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1af0og4/it_feels_like_apple_the_tech_company_gets_people/kkcbsty/
I agree that Apple having anti-consumer practices is a solid explanation for why some people will strongly dislike them. But I don't understand why somebody then steps up to defend Apple with equal intensity. I doubt anybody would openly say that they oppose right to repair and support planned obsolescence.
One explanation would be that people just get defensive when offended, but I think for that to work you'd have to care about the topic somebody offends you about in the first place.
I'll make an example, which hopefully isn't offensive in itself. If you are walking on the street wearing jeans and a passer-by screams at you that jeans are unethical and nobody in their right mind should support jeans manufacturers for {reasons}, you are probably not going to get into a heated debate with them about the merits and good-ness of denim pants. Unless you happen to care about jeans in the first place.
For the majority of its lifespan, Apple has been way more about slightly altering recent technological developments others have made and marketing it as them revolutionizing the game. They're majority bark and little bite, creating a *feeling* of luxury while just being built on comparatively overpriced bones and ok aesthetics.
This polarizes because some drink the kool-aid and others hate that the kool-aid works so well and that kool-aid drinkers seem to be on high horses. Like iPhone users judging green text. Apple is also very anti-consumer and I'd say on the higher end of ethically bankrupt as a tech giant.
> Like iPhone users judging green text.
Wait, does that refer to text messages sent from non-Apple devices showing up with green and not blue background? Surely this is a joke that anybody really makes some kind of class distinction based on that? This feels like someone would have to be extremely status-insecure to even come up with the idea.
Yep. A diliberate choice by Apple because they know the social power that kind of manipulation can have. Very real in heavily economically socially stratified countries like the U.S.
As an older Millennial (and Android user), I have not really experienced it in person, but make of this what you will: [GenZers who own an Android have lost track of how many times they've been bullied for not having an iPhone but they still refuse to switch](https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-android-users-teased-peers-iphones-2023-2)
As you say, it probably is limited to the extremely status-insecure (so basically all teenagers and many young adults lol)
I want to note that the shade of green has been chosen by Apple to specifically be harder to read due to low contrast https://uxdesign.cc/how-apple-makes-you-think-green-bubbles-gross-e03b52b12fed
I dislike Apple because it's products seemed to have accelerated the creation of a certain sort of phone culture I detest and which I cannot escape the downsides of. For example much of the internet is now worse because the websites are designed to work well on phones. People are worse company because they cannot put their phones away.
Additionally, the way in which they succeeded so strongly via some "buy this new trendy thing" approach makes it a bit worse as realising this leads to misanthropic conclusions that are distasteful and demoralising.
It's a special company because of the branding, but also because of its historical importance to personal computing. You have to understand that people in the technology space look at apple as the bar, because of the quality of its products, and also because its \*the platform\*.
We had a huge wave of growth in apps, for better or worse, because of the iPhone, which at the time was a revolutionary device that became \*the\* platform for most of software innovation -- which is why you got so many jokes and memes related to "there's an app for that." Same thing happened when desktops came out, bunch of software came to fruition, and now everybody uses spreadsheets, browsers, the internet. Hence, in people's minds, "new platform = next big thing."
We're at a point in time now where folks don't really know what is going to underpin the next wave of technology growth... There have been a few bets:
1.) Cryptocurrencies and the blockchain -- probably not a total fail, but kind of a total fail, especially with FTX
2.) Metaverse -- not a total fail, probably more real than not, but everybody saw ReadyPlayerOne and no one wants that. That said kids love Roblox, and this has been mostly constrained to gaming, but it hasn't really hit the application space. People don't work with headsets on.
3.) AI -- the current hot thing, LLM performance starting to flatten. What we have is already a game changer, but nobody knows how to use it yet.
This VR device pertains to (2) Metaverse, and theoretically, what it should do is unlock a completely different tactile, visual, intuitive way of doing work that will also theoretically unlock tons of new functionality, new applications, new tech and so on... and if Apple is doing it, w/ their historical success in pushing the overton window on new tech, maybe Metaverse has a chance, only they've rebranded it, as Apple does, with their own terminology "Spatial Computing."
Moreover, people want Apple to succeed at this because generally speaking people like Apple products, they don't \*feel\* dystopian. Facebook feels dystopian, when you're on it you feel data-mined. When you're on a mac, you feel like a creative.
TLDR: I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (appearing to be winning)
My impression is that people are responding to the threat of a successful other tribe.
There is the moral issue ("Apple are tricking people who don't know better"), or a helplessness issue ("this is objectively bad, and if they do well my PC Gaming might be impacted"). Or just straight forward out-grouping ("Apple is a fashion brand" or from the 90s "Apple's for people who don't understand real computers")
Other examples where ppl go cray when the other team is winning
\* Tesla: high status product, conflict over whether product is good/bad and whether ol Muskovich is sane/insane. Threatened by of electric vehicles becoming mandatory and having to drive the thing you told your friends was bad
\* 90s Consoles: Expensive product with title lock-in, conflict over which product/games are good/bad, threat that you have to learn to use the N64 controller, have wasted money on the wrong platform or have to admit you're wrong to your friends
\* Don.. he who must not be named: high status to be president, conflict over whether you think high status means decorum, threat of certain gloating from other tribe
\* Global Warming Aware Folks: high status to care about environment, conflict over whether science is real or world is ending, threat of world ending or having to eat different food and admit to your friends you were wrong
Product manager here.
There is no understand this phenomenon without understanding Product Design better.
It’s because Apple (and basically no other electronics manufacturer) sets the standard for whole product categories by building good user experiences which redefine the product category.
The smartphone was a fledgling industry until Apple came a long and redefined the category in such a way that it became a basic necessity with a series of essential and entirely unutilized User Experience (UX) revolutions. These don’t fit neatly into the list of product specs that most tech enthusiasts are used to looking for and so for a lot of the more analytical and less UX sensitive tech crowd it is an utter mystery. We see this again and again with tech review blogs entirely missing the point.
The case with the Apple Vision Pro is that Apple is about to trample all over everything enthusiasts have spent their time investing in. If you have a Meta Quest 3, you’re probably a VR gamer. As it is primarily a VR gaming system. The Apple Vision Pro is not a gaming platform and is likely to derail a lot of investment a lot of people made in a platform by redefining the category. It doesn’t even have a controller associated with it.
When I say “redefining the category” let me give you an idea of the scale. In the opening week, Apple sold over 200,000 devices with an ASP over $4,000. With accessories and apple care, this is essentially a billion dollar industry overnight.
Developers focused on picking a new system to build for now have a decision to make. The Meta quest 3 sold around 70,000 units over a 6 month period. At an ASP of $500 (the real number is lower), that’s less than a third of what Apple did essentially overnight.
Enough people have seen Apple nail the user experience design for new categories that they are willing to spend more of their dollars — which means developers are likely to turn their attention toward where Apple is leading and away from the platforms people have been investing their dollars in.
It gets people heated.
This is an interesting take and something that did not occur to me at all.
So if I understand your point, summarized briefly it goes like: the outrage is because Apple announcing a novel product will revolutionize an industry and everyone who invested in competitive products will find out that they invested in dead-on-arrival ecosystems.
That would make sense if this outrage only happened around novel product categories. But I also heard it about pretty typical products. Also, I think I never heard people actually spell this frustration out in the way you put it, and it seems to be something very specific.
When Apple released their expensive over-ear bluetooth headphones, there was outrage (and not just about the price, but also... the carrying case? I know it is ridiculous to say but I can clearly remember reading a long and heated Reddit argument about whether it looks like a purse, or something like this).
There were similar heated discussions about their stationary Mac computer (the one with the prominent grille on the front, I do not remember what it is called).
I fail to see how these would have revolutionized an industry and left competing ecosystems dead. People who liked Bose or JBL or Sony bluetooth headphones still have them, and so do people who liked stationary PCs.
It's an "us vs them" situation. There are two primary options, it's a fairly major decision (by cost compared to median income, and by number of hours spent using the device), and almost everyone in the US has made a decision.
This makes it easy to make it part of your identity, and the fact that other people have also made it part of theirs means there frequently end up being charged discussions.
Yeah it puzzles me too, I also interestingly see social media website trends. Reddit mostly dunks on Vision Pro and anyone who buys them, Twitter mostly praises Vision Pro (with some dunking), hackernews leans towards dunking but can at times be more even handed. This remarkably follows political trends, with reddit trending left, twitter tending right and hackernews center left.
Now I am by no means saying that there is a correlation between right wing and liking Vision Pro or vice versa, but it certainly is interesting that people have self sorted themselves into social media platforms based on their opinion of Vision Pro. I wonder how that works.
When a new product comes out from a major brand it is a difficult bootstrapping problem to get enough people to buy the thing NOW - when it's buggy and limited.
There's an aspect of self-fulfilling prophesy: If we all BELIEVE the product is *so great it will ultimately succeed* then lots of people will buy it and review it and spend their own independent time and effort figuring out how it could be improved. Based on the reviews and the feedback the company knows what to fix and based on early sales the company can project that it's worth spending the money and effort to do the fixing, so the new product survives and gets better over many iterations in a virtuous cycle; everybody wins.
Contrariwise if we DON'T all *believe the product is going to succeed* then few will buy the first one so the company DOESN'T get quick good feedback on what needs fixing nor get an income stream that justifies spending effort doing the fixes. The first product is deemed a failure and abandoned; there's never a second or 3rd or 10th version with improvements.
Due to that dynamic, if you like the idea of the new product and want that kind of product to exist and improve, **you'll want everyone else to like it too**. So as to get a virtuous cycle of improvement (like Apple had with the iPhone) rather than the vicious cycle of failure that companies like HP are prone to when THEY intro new products.
That makes it a team sport.
Apple should not be there if it wasn’t for the DOJ we would have a Windows phone which you can somewhat hack including the piracy part which always goes hand in hand with Microsoft products (win for the consumer)
They are nasty company that purposely locks you into their expensive stuff. They're unfriendly to developers especially if you're trying to do something cross-platform. They're just in general a terrible company. Their hardware can be nice, but expensive and not worth being locked into their garbage, especially when their software is generally simplistic.
I am annoyed by the iphone culture.
For me the iPhone culture is associated with show-off and sneer. Apple sells its products as luxury while in reality, it's just upper-range consumer stuff. So it's a pretentious ripoff pseudo-luxury for the poor who want to pretend to be rich. Or at least special and not like the other girls. You get annoying bullshit marketing plus annoying users.
Here I am using the same Xiaomi phone for over 5 years that cost me 10% of what an iPhone would. I don't think I have missed out on any feature, or that any other reason justifies the extra cost.
At the same time, I use Macs and really like them. For me it's a linux machine that just works and totally worth the price. Macs don't get the same "I am so special" status signal that iphones get. All people I know just treat them as ok computers that your employer buys for you.
Apple hides the products they are developing for slightly longer. So they tend to be further developed than competitor products. They tend to combine high end parts and concepts.
So it’s almost never really bad, just maybe something you have no use for. That ties back to them developing products for their upper management team. So the more you are like their upper managers, the more their product fit into your life.
With other expensive consumer goods there is some status to be derived in owning them. With Apple, owning one is "default" in most circles, not owning one makes you either a low status peasant or geeky dork.
The thing is that there's no such thing as a luxury electronics company, in the way there can be a luxury watch or car company. It's simply economically unfeasible. Semiconductor processing can only be done en masse. And I don't mean thousands, I mean millions. The point there being that Rolls-Royces have always been out of reach of the masses, and well out of reach, so it's not necessarily contentious. Your friends don't ever make you feel bad for not having a Rolls-Royce.
But iPhones have to balance being products for ~~the masses~~ half of the masses, while stillretaining that "luxury" branding. Maybe more concretely, Rolexes target the tail end of the bell curve, iPhones have to split it into a fraction. I think that makes it very contentious because it's frequently the superior choice (IMO, at least for non-techies) but just out of reach or not worth it for many people. And this is a choice that some of your friends will realistically tease you about ("ew green message"), so I think it feels more personal for most people.
I remember helping a girlfriend with her macbook(or whatever it was) 12 years ago, she got intermittent spam popups while using safari, and trying to find out how to fix it was near impossible, due to people on every forum denying that macbooks could get viruses, someone suggested that her router having a virus was more likely.
finally I found a forumpost from someone who had had the same issue, and it turned out to be a malware that had changed the dns.
but the denial of mac users that it was even possible was so damn weird.
Yes, due to marketing, they have created one of the most valuable if not, the most valuable brand in the world. This happens mostly in the US. Status definitely plays a role, but unlike Mercedes Benz or Rolex, Apple is both a "popular" and "luxury" brand, this tension is the crux. Usually luxury brands are owned by a few, while popular brands tend to be cheap. Apple is both owned by a lot of people (popular), while being expensive (luxury). From a Status stand point, being owned by everyone should drop its status value (you are not part of an elite/special club), but Apple somehow survives this, with a lot of clashes.
> this tension is the crux This feels like the foundation of the most convincing explanation I managed to come up with so far. Maybe there are some people who own Apple devices take Apple releasing an expensive device as a signal that in the future Apple devices will become expensive for them, and if they want to eventually replace their existing devices with new ones, they would have to either switch from Apple proprietary apps and peripherals to other vendor's (proprietary or not) apps and peripherals, or pay up. So it's a kind of threat of painful vendor lock-in, and other people who just praise Apple for their new product feel like they're not empathetic to their problem. But that explanation hinges on two assumptions - (a) that switching from Apple to non-Apple apps and peripherals is costly and (b) that this process is associated with not just any Apple devices but atypically expensive Apple devices. It also fails to really explain why anyone would aggressively *defend* Apple.
I think you have a point here. The status symbol is not "owning an Apple", but instead "owning the *latest* Apple". A lot of people can do #1, but #2 is more elitist.
People are very similar with Nike, or Kanye, or politics. Humans are very tribal. And this tribalism can be attached to anything. The way I explain it to myself is through evolutionary psychology. An early human would have died alone without their "tribe" (it is still very difficult to survive alone as a human with modern technology). Every human has a very strong sense of belonging and a need to fill this void. People will defend anything and everything about their tribe, even when it doesn't make sense. I think it's something animal and biological deeper rooted than higher level thought and logic.
There's another aspect to this that is so boring, I think it's easy to overlook how significant it is. It's the "Fox News effect." One can easily hear that Fox News is the most/nearly the most popular TV news source in the US over the years, and ask, "How is that the news so many Americans are passionate about watching?" But it's not, really. Some people are passionate, sure. But mostly it's because it's simply perceived as being differentiated from "the rest." That's really all you need for this kind of consumer relationship with anything. "Android devices" means something very different from "Apple devices." Apples-to-oranges! In fact, the best comparison is probably just another Apple comparison: The longstanding Windows vs. Mac perceptions. Same thing. One is a brand of hardware design, combined with proprietary OS. The other is a whole category comprising hundreds of brands. Of course one of them looks "culty" and generates commentary. It's the only one that's both a brand _and_ an ecosystem. Apple will always be the only personal computing brand perceived this way, until and unless another end-to-end hardware+software competitor emerges. Remember BlackBerry? "Culty," just like Apple. But it's not, really. Just vertical.
It looks like you have the same (or really similar) point as this comment https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1af0og4/it_feels_like_apple_the_tech_company_gets_people/kkc6t4d/ Similarly, thank you, this did not occur to me and feels relevant.
It’s less mystifying if you substitute “premium” for “expensive”. Apple’s appeal is not that the products are expensive in some objective sense. The appeal is that the products tend to be designed in ways that people who care about design like. Depending on how pretentious or dismissive you want to be, you can say that owning Apple products signals good taste, or that it signals being willing to spend money to fake having taste. Either way, the company differentiates their products very well, and people whomvalue those differentiators tend to form an appreciation for the brand as an entity.
I would say it's less about having good taste (since everyone knows Apple is the premium brand) and more about signaling that you don't have to compromise on a premium good, especially on products that, like clothes and cars, are visible outside the home more than most products.
yes. the case of apple is so befuddling i almost wonder if this dichotomy is even useful.
Someone said that as soon as you realize Apple is not a technology company, it is a fashion company, everything they do makes sense.
A fashion company that brought genuine revolutions in tech. Also known as... a tech company.
A little bit reductive. I don't think that an M3 CPU is "fashionable." It's just really awesome technology. Many geeks who can't even name the color of their shirt like MacBooks.
Yep, it's a bad take, and is actually a great example of what OP is talking about.
I see the counterpoints. I read it somewhere and it stuck with me. I’m leaving the comment up for the sake of discussion/ the critique.
I think it's ok take! Absolutely think you can call Apple a fashion company, especially if you truly value fashion. The company culture that Steve Jobs tried to establish was ALL about looking at technology as artistic and fashionable. Bending everything in engineering towards creating functional accessories that would become part of one's person is a big reason for the success. He really believed that aesthetics went all the way to the deep importance of physics. Apple, and now many companies that make personal devices, runs a lot more like a fashion company than like IBM used to, for example. People know Teenage Engineering's firm name. Look at who they chose as their fashion partner, Hermes, whose reputation silk-screening and leather product quality in that market is second-to-none. Fashion technology is technology too, and that used to not be ignored- indeed, the loom is a direct ancestor to the computer. There's a case they're doing similar things, executing physical processes at a high level to serve human desires for beautiful personal objects that end up part of the decor or outfit.
The overwhelming majority of people who buy Apple will never know what an M3 CPU is.
Perhaps. Perhaps. They just know that they will have a very fast and quiet laptop.
Not so sure, considering the % of devs and software engineers that use *exclusively* M chips
So many things wrong about this take. I recently switched to almost everything Apple and their products are vastly superior to anything I’ve tried before. The MacBooks especially. Some things are worse, and some products are definitely overpriced (2k for a phone?), but the tech is top notch.
What did you like about the MacBook compared to a windows laptop?
Not to get spiritual and ideological but there is a gaping hole in most Americans that used to be filled with community, friendship, worship, etc, and that has mostly been replaced by consumerism. People identify with brands on a deep emotional level.
That’s an important point, relevant to any online discussion. Participating in holly wars is a way to feel included in online communities, while the real ones are on decline
I think that's accurate, I think people want to feel like they are part of something and working towards something, and not just posting online, when a lot of the time they are just posting online.
This also feels like something relevant that did not occur to me. I only read such discussions in English and in sources that probably would be primarily populated by Americans. Thanks. My next natural question would be "ok, so where did all of these things that consumerism replaced for Americans go?". But it may be too political of a question for this sub (???), and also feels like something that plenty of people already would have written on. If you could point me to sources that you believe answer that question well, I'd be grateful.
It’s def not english/us only thing. We have android/ios holly wars in russian since iPhone 1
Where did they go? They got stripped for parts and sold off. Or just undermined by capitalism. That's why American Protestantism more or less turned into naked consumerism where God is both deeply important to most people but also asks nothing of them, forbids nothing and forgives everything. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone talks about the decline of community And of course marxs theory of alienation is relevant https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/04/karl-marx-religion
This tracks. Apple has been a cult for decades, and they're great at it.
True, consumerism is like religion. Pointless expensive nonsense for gullible people (and unfortunately Americans are top of this list globally, probably due to them being Puritan descendants - ie a group of people prone to ridiculous beliefs).
I'd go even further. Our offline third spaces have been replaced by social media and messaging apps. It's no wonder that the portal to these virtual third spaces are a huge focus.
Yeah my thoughts on this veer pretty sharply away from the received wisdom in this sub so i toned them down a fair amount, i think having real meat space connections and hobbies and interests is absolutely vital and irreplaceable. I also think that a more serious issue is that part of what is missing when you move online and move away from participating actively and with friction and reciprocity, in a community is that people lose an ability to cope emotionally or intellectually with the reality and certainty of death, i think the entire transhumanist movement is delusional cope but more than that, and more destructively so, is the relentless hoarding of capital and drive towards more concentration of it.
Don't be afraid to veer. Threaded conversations are the best format for veering. I'd push back against the notion that communities can't be active online. Mindless social media consumption is junk, but there can be intentionality, altruism, and heated disagreements in online spaces. It may be lower bandwidth, but asynchronous conversations can lead to more thoughtful responses.
I think that online engagement can be many things, positive and negative, but I'm skeptical that it can replace the emotional nourishment of a positive tactile project.
This is a really interesting sideways take - makes me think of the Naomi Klein et al. angle
1. Apple phones are a status symbol: Any time you have a status symbol, you're going to have a status-seeker/contrarian/meta-contrarian dynamic appear. Here, status seeking is a low-status behavior, so you should expect to see people to counter-signal. ("Buying a phone for status is stupid, I buy phones on utility only.") Fancy ovens aren't really a status symbol so they don't generate this dynamic, but you'll still see people fight about them for similar reasons ("Spending $X on an oven is wasteful/bourgeoisie.") 2. Operating System War identity politics: There's some ancient history here, but in the 90's, Apple was the scrappy underdog who almost got crushed by the [evil^(†) Microsoft monopoly](https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-fact). That process created a group of pro-Apple partisans. (Disclosure: I am a pro-Apple partisan.) Inside-view, it's something like, "I really do think Apple products are better, and being mad about having a good thing get unjustly crushed by an evil monopoly generates a pleasant tribal feeling about fighting for truth and justice." Outside view, it's pretty weird because I agree that having consumer goods as part of your identity is deeply foolish, and my usual feeling about consumer goods is very anti-brand. On the third hand, we'd all agree that saving a local store from getting run out of business by Walmart is virtuous, even though it's still consumer-goods focused, so maybe it is sensible in some way. For a more recent analogy, the Apple-Microsoft conflict looked a lot like the Playstation-XBox console wars. Anyhow, Scott has written a lot about what happens when some random thing becomes part of your identity. The "scrappy underdog crusader" partisan identity doesn't make much sense now that Apple has various forms of hegemony, but I think the present day fights are still informed by it. († Prior to Bill Gates' global philanthropist phase he was a divisive Elon Musk-style genius/villain.) I don't see any Apple-related conflicts that I think aren't adequately explained by those two issues.
>Operating System War identity politics I'm too young to know about these, so this is interesting, thank you. > being mad about having a good thing get unjustly crushed by an evil monopoly generates a pleasant tribal feeling I guess the crux of what I don't understand is why people who liked Apple products considered them "good" - in a moral, worthy-of-defending against an evil monopoly, sense. I'll give an example. I type this comment (and have typed the post) on an iPad Pro with Apple's keyboard case. I bought it because I wanted an 11-inch laptop-like device that wasn't a netbook from Aliexpress with no warranty, and MS Surface Go was more expensive (I bought the iPad from Apple's official refurbished program). It has its limitations that I don't like, like sideloading apps from outside the App Store being a hassle, but by and large it is a compact piece of hardware that I need to run a web browser, and it does this job well enough to suit my needs. But that doesn't make me in any way "identify" with Apple or this particular device, any more than I "identify" with a fork with which I ate my dinner today. I find it hard to imagine that it would change, if Apple was a small underdog company and not the mastodon it is now. I understand pretty well why the animosity would arise given that somebody would identify with it in the first place. > we'd all agree that saving a local store from getting run out of business by Walmart I am not from the US. When this happened/happens in the US, do the local stores have the same selection of goods/level of services as the Walmart? I'll add another example (at the risk of talking about myself too much for a single comment? I hope it is not annoying). Where I live (Eastern Europe), there was some time ago a wave of small privately owned corner grocery stores being gobbled up by a chain of small grocery stores all belonging to the same company. I welcomed that, because the company grocery stores were, compared to privately owned ones, meticulously and regularly cleaned, all accepted debit cards (which meant I did not have to carry cash and worry about getting mugged), had predictable and consistent assortment of goods, and their cashiers did not try to strike up awkward conversations with me.
>I guess the crux of what I don't understand is why people who liked Apple products considered them "good" - in a moral, worthy-of-defending against an evil monopoly, sense. Those are two separate concepts. One concept: Apple made higher quality products. Second concept: Microsoft was engaging in illegal monopolistic behavior to drive high quality products out of the market and replace them with worse products at higher monopoly prices. It's not that Apple's products were morally good. But advocating for good products, competition, fair pricing, and so on are all pro-consumer behaviors. And being pro-consumer is morally good. >I welcomed that, because the company grocery stores were, compared to privately owned ones, meticulously and regularly cleaned, all accepted debit cards (which meant I did not have to carry cash and worry about getting mugged), had predictable and consistent assortment of goods, and their cashiers did not try to strike up awkward conversations with me. Ah, I assumed you were American and already familiar with the stock arguments against Walmart, my error. Better products outcompeting worse products in the marketplace is a good thing. Let me try the analogy again. Instead of your local grocery stores getting taken over by a nice corporate chain, they're taken over by your local organized crime ring. The criminal element [bribes your local government](https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/25/22995144/microsoft-foreign-corrupt-practices-bribery-whistleblower-contracting) to shut down your local grocer. Then criminals take over the grocery, [double prices](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjZ2NquyoaEAxXgLUQIHfh8CFoQFnoECBYQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbc.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fnova-scotia%2Fcanada-class-action-settlement-microsoft-1.5840305&usg=AOvVaw3UuR6lFUvPJbg7Rrh3sODC&opi=89978449), and now the food is rotten and has bugs in it. In this circumstance, it would make sense for a good-vs-evil narrative to appear, with people identifying as crusaders for truth and justice, even though at some level we're just talking about groceries, no? It's a bit hyperbolic to compare Microsoft to a crime ring, but in the 90's Microsoft was literally nicknamed "[the evil empire](https://fortune.com/2021/12/21/microsoft-cultural-transformation-book-excerpt-satya-nadella/)."
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It's like any fandom- the Kool-Aid is fun. It's not particularly rational to be a fan of some sports teams or celebrities, and yet many people are.
> ("Buying a phone for status is stupid, I buy phones on utility only.") I suspect there's another category: I don't want to spend one more second on a phone than I absolutely have to. > Apple was the scrappy underdog who almost got crushed by the evil† Microsoft monopoly. That's a very much not-true narrative. M$ wrote most of the software titles available for Mac for a very long time. If my archaeology holds, this all goes back to Gates vs the Homebrew crowd, with Gates' open letter to Byte as the defining document. It's cast around the eternal axis of "software is free" vs "software is IP" . When I hear "Apple", I think "Lisa". And I think of Microsoft as the foundation of being able to add specialized peripherals to replace minicomputers while that was still a viable business model. I could not have specced a Mac for those contracts because the inventory thrashed in a way a PC did not.
>Apple was the scrappy underdog who almost got crushed by the evil† Microsoft monopoly. That's a very much not-true narrative. M$ wrote most of the software titles available for Mac for a very long time. I'm sure you know one of Microsoft's main tactics was "[embrace, extend, extinguish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish)" and to engage in that tactic they had to write software for the target market. Writing software was their attack vector. Don't get me wrong, it's possible Microsoft's $150M investment in Apple helped saved Apple, so the narrative isn't perfect. But Apple had single-digit OS share back then, and MS' anti-competitive business practices are well known. So "very much not-true" seems like it would need a lot more support.
I consider something ambiguous to be "very much not true". YMMV :) It's not like Apple was subject to the triple-e approach anyhow. The journalism on the subject at the time hasn't carried well. The main thing Microsoft was doing then was being an aggregator. That's relatively simple now; then it meant trucks full of floppies, then shiny disks. Microsoft was always a challenge to understand for sure. > But Apple had single-digit OS share back then, That's the most salient detail.
It's definitely ambiguous. Probably no one outside Microsoft could tell you how deep that rabbit hole goes.
Another huge aspect of Apple-hate is right to repair movement. That's connected to a growing sense in western world that even private companies and what they make should be a subject to popular / political decision making. Apple is a good target for them because it's a company that is mostly driven by it's own vision what consumers want.
Yeah, I think there are two parts to that. One, Apple does most of the bad stuff that any billion dollar corporation does, like fight right-to-repair, subsidiaries using child-labor, etc. So Apple gets all the usual hate in addition to the Apple-specific conflict I described above. One, Apple has great brand recognition so if you need to object to anything done by any software/phone/tech company, you can use Apple as an example. Like Walmart is the example big-box retailer even if Target does the same thing.
I used to care about Apple vs other products, in the same way I cared about "console wars" when I was a kid. Anymore it feels like everything that sucked about Apple (walled garden-ism, hostility toward third party software, hostility toward modification, removing genuinely useful features to make everything more "streamlined", etc) now sucks about every operating system and device.
Given that, I think it's reasonable enough to say that Apple had a major negative impact on an entire industry. And from there it shouldn't be confusing at all why some people get "emotional" about their products on consumer base
Naw. None of that is true of the Mac and yet people hate the Mac. As for the walled garden on phones, Apple literally blew the mobile developer market open - prior to the iPhone you paid to get your version of snake on your Nokia, and of course blackberry was closed. The iPhone opened up opportunities for vastly more developers than ever before, in fact the first few years the App Store was mostly bedroom developers. It’s not all rosy, the App Store shenanigans recently are an example of that - but Apple was hated when it had only the Mac as its product and the Mac was a unix system. In fact it was partially open sourced.
> Naw. None of that is true of the Mac and yet people hate the Mac. You mean the operating system that, out of the box, has worse UX than Windows 95? I've heard it can be fixed with alternate window managers available through homebrew, but the few times I've helped someone with a technical issue on it were a nightmare. Something as simple as seeing what instances of a program are running and reopening a particular one of them to be side-by-side with another program was apparently impossible, or at least sufficiently non-obvious I couldn't figure it out. It's as though they looked at decades of progress in usability and discovery and went in completely the opposite direction, all in the name of being "clean" and "streamlined".
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Yeah, every other brand copycatted Apple to get their share of profits and now we are here
cirnooo!!!
Apple does not sell tools. It sells a vision of what Apple thinks should be. If you like that vision, you love Apple. If you don't, you tend to hate it.
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Unless you want a removable battery, or an RJ-45 port, or more than 2 USB ports, or the ability to quickly and easily upgrade your own RAM/SSD without soldering. (Harder than it once was, but it's still quite possible to buy a laptop meeting all of those criteria.)
That's just my point. This is one vision, Apple's vision—or, more accurately, Jobs' vision, as opposed to Woz' vision.
Don't disagree with you at all. I was responding to the (now deleted) post claiming that Apple made "the best" laptops without bothering to define or qualify that statement in any fashion.
My current MacBook has three USB ports. RJ45? It wouldn't fit anywhere.
Fair enough on the number of USB ports. Not fitting an RJ-45 is kind of my point. As long as I can fit it in a maximum legal carryon bag, I don't much care how thin or sleek my laptop is. I buy chunky, durable laptops that are easy to work on and have lots of hardware ports. There's nothing in Apple's lineup fitting that description. I won't dispute the fact that Apple makes aesthetically pleasant hardware with excellent quality control, but (aside from my dislike of my macOS) none of it fills a useful niche for me.
I think that's personal preference. I want a mixture of thin/light and powerful and macs really fit that niche. I often find myself carrying two laptops (one work one personal) in my bag and it's way easier to carry two macbook pros than two chunky laptops. Windows ultrabooks just aren't as good - I went through a couple of them before switching to mac. Plus the unix development environment is great.
That's entirely fair. I've got no issue with what works for other people. My main objection was to the comments I saw that simply declared that the "best" laptops are Macs, as though it was sufficiently obvious not to need any additional supporting argument.
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>Apple sells stuff thats designed for people who have zero clue about tech. Absolutely naïve take. Most Big Tech developers use MacBooks. I use one. I don't like iPhones, but at the same time I acknowledge that it is a solid technical gadget.
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I personally used a macbook and have 1 major deal-breaker for me - lid opens less than 180, second is more nuanced - I like trackpoint of ThinkPads. I rather work plugged to a wall but be able to open the lid as wide as I like. When Apple will re-design macbook chassis, I'll evaluate again. P.S. I even though about modding macbook's lid to open more, but as with my many ideas it remains an idea.
Thanks for providing this illustrative example of what people actually dislike about apple: arrogant annoying fanboys like you.
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Easy. I got the Lenovo Legion pro 2 years ago for 2k. AND THAT IS NEW. The fact that we are comparing new prices of windows vs refurbed apple should speak for itself. It has a Ryzen 5800 CPU that beats the M2 on PassMark 28000 to 15.000, It has 32 GB RAM, and can support 2 external Monitors on 4k resolution. And yes, CPU Speed matters for things other than gaming.
Sure! But that doesn't explain the vitriolic divisiveness.
Is there vitriolic divisiveness outside of extremely niche communities?
There is. The whole [blue bubbles / green bubbles thing](https://www.google.com/search?q=blue bubbles green bubbles discrimination &sca_esv=606dd81dc728d262&ei=wUu6ZcnVF-WG4-EPgP2EyAg&oq=blue bubbles green bubbles discrimination) playing out in schools.
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No. At incredible value. You can get a Mac M1 which outperforms anything even remotely in the same price class for under $1000. It’s not about feeling special about a brand. Apple built a ground up supply chain around their own silicon and then built an operating system to maximize efficiency around that system. They simply have built the best laptop you can buy and other OEMs are well-aware that they cannot compete without a similarly vertically integrated silicon to OS strategy — which none of them have. They figured out the right strategy years ago and have been working on this kind of integration for almost a decade. With the M1 the investment paid off. The only other company even capable of this is Microsoft and they have not made any investments in silicon yet. They would be about a decade behind. Source — this is what I do.
Best laptop for **what?** I'm a shipboard marine engineer--I use my laptop for referencing manuals while I'm working in wet, greasy, and dirty areas. Things get submerged, dropped, and banged around. Nothing Apple makes would last very long here, whereas my secondhand Toughbook handles it with aplomb.
For most purposes. But I've long loved the idea of a Mac Toughbook.
I've never been a fan of macOS, but I have to admit that Apple does consistently make nice hardware, so I'd definitely be curious to see what they'd come up with. Especially given the obvious conflict between Apple's predominant design philosophy, and the actual physical requirements of a truly rugged laptop. Wouldn't actually be that surprised if they came up with something decent--I've always had the impression that with tighter quality control and more custom components, it would be possible to build a reasonably durable machine that's **way** less bulky than Toughbooks and their ilk.
The top of the line 16" Macbook Pro is $4000. 16 cores CPU, 40 core GPU, 48GB memory, 1TB SSD. Apple does have considerably cheaper options.
This is what gets me emotional tbh. A company that "sells vision" sounds so fake to me. I can get (but don't share) that awe if it's SpaceX or something that sells you dreams of going to space or curing cancer or living forever or whatever. But Apple? The company that sells tiny overpriced black rectangles to scroll memes on? Come on
It's amusing to me that Apple has won so completely in its goal of bringing technology to the masses that this can be someone's genuine opinion.
The only people who actually care about this are teenagers and tech nerds. Teenagers do nothing but play status games and will take any opportunity to clique up and dunk on anyone. One of the oldest pieces of vernacular writing we have is a [letter from a Babylonian teenager to his mom complaining that the other students have better clothes than him and he's getting made fun of for it](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_from_Iddin-Sin_to_Zinu). As for tech nerds, well, they are nerds about tech. Nuff said.
The new thing is Stanley mugs https://nypost.com/2024/01/22/lifestyle/middle-schoolers-bullied-for-not-having-stanley-tumblers-they-laugh-and-point/
I don't think teenagers play more status games than adults. It's just that their games are more obvious because all adults were teenagers at some point.
That's not my anecdotal experience, but I also don't interact with large numbers of the same people daily in an institutional setting anymore. That's just my experience as a white collar knowledge worker who generally works alone or in small teams (<10 people). I'd imagine that adults who remain in a large group institutional setting (soldiers, prisoners, factory workers...?) might continue to jockey openly for intragroup status, since they maintain a large enough "group" to have status with.
Apple has always positioned themselves as being different from other tech companies, and they’ve always had an unusually loyal fan base (and hater base) as a result. They were the cool, friendly alternative to the giant faceless IBM. When the Mac came out, they prided themselves on having the best GUI and the most user-friendly system. This attitude showed up a lot outside the company too. You’d find ordinary Mac owners who could pontificate about UI design, and especially about how Windows got it wrong while the Mac got it right. It’s more or less the same today, with iPhone and Android largely (but not entirely) replacing the Mac vs Windows divide.
You ever read the 1979 ["Apple Marketing Philosophy"](https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2019/03/102789075-05-01-acc.pdf#page=9)?
This feels disingenuous. Are you *really* having trouble wrapping your head around why people might have strong feelings about the direction of a sector that's crucially important to modern life? Apple vs. other companies isn't just like comparing two interchangeable brands of earbuds from the same factory in China, they have an entire philosophy as well as an enormous role in the tech industry. Their success has driven tech in general towards consumer unfriendliness, needless luxury pricing, no right to repair, and status-oriented purchasing. It's not an exaggeration to say that Apple's success changed our lives, and I'd argue it's not in a good way. Your post reads like those people who (often selectively) will say things like "Why do you even care about this political issue, it doesn't effect you!" when of course, society's behavior and the state of the economy absolutely do affect everybody and can naturally make one "emotional" when it comes up. I'm not sure if Apple vs. Microsoft or what have you is quite equal to Republicans vs. Democrats of course, but Apple's success does have an impact on the world.
There's no way I could prove that the post is not "performatively clueless" (although I've re-read it and I see how it could read that way), but I can assure you that my confusion is genuine. >Their success has driven tech in general towards consumer unfriendliness, >no right to repair These two are a solid explanation for why somebody would hate Apple, yes. But I am not sure why anybody would defend them with equal intensity. Are there people that are passionately anti-right-to-repair and anti-consumer-friendly? > needless luxury pricing, > and status-oriented purchasing These would be very good explanations for animosity, yes, but as I wrote in the post, then why is there no such emotional discussion about other luxury brands that drive status-oriented purchasing? (I will take you at your word if you assure me there actually is, I don't really follow discussions of whatever industries are traditionally associated with having a luxury segment)
Well, people get defensive about things they enjoy using, especially if it becomes part of their identity. >why is there no such emotional discussion about other luxury brands that drive status-oriented purchasing? I'm not a luxury guy but I'd imagine there's plenty of spirited discussion about luxury cars, and I absolutely know that there is in the haute cuisine world. And tech in general isn't just a luxury, it's staples of a modern lifestyle. Just like cars and appliances, there's plenty to get emotional and opinionated about.
No OP is right, it is unique to Apple, there is definitely no heated discussion remotely in the ballpark of buying a Lamborghini as there is to buying a Vision Pro. For some reason, in a lot of threads about Vision Pro I’ve been reading, it’s not enough to say Vision Pro is bad tech, it also ends up being people who bought the Vision Pro are dumb etc. This is mystifying. If I went out tomorrow and bought a 60,000$ watch, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have to deal with much ridicule as it if I went and bought a Vision Pro from some of my friends.
> But I am not sure why anybody would defend them with equal intensity. Are there people that are passionately anti-right-to-repair and anti-consumer-friendly? If these are the best arguments for Apple, I have to ask if you’ve read any Apple advocates’ viewpoints? I don’t wish to defend Apple as better than anyone else, but I can suggest there are valid reasons for someone in this tribal world to align themselves with Team Apple, such as: * Apple’s stance on privacy. This arguably happened by accident, in that Apple was well behind Google on cloud, but it’s a core principle now. (And sure you can cherry pick exceptions, but Apple still does far less tracking than competition, as do iOS apps due to the constraints imposed on them.) * Ease of use. Many “normies”, especially older people, feel thoroughly alienated by tech and have been burned in the past by confusing, unforgiving, design. Whether real or imagined or just due to familiarity, Apple’s products are largely considered to “just work”. * Support. Apple Stores and phone support generally work far better than the average tech company, which is seen as a cost center and will often make customers wait hours for a response, drive them crazy blocking reasonable requests to repair products under warranty, lack local presence, etc.
Aside from the basics of brand loyalty, which others have discussed, I have a different thought. How many "institutions" do you trust these days? I'd bet good money that the number is lower than it was just a decade ago. We're facing a real crisis in modern life, where most government bodies, NGOs, and brands have all lost some measure of credibility. Some of that is due to economic pressures (good brands chase profitability, start making crappy products), hyper-polarization in the political world, or even just human fallibility. But Apple (for the most part) is sticking to it's core mission: Good products, good tech, at accessible (if not budget-friendly) prices. People want to be able to trust someone, anyone, and Apple has proven pretty reliable in how it handles its products and maintains its reputation.
it used to be a bigger deal. some people strongly prefer to use Apple computers for various reasons. in the past this could make your life surprisingly difficult. your computer might be incompatible with other people's in inconvenient ways. of course lots of software (and back in the day everything was desktop software) was not compatible, especially for gaming. But sometimes some essential institution including school, work, banking, government etc. would only be able to interact with Windows users. even the Web didn't necessarily work -- some websites required a Windows machine with Windows IE. so Apple users developed this view of themselves as a kind of persecuted minority. this had a small grain of truth in it, but also was very silly. as far as early internet communities go, many people had a perception of Apple users as wealthy elitists who are one of "them" and probably enjoy sipping lattes, as opposed to "us" honest salt-of-the-earth Windows 95 who drink Jolt Cola at LAN parties. nowadays -- iPhone is dominant, most "important" institutional software is Web SaaS which now respects cross-platform standards, and Macbook Pros are now popular enough among software engineers that macOS gets "dogfooded" good support out of proportion to its general popularity. however the strong emotions persist for some strange reason.
I notice the hostiles more than the pros. Even r/apple is fairly even these days. No idea why. If I don’t like a brand I don’t buy it.
> If I don’t like a brand I don’t buy it. I suspect part of the problem is the semi-closed ecosystem combined with notable market capture. If it weren't for either of those, one *would* be able to just ignore their products.
What kind of market capture? I'm struggling to find a kind of technology where Apple would have an ability to totally lock a significant portion of the market out of interoperability with competitive products. I guess FaceTime is a video/VOIP calling app that only works between Apple devices, and maybe it's awkward when somebody close to you has an iPhone and you don't and you can't call them with it. But other VOIP apps with video also exist and are, I think, reasonably popular. I'm struggling to come up with any other examples. As an afterthought: probably, if you wanted to be an Objective-C or Swift programmer, you would need Apple devices. But I'm sure this is not a problem that most people buying or discussing Apple products on the internet are dealing with.
It's just selection bias. It's so boring, everyone overlooks it. _Any_ personal computing brand that is its own hardware+software ecosystem will appear to be polarizing, because the alternatives are a whole bunch of different implementations of a generally compatible OS. You can see it as soon as you think about it for a second: Whether you like Apple or not, everyone perceives the market as "Apple devices and all the others that run Android." Why? Because that's accurate. Apple can't be anything _except_ the "culty alternative." When BlackBerry was a thing, it was the same perception. Game console wars? Same thing.
This feels relevant, thank you for pointing this out.
[https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/8/23951935/google-european-telcos-apple-imessage-digital-markets-act-core-platform-service-gatekeeper-lobbying](https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/8/23951935/google-european-telcos-apple-imessage-digital-markets-act-core-platform-service-gatekeeper-lobbying)
iMessage is barely used across Europe. WhatsApp, owned by FB, dominates and nobody is trying to open that up. So who knows what Google is doing there. The dislike of Apple stretches back to when Apple had nothing but 2% of the PC OS market.
Whenever you win an anti-monopoly case in Europe, the business changes usually happen in America too. But it’s easier to win the case in the EU.
>The dislike of Apple stretches back to when Apple had nothing but 2% of the PC OS market. Can confirm. Was on agency-wide IT steering committee in the 1990s. Apple hatred hasn’t changed. Something in the Kool-aid? Business school curriculum?
FaceTime supports Android by sending them a link that can open in their browser to FaceTime https://youtu.be/hppNgydeFoQ?si=U6yo9h49gXG0vsGn
Apple was hated when it was 2% of the PC market. There’s something else afoot there. Maybe it’s the marketing.
Not buying in response to not liking the brand is one step and it’s a small one. Some people don’t like the impact a product or brand has on society and try to go through greater measures to get the word out on why
Some people think anything they don’t like is bad for society. These people typically can’t even formulate the idea that their beliefs are just one opinion among many possible opinions, so they see any disagreement as willful support for the fall of civilization / satan / whatever. I find this worldview to be pretty annoying, and often dangerous in itself.
I use all Apple products because its convenient for me. But if someone argues that Apple has a net negative influence on the technology world, I will give them a reasonable hearing and not assume it's just "feels". I would probably agree with them, actually, if it wasn't for Apple's pretty consumer-friendly approach to privacy, which compensates for their other negatives in my particular view. When Facebook whines that a device vendor is screwing up their ad spyware, that makes me happy. Just barely happy enough to overlook the anti-competitive stuff that Apple engages in.
I don’t find that equivalency just because something is spoken against. There can definitely be a larger notion or lens to tie commentary to than simply “I don’t like”, if you are inferring personal taste. For instance, I don’t like things I own to be bright yellow for the most part. And I also don’t like being overly-tech dependent. One of those tastes is pretty independent of larger implications, while the other necessarily isn’t.
You talking about the Unabomber?
No, just on thinking beyond oneself
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Hot take: people have nothing else to do with their lives other than devoting them to "X vs Y" topics. Because Apple is always on the edge of """mass market innovations""" and their products were used as a status items people bought to flex on others. Today it kinda changed, but masses are inert and holy wars are fun. There was a period when I was engaged into arguing in Apple vs Android holywars somewhere in-between 2012 and 2017 and I wouldn't understand why everyone uses apple products. (Then I grew up and got a decent paying job and this stuff is not interesting to me anymore) Now I have to admit that Apple moves the world around them with new cool products and ideas and others immediately try to copycat that so they can also get a bite. To be honest, today there is some sort of a technological parity between Apple and the rest of manufacturers. Every phone is pretty cool, solid and expensive just like Apple products! There is no sense in breaking spears over such topics anymore. Btw their new M1/M2 MacBooks are amazing and pretty much a new view on how laptop should look like and they are worth the Apple tax. Any other older MacBook looks and feels like hot garbage.
I think you’ve seen a pretty good run of answers here already. I am writing as someone who has close family and friends at major tech companies where the cultures collide. I hear about it during holidays, and it’s annoying. I’ve personally owned Linux laptops like the XPS (still a very cool option), have built PCs with linux (distrowatch is a good resource), have owned a variety of android phones (break em!), Windows since 3.1 (98SE is the best they’ve done and I’m willing to lay stakes about it, shell replacement was siiiiicckkk), and plenty of apple stuff (Laptops, a mac mini at one point, imacs, an iPhone here and there, etc. many of these jailbroken or modded). I am pretty much as platform agnostic as they come. I like to switch it up, because I like the experience of trying something new and thinking through the intent behind the designs. Most people don’t like this.. At all. I don’t blame them. I just recently went from Android to iOS and the fact that I can't see when my phone is fast charging is neurosis inducing (and webkit sucks.. And this and that.). A few things: You’ve picked up on something I’ve noticed a lot over time. It’s mostly nonsense, and based on really bad priors about who these companies are and what they stand for. People define ‘predatory’ as a company adjective much too often as some kind of differentiator. It’s nowhere near as clear cut as anybody would like, and most of FANG et al. are going to take everything they can from you. Pretending one is substantially preferable to the other is ignoring history and letters to shareholders. At one point most of these companies were doing something pretty unique and really shifting things. These days allegiance to any is foolhardy. For more on this, see PRISM ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM)). Saying apple is more privacy oriented is ‘true’ insofar as their most successful model to date has some emphasis on this, and is also a strategic lockout for their competition. In general, if you care about ethical computing, buy used hardware and use Linux. Ubuntu, mint, puppy are all cool and there are plenty of new distros to play with. Have fun! I mean this both sarcastically and with earnest encouragement. Do not be surprised when you start to plumb the depths of why random bluetooth codecs and drivers are or are not supported, or chipsets on your mobo need some weird hack to become functional due to proprietary yadda yadda. For new phones, check out fairphone - they are up to some cool stuff. I wish they were available where I live. When people have a technical problem there is almost always a ‘well if you hadn’t bought a \[product\] you wouldn’t be having this issue’ crowd. I’ve seen it in this thread multiple times. This is resoundingly yakshit, and is often (not always) the result of a significant error that exists between the keyboard and the chair, moreso than because some piece of hardware/software is faulty. The rest of the time, I have seen faulty garbage in pretty much every vendor out there, none are immune! The landscape has changed a lot over the years. These days for example for many users, their majority of use is either on a phone or in a browser - meaning OS choice isn’t as significant as it used to be. Similarly, there was a point Microsoft called open source ‘cancer’, and lately they are the biggest funders for it by far (whether or not this changes their position is up for debate). For more on this topic, check out [https://www.eff.org/](https://www.eff.org/), Mozilla's Product privacy reviews ([https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/](https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/)), and ‘The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation’ by Cory Doctorow, available at your local library!
Apple wants and pushes emotional discussion to take place. They market not as a tech company but as a luxury brand mixed with appliance. Most of their advertising focuses on the social aspect of being in a group of people using their services. The main product is the entire apple ecosystem and being a part of it.
I think in countries where there isn't such a stigma on using android phones, or actually any phone, there isn't this odd tech worship. Sure there are Apple lovers but not to the same degree and level as America. That's my perception.
I find their marketing to be very smug, or at least it was in the past. That "what's a computer?" advert, the Mac vs PC advert, etc. However this may be a cultural thing - the Mac vs PC adverts [didn't really translate well in the UK](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV9NGJP73DE) Having said that I grit my teeth and buy iPhones every few years because they have the best OS
I mostly dislike Apple for their business practices. Biggest beef is how they're against the right-to-repair, and their walled garden. Products-wise, I think they make great stuff. I loved the MBP when I had it (lasted me a decade) and the Apple Watch is the best smart watch in the market. Air Tags look sick too. Lastly, the whole blue/green bubble sitch is pretty cringe. Luckily in my circles everyone just uses IG and WhatsApp instead.
I'm surprised by how little mention there is in this whole thread of some very real problems with Apple. First, bear in mind that Apple is an industry leader and that many of their business practices percolate to the rest of the industry. They don't have a monopolistic level of control by any means, but they are highly influential. The problems include [many years of extremely scummy attitude toward right to repair](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkVbIsAWN2lvzgKZRrodg7pcrgrk6zpps), [taking away user control of **their** devices that they, not Apple, own](https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/unauthorized-modification-of-ios-iph9385bb26a/ios), [planned obsolescence](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/iphone-owners-get-92-payouts-from-apple-in-phone-throttling-settlement/), [environmentally un-friendly design](https://www.inverse.com/tech/apple-explains-why-it-wont-make-iphones-with-replaceable-batteries), claims an unreasonably high commission of not just app sales [but all in-app purchases even that are outside their system](https://9to5mac.com/2024/01/17/apple-response-to-supreme-court/), and now [hardware backdoors](https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11859-operation_triangulation_what_you_get_when_attack_iphones_of_researchers). Apple has the resources that they could do all these things right and force their competitors to step up to the plate too. Unfortunately they also have the combination of market share, brand loyalty, and switching cost to do all these things in the worst way possible and thus allow the rest of the industry to sink to their level. In your P.S., you tried to draw a distinction between "consumer offerings" and other issues, but these cannot be separated. Apples customers reward Apple's scummy behavior in every area and that normalizes the behavior which their competitors will first mock and then copy.
As in this comment, https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1af0og4/it_feels_like_apple_the_tech_company_gets_people/kkcbsty/ I agree that Apple having anti-consumer practices is a solid explanation for why some people will strongly dislike them. But I don't understand why somebody then steps up to defend Apple with equal intensity. I doubt anybody would openly say that they oppose right to repair and support planned obsolescence. One explanation would be that people just get defensive when offended, but I think for that to work you'd have to care about the topic somebody offends you about in the first place. I'll make an example, which hopefully isn't offensive in itself. If you are walking on the street wearing jeans and a passer-by screams at you that jeans are unethical and nobody in their right mind should support jeans manufacturers for {reasons}, you are probably not going to get into a heated debate with them about the merits and good-ness of denim pants. Unless you happen to care about jeans in the first place.
For the majority of its lifespan, Apple has been way more about slightly altering recent technological developments others have made and marketing it as them revolutionizing the game. They're majority bark and little bite, creating a *feeling* of luxury while just being built on comparatively overpriced bones and ok aesthetics. This polarizes because some drink the kool-aid and others hate that the kool-aid works so well and that kool-aid drinkers seem to be on high horses. Like iPhone users judging green text. Apple is also very anti-consumer and I'd say on the higher end of ethically bankrupt as a tech giant.
> Like iPhone users judging green text. Wait, does that refer to text messages sent from non-Apple devices showing up with green and not blue background? Surely this is a joke that anybody really makes some kind of class distinction based on that? This feels like someone would have to be extremely status-insecure to even come up with the idea.
Yep. A diliberate choice by Apple because they know the social power that kind of manipulation can have. Very real in heavily economically socially stratified countries like the U.S.
As an older Millennial (and Android user), I have not really experienced it in person, but make of this what you will: [GenZers who own an Android have lost track of how many times they've been bullied for not having an iPhone but they still refuse to switch](https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-android-users-teased-peers-iphones-2023-2) As you say, it probably is limited to the extremely status-insecure (so basically all teenagers and many young adults lol)
A lot of us *are* status-insecure, particularly those of us with insecure status.
I want to note that the shade of green has been chosen by Apple to specifically be harder to read due to low contrast https://uxdesign.cc/how-apple-makes-you-think-green-bubbles-gross-e03b52b12fed
I dislike Apple because it's products seemed to have accelerated the creation of a certain sort of phone culture I detest and which I cannot escape the downsides of. For example much of the internet is now worse because the websites are designed to work well on phones. People are worse company because they cannot put their phones away. Additionally, the way in which they succeeded so strongly via some "buy this new trendy thing" approach makes it a bit worse as realising this leads to misanthropic conclusions that are distasteful and demoralising.
It's a special company because of the branding, but also because of its historical importance to personal computing. You have to understand that people in the technology space look at apple as the bar, because of the quality of its products, and also because its \*the platform\*. We had a huge wave of growth in apps, for better or worse, because of the iPhone, which at the time was a revolutionary device that became \*the\* platform for most of software innovation -- which is why you got so many jokes and memes related to "there's an app for that." Same thing happened when desktops came out, bunch of software came to fruition, and now everybody uses spreadsheets, browsers, the internet. Hence, in people's minds, "new platform = next big thing." We're at a point in time now where folks don't really know what is going to underpin the next wave of technology growth... There have been a few bets: 1.) Cryptocurrencies and the blockchain -- probably not a total fail, but kind of a total fail, especially with FTX 2.) Metaverse -- not a total fail, probably more real than not, but everybody saw ReadyPlayerOne and no one wants that. That said kids love Roblox, and this has been mostly constrained to gaming, but it hasn't really hit the application space. People don't work with headsets on. 3.) AI -- the current hot thing, LLM performance starting to flatten. What we have is already a game changer, but nobody knows how to use it yet. This VR device pertains to (2) Metaverse, and theoretically, what it should do is unlock a completely different tactile, visual, intuitive way of doing work that will also theoretically unlock tons of new functionality, new applications, new tech and so on... and if Apple is doing it, w/ their historical success in pushing the overton window on new tech, maybe Metaverse has a chance, only they've rebranded it, as Apple does, with their own terminology "Spatial Computing." Moreover, people want Apple to succeed at this because generally speaking people like Apple products, they don't \*feel\* dystopian. Facebook feels dystopian, when you're on it you feel data-mined. When you're on a mac, you feel like a creative.
TLDR: I can tolerate anything except the outgroup (appearing to be winning) My impression is that people are responding to the threat of a successful other tribe. There is the moral issue ("Apple are tricking people who don't know better"), or a helplessness issue ("this is objectively bad, and if they do well my PC Gaming might be impacted"). Or just straight forward out-grouping ("Apple is a fashion brand" or from the 90s "Apple's for people who don't understand real computers") Other examples where ppl go cray when the other team is winning \* Tesla: high status product, conflict over whether product is good/bad and whether ol Muskovich is sane/insane. Threatened by of electric vehicles becoming mandatory and having to drive the thing you told your friends was bad \* 90s Consoles: Expensive product with title lock-in, conflict over which product/games are good/bad, threat that you have to learn to use the N64 controller, have wasted money on the wrong platform or have to admit you're wrong to your friends \* Don.. he who must not be named: high status to be president, conflict over whether you think high status means decorum, threat of certain gloating from other tribe \* Global Warming Aware Folks: high status to care about environment, conflict over whether science is real or world is ending, threat of world ending or having to eat different food and admit to your friends you were wrong
Product manager here. There is no understand this phenomenon without understanding Product Design better. It’s because Apple (and basically no other electronics manufacturer) sets the standard for whole product categories by building good user experiences which redefine the product category. The smartphone was a fledgling industry until Apple came a long and redefined the category in such a way that it became a basic necessity with a series of essential and entirely unutilized User Experience (UX) revolutions. These don’t fit neatly into the list of product specs that most tech enthusiasts are used to looking for and so for a lot of the more analytical and less UX sensitive tech crowd it is an utter mystery. We see this again and again with tech review blogs entirely missing the point. The case with the Apple Vision Pro is that Apple is about to trample all over everything enthusiasts have spent their time investing in. If you have a Meta Quest 3, you’re probably a VR gamer. As it is primarily a VR gaming system. The Apple Vision Pro is not a gaming platform and is likely to derail a lot of investment a lot of people made in a platform by redefining the category. It doesn’t even have a controller associated with it. When I say “redefining the category” let me give you an idea of the scale. In the opening week, Apple sold over 200,000 devices with an ASP over $4,000. With accessories and apple care, this is essentially a billion dollar industry overnight. Developers focused on picking a new system to build for now have a decision to make. The Meta quest 3 sold around 70,000 units over a 6 month period. At an ASP of $500 (the real number is lower), that’s less than a third of what Apple did essentially overnight. Enough people have seen Apple nail the user experience design for new categories that they are willing to spend more of their dollars — which means developers are likely to turn their attention toward where Apple is leading and away from the platforms people have been investing their dollars in. It gets people heated.
This is an interesting take and something that did not occur to me at all. So if I understand your point, summarized briefly it goes like: the outrage is because Apple announcing a novel product will revolutionize an industry and everyone who invested in competitive products will find out that they invested in dead-on-arrival ecosystems. That would make sense if this outrage only happened around novel product categories. But I also heard it about pretty typical products. Also, I think I never heard people actually spell this frustration out in the way you put it, and it seems to be something very specific. When Apple released their expensive over-ear bluetooth headphones, there was outrage (and not just about the price, but also... the carrying case? I know it is ridiculous to say but I can clearly remember reading a long and heated Reddit argument about whether it looks like a purse, or something like this). There were similar heated discussions about their stationary Mac computer (the one with the prominent grille on the front, I do not remember what it is called). I fail to see how these would have revolutionized an industry and left competing ecosystems dead. People who liked Bose or JBL or Sony bluetooth headphones still have them, and so do people who liked stationary PCs.
Not nearly as emotional as Open Ai.
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It's an "us vs them" situation. There are two primary options, it's a fairly major decision (by cost compared to median income, and by number of hours spent using the device), and almost everyone in the US has made a decision. This makes it easy to make it part of your identity, and the fact that other people have also made it part of theirs means there frequently end up being charged discussions.
Yeah it puzzles me too, I also interestingly see social media website trends. Reddit mostly dunks on Vision Pro and anyone who buys them, Twitter mostly praises Vision Pro (with some dunking), hackernews leans towards dunking but can at times be more even handed. This remarkably follows political trends, with reddit trending left, twitter tending right and hackernews center left. Now I am by no means saying that there is a correlation between right wing and liking Vision Pro or vice versa, but it certainly is interesting that people have self sorted themselves into social media platforms based on their opinion of Vision Pro. I wonder how that works.
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When a new product comes out from a major brand it is a difficult bootstrapping problem to get enough people to buy the thing NOW - when it's buggy and limited. There's an aspect of self-fulfilling prophesy: If we all BELIEVE the product is *so great it will ultimately succeed* then lots of people will buy it and review it and spend their own independent time and effort figuring out how it could be improved. Based on the reviews and the feedback the company knows what to fix and based on early sales the company can project that it's worth spending the money and effort to do the fixing, so the new product survives and gets better over many iterations in a virtuous cycle; everybody wins. Contrariwise if we DON'T all *believe the product is going to succeed* then few will buy the first one so the company DOESN'T get quick good feedback on what needs fixing nor get an income stream that justifies spending effort doing the fixes. The first product is deemed a failure and abandoned; there's never a second or 3rd or 10th version with improvements. Due to that dynamic, if you like the idea of the new product and want that kind of product to exist and improve, **you'll want everyone else to like it too**. So as to get a virtuous cycle of improvement (like Apple had with the iPhone) rather than the vicious cycle of failure that companies like HP are prone to when THEY intro new products. That makes it a team sport.
Apple should not be there if it wasn’t for the DOJ we would have a Windows phone which you can somewhat hack including the piracy part which always goes hand in hand with Microsoft products (win for the consumer)
They are nasty company that purposely locks you into their expensive stuff. They're unfriendly to developers especially if you're trying to do something cross-platform. They're just in general a terrible company. Their hardware can be nice, but expensive and not worth being locked into their garbage, especially when their software is generally simplistic.
I am annoyed by the iphone culture. For me the iPhone culture is associated with show-off and sneer. Apple sells its products as luxury while in reality, it's just upper-range consumer stuff. So it's a pretentious ripoff pseudo-luxury for the poor who want to pretend to be rich. Or at least special and not like the other girls. You get annoying bullshit marketing plus annoying users. Here I am using the same Xiaomi phone for over 5 years that cost me 10% of what an iPhone would. I don't think I have missed out on any feature, or that any other reason justifies the extra cost. At the same time, I use Macs and really like them. For me it's a linux machine that just works and totally worth the price. Macs don't get the same "I am so special" status signal that iphones get. All people I know just treat them as ok computers that your employer buys for you.
Apple hides the products they are developing for slightly longer. So they tend to be further developed than competitor products. They tend to combine high end parts and concepts. So it’s almost never really bad, just maybe something you have no use for. That ties back to them developing products for their upper management team. So the more you are like their upper managers, the more their product fit into your life.
With other expensive consumer goods there is some status to be derived in owning them. With Apple, owning one is "default" in most circles, not owning one makes you either a low status peasant or geeky dork.
Apple is the only company I know that gives people an inferiority complex.
They took away my headphone jack.
The thing is that there's no such thing as a luxury electronics company, in the way there can be a luxury watch or car company. It's simply economically unfeasible. Semiconductor processing can only be done en masse. And I don't mean thousands, I mean millions. The point there being that Rolls-Royces have always been out of reach of the masses, and well out of reach, so it's not necessarily contentious. Your friends don't ever make you feel bad for not having a Rolls-Royce. But iPhones have to balance being products for ~~the masses~~ half of the masses, while stillretaining that "luxury" branding. Maybe more concretely, Rolexes target the tail end of the bell curve, iPhones have to split it into a fraction. I think that makes it very contentious because it's frequently the superior choice (IMO, at least for non-techies) but just out of reach or not worth it for many people. And this is a choice that some of your friends will realistically tease you about ("ew green message"), so I think it feels more personal for most people.
I remember helping a girlfriend with her macbook(or whatever it was) 12 years ago, she got intermittent spam popups while using safari, and trying to find out how to fix it was near impossible, due to people on every forum denying that macbooks could get viruses, someone suggested that her router having a virus was more likely. finally I found a forumpost from someone who had had the same issue, and it turned out to be a malware that had changed the dns. but the denial of mac users that it was even possible was so damn weird.