neoncat

Only responding to offer my full-throated support for the use of the word "imbroglio." Fun to say, fun to spell!  

Were you a Mac user in the mid-90s when developers jumped ship left and right? I was. It was a difficult time, looking wistfully at all the software available on Windows, and having to make due with the pitiful selection on the Mac. Luckily, things are better now. I wouldn't call them great, but they're better. I'm grateful to the talent, moxie, and tenacity of developers (yourself included, Sflocal, if you're an Apple-device developer!) who commit to bringing their ideas to market despite Apple's capricious, obnoxious behavior. 

The Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and certainly VisionOS, would be, and/or will go, nowhere without developers. Apple creates impressive, unique platforms on which to build. Developers make those platforms dynamic and useful. 

(I am conspicuously ignoring at this point the growing "movement" of people who have committed, often in weirdly emotional public posts on Reddit, MacRumors, etc. to not use third party software on iOS in particular, limiting themselves only to first-name, Apple-only options, as a protest against the sort of developer actions outlined in this article. More power to anyone who's needs are basic enough to make that work, but, throwing out the milquetoast default options is a day-one activity for me on any platform.)

22july2013 said:

Maybe he knows something we don't?

Sales of stock by c-suite executives at public companies are scheduled months (usually 6 or more) in advance, on a schedule, that has to be submitted to the SEC. While not a perfect solution, the goal is to avoid shenanigans based on insider knowledge that there would be no way for a CEO to not have. 

The overwhelming likelihood is that the sale was for to pay taxes, or to reimburse for taxes paid—Q4 (tax year, not Apple's fiscal year) just started on October 1st, so there would've been an estimated tax payment due at the end of September, something anyone in Tim's income class would be required to pay. 

Doesn't mean that some of the money isn't intended for whatever Tim would like to spend his money on—solid gold rocket car, whatever—but that as a CEO, he has far less control over when he sells stock grants than any of us normies who can buy and sell stock as we wish.

Of course it's just a tagline, come on now. Apple is a business, and like any business—whether my 1 person shop or a massive multinational like Apple—the goal is to make money. Anything that comes out of the maw of its marketing machine should be considered a highly flexible platitude designed to mollify one audience or another into spending more money. 

China is a massive market for Apple, as has been reported on this very website. There's no way they're going to put a profit center like that at  risk. 

eriamjh said:

What sane person is paying more than retail for an iPhone? 

[ ... ]

Color me skeptical that this is happening.  

People with low impulse control.
People who need to have the latest and greatest right away regardless the cost.
People who have the money to spend and don't put a lot of thought into how they are spending it, or people who don't have the money but spend it anyway.
People who take a measure of their self worth from what they own rather than who they are.
People who buy into the hype created by Apple's maudlin, over-the-top, effusive marketing juggernaut and their army of fan sites (like this one, to be sure) and influencers that turn functional, practical tools into desired objects and baubles. 

Of course it occurs, the same way it occurs with fancy shoes like Air Jordans, with concert tickets, with a host of "coveted" objects, services, or events. It is a mix of capitalism working as intended (scarcity creates demand, demand raises prices), people with broken self worth, and companies encouraging people to think about purchases as emotional rather than practical. The scalpers may be preying on people's lack of self control and a company's lack of safeguards, but they're far from the only ones complicit in this relationship.

Consider: There are a handful of regular users over at MacRumors who live in Australia. Thanks to the international date line, they are first to get access to the new iPhones, and the members of that group buy new phones every year and race to post their unboxing photos and share their first impressions, usually before people in the U.S. are even awake. They're treated with this weird reverence, and their posts attract hundreds of obsequious replies: omg that color is so pretty! You're so lucky! What case did you get? and so on. This weird emotional feedback loop. Over a phone. Yes, I think it's completely nuts too. But it's a behavior on display everywhere you look.