Let's hope that partnership with Goldman Sachs is just a temporary stepping stone towards Apple Bank, and that there's some serious disruption of the clusterf*ck that is global finance yet to come.
Imagine a company looking through your mail, tracking where you go & what you buy to send advertising to you. In the past that would have been intolerable. But that is what Google does. It mines data on its apps, ties it to the user and uses that data to send individualized ads to the customer. This is how Google makes most of its money.
I minimize that kind of data tracking as much as possible & part of how I do that is to carefully use Apple products to reduce data tracking for ads. In addition, Apple has top notch customer service & devices which have OS support/updates for many years. The Apple ecosystem works well across its devices. Apple products by & large are simple to use & yet are very powerful.
For all those things which benefit me, I’m willing to pay a reasonable amount more.
You don’t think Apple would do the same? Tim Cook talking about privacy isn’t a guarantee. He may one day make the “pragmatic” decision to sell your data.
Company A is a privacy nightmare, tracking your activity, storing it forever, buying additional 3rd party data to match against its own. Company B does none of these things, keeps much of its data only for 6 months, invests in methods to anonymize data, and actively promotes privacy and security.
But, maybe in the future Company B will change their mind. Therefore Company B really is no better than Company A...
brucemc said: I always get a good laugh at posts like this one. It starts off with the "Apple is not innovative enough" argument - that all they do is refine products instead of build the future. And then they bring up what they want - a refined older Mac that has all of the ports of the last 10 years, and an updated SE. Somehow this is innovation.
I guess it depends what people mean by innovation. I don't think there is anything in the definition that says it has to be something completely new. But, in defense of the attitude you're critiquing, I think a lot of us aren't feeling like Apple has been innovating much, so we'd at least like to see them keep their current products updated and working well. If they aren't innovating or keeping their current products useful to us, that is doubly bad.
Also, innovation isn't just making things totally new for the sake of being new. It also has to be useful to the target audience. For example, making a super thin laptop with an unreliable (nearly unusable for many) keyboard, ports that need adapters (because the tech everyone has that uses them isn't on the new connectors yet), and that can't cool itself (possibly because it is too thin), isn't a good kind of innovation, no matter how much of a feat it might have been.
Any product you can buy at your local Walmart probably doesn’t qualify as “premium luxury”.
In most industries, the level of performance or quality keeps going up depending on how much money you have. You can buy a basic affordable car for $20k, and then pay $60, $80, $100+ thousand for ever fancier and well appointed cars.
For mobile phones, generally anyone can afford even the most expensive iPhone if they want to, and there really isn't anything better. Apple is pursuing the state of the art at a reasonable price range.
So leading they threw practicality out the window in regards to ports. Here we are several years after the USB-C debut and still USB-A is found everywhere. Who in their right minds wants to throw out all those thumb drives and legacy USB-A peripherals? Nobody. And to make them work with newer MacBook "Pros" you need dongles, which are a bother.
With regard to the butterfly keyboard, big-time Apple fan John Gruber, who is so pro-Apple that Apple often grants him sit-down interviews to top Apple executives, had a few choice words to say:
"...it used to be the case that Apple’s notebook keyboards were widely hailed as the best in the world — that’s no longer the case, and I think that’s a problem."
I side with John. I love Apple, but I'm not blind to reality. They are in many ways NOT leading the way, and that needs to change.
Using a USB-A peripheral with USB-C doesn't require a "dongle" it requires a cable.
Any product you can buy at your local Walmart probably doesn’t qualify as “premium luxury”.
In most industries, the level of performance or quality keeps going up depending on how much money you have. You can buy a basic affordable car for $20k, and then pay $60, $80, $100+ thousand for ever fancier and well appointed cars.
For mobile phones, generally anyone can afford even the most expensive iPhone if they want to, and there really isn't anything better. Apple is pursuing the state of the art at a reasonable price range.
This is false.
'Generally anyone' can afford the most expensive iPhone? Not even in the US.
There are millions of people in Spain, for example, for whom the most expensive iPhone would be more than a month's salary. For millions more, there is no way surplus income could cover the thought of an iPhone XS Max.
Imagine the situation in less industrialised countries. 'Anyone' (even when preceded by 'generally') isn't the right word here.
As for there not being anything better than iPhone and it being state of the art, you will find other phones pursuing that with more success and even being - objectively - better in many areas.
Comments
Company B does none of these things, keeps much of its data only for 6 months, invests in methods to anonymize data, and actively promotes privacy and security.
But, maybe in the future Company B will change their mind. Therefore Company B really is no better than Company A...
Also, innovation isn't just making things totally new for the sake of being new. It also has to be useful to the target audience. For example, making a super thin laptop with an unreliable (nearly unusable for many) keyboard, ports that need adapters (because the tech everyone has that uses them isn't on the new connectors yet), and that can't cool itself (possibly because it is too thin), isn't a good kind of innovation, no matter how much of a feat it might have been.
For mobile phones, generally anyone can afford even the most expensive iPhone if they want to, and there really isn't anything better. Apple is pursuing the state of the art at a reasonable price range.
Using a USB-A peripheral with USB-C doesn't require a "dongle" it requires a cable.
'Generally anyone' can afford the most expensive iPhone? Not even in the US.
There are millions of people in Spain, for example, for whom the most expensive iPhone would be more than a month's salary. For millions more, there is no way surplus income could cover the thought of an iPhone XS Max.
Imagine the situation in less industrialised countries. 'Anyone' (even when preceded by 'generally') isn't the right word here.
As for there not being anything better than iPhone and it being state of the art, you will find other phones pursuing that with more success and even being - objectively - better in many areas.