cubefan

Welcome to the disposable capitalist world of the 21st century, where everything except your Mac is a commodity. Whilst the rest of the world burns, Corporate America, with the exception of Apple, believes that shipping crap products in volume is the solution. My local supermarket was selling an HP inkjet yesterday for 75% off retail, about $12, retail was only $60, this is not good for the planet.

Five years is long enough when your family is thousands of miles away - what's the difference between 100,000 developers and store workers? nothing, although I'm not a fan of what is known over here as Human Remains - there's still a job to be done and keeping your staff happy and productive is the most important thing HR can do - not be there just to control and limit and block creative people - which is what they are often guilty of.. Ms Ahrendts leave the retail side in better shape than it was when she arrived, job done. To claim anything else is unfair to a fellow human being.

appex said:

Apple should use standards and stop using proprietary and soldered components in all devices.

I think you'll find Apple an early adopter, pioneer and supporter of industry standards - USB on first iMac  and Lightning to name but two.  Not only that, Apple's support for standards and interoperability is often far more complete than any other technology vendor I've come across in the thirty eight years I've been using computers..

Contrast that with Cisco who develop a proprietary protocol to gain market advantage and then put it forwards as a 'standard' when they've exploited the market advantage for two years and use their size and clout to make it a 'standard'.

Every vendor uses soldered components and the only bits that are proprietary are the ones that give Apple a technological lead - Apple doesn't own Intel, or the ARM architecture - but it exploits its abilities to develop ARM based chipsets to get improved performance at lower power - we don't care what's inside - it runs iOS, also based on BSD Unix but with better eye candy.

If you print anything from Linux or MacOs or any Unix O/S, chances are it runs through a software stack called CUPS, CUPS runs on every Mac to provide the print services for MacOS which is BSD Unix derived, to find out, point your browser at localhost:631.  Who owns CUPS development?  Apple.

I've never had a decent Lightning cable break.
So your statement is, er, fake news, completely inaccurate and erroneous.

Anti-competitive?  Those three are having a laugh and a joke at their customers expense because they don't have enough competition - contactless reader technology is fairly widespread in the UK - but RFID bank cards are fundamentally insecure to walk-by scamming.  I use ApplePay daily and watch people in the coffee shop queues' reaction as I use the same device for loyalty card and payment, its much faster and more secure than chip and pin, cards only come out when there's antediluvian technology in the shops or I need some cash.   Why do I need to put my card in a slot? can't I have ApplePay secured cash machines. Please?