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this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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This is a Reddit-style circle jerk. A LOT of people like Apple, because even though they’re almost as remorseless as Amazon or Microsoft or Google when it comes to maximizing profits, they build good products, create new product categories, and they’ve been doing both of those things for 40 years.
Is this a sleazy thing to do? Yup. Is it as sleazy as Meta intentionally allowing its algorithm to push softcore kiddie porn to teen Instagram users? Nope. Not even in the same ballpark.
Ah, sounds like what-about-ism. Metas behavior doesn't exempt Apple from criticism. That logic tends to drive all of our standards and expectations down.
Theres room to criticize and expect more from all of these companies who are more than capable of doing better.
That’s fair. It is whataboutism (is that one word or 7?) And, I’m pissed off not only that Apple is messing with basic DMA compliance, but that they literally forked all their software rather than do this in the US.
At the same time, I hate Apple the least of big tech, since they actually do give a crap about building good products and have done quite a bit of that. One can make the argument that zero other big tech companies do.
Should we expect more of all of them? I’m not gonna die on that hill! It is way, way too late to stop this corporatocracy, but one can hope.
Apple builds marketing, not good products. There was a time they were innovative, and it is not now. Their price/performance ratio is laughable.
I have to disagree when it comes to laptops: the gap has closed a bit now, but there's still no intel- or amd-based alternative that comes close to the MacBook air in terms of performance/battery life at the £1000-£1200 price point. When the M1s first came out, the fanless MacBook air shattered the intel i9 MBP in any conceivable metric other than pure GPU power (which the MacBook Pro could use for about a minute before overheating).
Even if expensive, the current MacBook lineup is really compelling. If you're prepared to spend £3000 on a laptop, you just can't get anything similar in terms of performance, battery life, and noise. You might get a workstation like an HP ZBook with similar oomph but then you're looking at a beast that weighs 50% more than a comparable MBP, has the fans buzzing all the time at full blast, and lasts a couple hours on a battery charge. I've used my work MacBook Pro (M1 Max) for a full Atlantic flight of ≈9 hours and it still had juice to go.
They start at £1,150
MacBooks in that price range fall apart frequently due to only having 8GB of RAM. They're e-waste.
You've got to spend ~£500 more to get one with alright specs. And even for that £1,650 price point you only get 512GB storage (are you fucking serious, Apple? A £500 Acer has that amount!)
And please don't regurgitate Apple's "our RAM is magic RAM so you don't need much of it" nonsense.
I have no idea what you're on about. MacBook airs start at £999, and I've still been able to configure one at £1199 with 16 GB of RAM.
Also I haven't said anything about that magic ram nonsense, please don't try to paint me as an idiot. Even my personal laptop has 32 GB. But different needs, different price points. I still maintain that at the price points apple operates, it's hard to find something better with windows - not because I'm an apple fanboy by any means, but because of the laziness of Intel and the lack of decent ARM alternatives (and Microsoft's half assed approach to ARM).
I was talking about the current generation, not a 3 year old model. Similarly if I was talking about iPhone pricing, I'd bring up the iPhone 15, not 12.
You need to add ram to at least 16GB, and storage to at least 512GB, otherwise not only do you have a pathetic amount of storage, but your storage speeds are crippled (which apple unfortunately tries of obfuscate).
That takes the price up to £1,650. £500 more than the base price.
And I didn't say you said anything about magic RAM. I said please don't regurgitate it in response. I see it a lot. 8GB of RAM is straight up e-waste.
I can't believe Apple wasn't sued over their "our RAM is... like... magic, bruh" statements
I really poked the bear on this one, this is more a reply to both of you:
Even if they were on par with other manufacturers, apples staunch position on never admitting security vulnerabilities or attempting to rectify them will steer me away every single time.
That's an incredibly low bar. There are exceptions of course but I'd argue there really is no need to use "big tech" software much of the time. Smartphones are probably the most challenging, but desktops and laptops? Easy to avoid.
It's a word, with a formal dictionary definition: "the technique or practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counter-accusation or raising a different issue".
It has it's origins in politics.
That hasn't been true for quite a few years.
I'm wondering what they are. The Newton was kind of cool, but before it's time. mp3 players had been out for years before Apple jumped on the bandwagon. Same with phones. I hope this doesn't come across as snarky "fuck apple", I'm genuinely curious.
They don't create new product categories. What they do is enter an existing category, do it the Apple Way, which is generally high-quality and integrated well into their ecosystem, and thus they become the default in people's minds.
They've almost never done anything new, but they integrate existing technologies better than almost every other company.
"Finding the application is half the innovation"
Oh, man! Quite a bit of traffic on my original comment. I won't spend time engaging on these since they're pile-ons, but this is objectively trivial to refute.
"They've almost never done anything new"? Seriously? How about the user interface when everyone was using DOS? Or the Mac Plus/SE/any of half a dozen other macs in the 80s and early 90s that redefined what a computer could act like and look like? When every other PC was a beige box with identical specs?
Maybe the iPod, which redefined that category and made every other MP3 player obsolete overnight? The iPhone, perhaps? This was the absolute gimme, like I can't imagine how you made that comment with the iPhone hanging around. What were phones before the iPhone? Blackberries and flip phones. Yeah, it couldn't copy/paste for two years, but Steve wanted it released, lol.
The iPad would be another. There were smart watches before Apple's, sort of, but they were pretty crappy and didn't do the same stuff.
While we're at it, find me some PC laptops that ever debuted with the stuff Apple put in theirs. High-res screens? Touch ID? Face ID? Even OSX, which is old as hell, is built on UNIX and rock-stable -- and was definitely innovative when it first came out, as were some of its predecessors. When OSX came out, your alternative was Windows 95.
Then there are the airpods, I don't think there were any wireless bluetooth earbuds before those, although I might be wrong. And finally, despite it being way too expensive and five generations away from being useful, the ski goggles. Before you say there's other VR goggles, recall that only Apple is doing that as AR computing instead of dumb fucking avatars in virtual conference rooms that probably run telemetry on how big your living room is and sell it.
By all means, say Apple is greedy as hell, but don't make stuff up.
The iPod was so derivative of the creative labs mp3 player that Apple ultimately had to pay them $100 million.
The Lisa and later the Macintosh copied from xerox. Something that everyone was doing around then. Amiga and Atari ST both had guis. Hell even the commodore 64 had Geos. The Mac didn't even get color until 1987.
Handspring had a smart phone, complete with touch screen and apps, years before the iPhone.
Mac os didn't have proper multitasking until version 7.5, years after Windows had it.
Onkyo created the first true wireless earbuds.
You're making up a lot of stuff, Xerox had a gui UI for a whole decade before apple and they certainly weren't the only ones.
The MP3 player they made was literally just a feature limited version of already popular devices. I got my arcos a year before the first apple device was released and it had every single feature that apple would slowly add in every new expensive version over the next decade
Apple does hype and marketing, that's their innovation - taking a feature restricted version of a technology and getting celebrities and media idiots to pretend it's the best thing in the world and actively ignore or discount the many better options.
Yes, Xerox PARC existed, and was totally non-commercial / didn't offer any product. Saying the iPod was the same thing as all those crappy MP3 players we all lugged around in the aughts is objectively LOL. The rest of your comment is pretty much ad-hominem and editorial -- and of course, you don't refute the rest of my points because you can't.
Bottom line, discussions like this on Lemmy are no different than Reddit ever was. They're circlejerks. I figured I'd drop in this one time to note that, but ultimately it's pretty boring.
Oh, man. I’m definitely not going to point by point. On a sub-argument that’s not even the topic of the thread? These are minutes in my life I don’t get back. But, seriously? My argument is invalid because I said Windows 95 instead of XP? And I must not have used any good MP3 players? By the way, they all sounded the same since they were playing 128 kbps MP3s… by the definition of how those work, they had to 😂
And just to consider this from another angle, if apple did get the goggles from hololens, where did Microsoft get their UI from in the 80s? How about Android?
Wow, I am so, so done seeking out a non-groupthink argument in this format ever. On any site. The memes are still better than Reddit though!
Hey man, pick one. Are we supposed to debunk your comment point by point, like you demanded of me. Or is it wasting minutes to destroy your corporate dribble. Make up your mind.
Here's a new fallacy for you baby, this one doesn't have big words so it is easier to remember: “moving the goalpost”.
So for you, you're objectively not smart enough to have the debate with. You're all set, you don't need to do anything 👍
And you complained about reddit. Dude, you are the worst of reddit. What a disgrace you moved here.
Dude! Bro! Son!
Ok ok, I'll give you what you seem to need. Let's step back a moment and recall the context of this thread: Apple's being shady as hell about complying with the DMA and everyone's piling on. I've noted that Apple is pretty greedy, but probably not as objectively evil as some other big tech companies, so this is a circlejerk. But, it's verboten to say that Apple's not terrible. I've also said that at least they innovate, but that's also verboten. You can't say Apple innovates. So, that's why we're here.
Now, going from memory, I've listed some Apple products that I think were innovative for their time. You've made a few counterpoints. Btw, it did take some time for that reply. I hope you weren't... researching? If not, congratulations: you're fellow GenX and either you have an eidetic memory or you work in UI/UX. Either way, you did teach me a couple of things, so thanks for that.
Let's go point by point:
As for this:
That sounds great. If I were 20, I'd be very intimidated and I'd feel cast out. I'd be sad. But actually, that's ... another straw man argument! Love those. I'm "desperately" looking for a group that thinks Apple is all-mighty, I won't find it here, good luck with that, etc. Well yes, but actually no. Congrats on proving that a thing I never said is unavailable to me 😂
That took 20 minutes and I could have done literally anything else with that time. I should bill you.
I did some research on this, because I was a big fan of MP3 players in the late 90s early 2000s and never heard of them. Turns out that the only Cowon Mp3 player I could find from around the iPod launch was the iAudio CW200, which had a capacity of 256MB.
This explains why I had never heard of it, as I was shopping for HDD-based players that could hold my entire library(I was looking at PJB, Nomad, Archos, etc).
Sorry but this illustrates OP's point. The iPod was the smallest HDD-based player on the market for years, all the other HDD players were chunky and could barely fit in a pocket. All the flash-based players had pitiful capacity. It wasn't that there were no MP3 players, it was that all the products had compromises that made them not ready for mass adoption.
While OP is overstating some things, your counter examples are rife with oversights like this.
As an example you are badmouthing Apple's "low resolution displays", while missing the fact that the MacBook Pro was the first ever mass market high dpi laptop. Ironically Samsung had produced a limited production laptop with a similar screen, but because Samsung lacks focus and had 1000 different laptop SKUs, they didn't make it a premiere feature of their brand, instead Apple simply bought out Samsung's entire manufacturing capacity for years and put them in their laptops.
This is the pattern. There are interesting technologies, but they are in products with mediocre design or appeal, and are not mass produced. Apple identifies these technologies, optimizes them, integrates them, ensures that there is a good user experience, makes a million of them, makes a billion on that, then changes the entire landscape of the market they entered by virtue of their success.
Everyone says I'm dumb when I simp for a shitty corporation that exists on hype alone
It must be because I'm so superior to every tech community on the web and they're circlejetking
Lol
Everything, all of that existed way before Apple. Just because you are ignorant of history doesn't make your point right. Apple got all of their ideas from interacting with other companies in private, then stealing their ideas. Jobs was no longer invited to certain demos because of that kind of shenanigans. And oh god, OSX is NOT build directly from UNIX. It's BSD which they scrapped from the NeXT computer. Everything you are spouting is just wrong. Apple is just good at marketing to chumps who care more about status and looks than usability, and who just buy into the cult mentality and lap all of Apple's bullshit without rubbing two neurons together long enough to notice they are being scalped with overpriced crap.
Please do continue to spew ad-hominem copypasta from every Apple hate thread in the history of Reddit like you're a first-gen LLM trained on r/foss posts. "All of that existed way before Apple" ... please feel free to refute each product I listed as being innovative or new by showing where it previously existed. I'd love to understand how some form of the iPhone was around way before Apple, or the iPad -- please go for it.
As for the statement that OSX is based on BSD, wow! Such an important distinction when BSD is a descendant of UNIX... this is a nice little straw man thing, please go look up what a straw man argument is.
On Jobs getting banned from demos, that's actually hilarious. But please do list any products I named that Apple objectively stole. I'm sure you have all the info there.
Just super fun times, I always hoped that Lemmy would have a higher level of discussion than Reddit. But how can it, when it's the same people and they're even more self-important? :D
Good boy, you learned ad-hominem. Now, tell me which other big words you know?
Yeah, the circlejerking and dog piling from people who have no idea what they are talking about is actually far worse here than it was at Reddit - but just know, we aren’t all as misinformed as these people. You’re absolutely correct.
[chasing goose meme]
Like what?
LIKE WHAT MOTHERFUCKER!?
Rounded corners I guess.
Which they charge x4 the value, and always underdeveloped one or two key features in order to scalp further inordinate amounts of money from their users to overcome the underperforming feature they neutered intentionally. Anyone buying from Apple is a chump getting taken advantage of and somehow is convinced to be proud of being abused by a corp.
They do sell good products... Kinda. But they are professional scalpers and scammers. iPhones get their performance nerfed via software after a few years to force you to upgrade. They charge Quadruple price for ram upgrades in their laptops. Now they're removing, not dropping support, but actively removing a feature that they themselves do not have to develop to stop you installing a feature on a device that you pay for.
Apple do not make superior products, apart from the iPad that's a genuinely superior product. They sell a walled garden that you have to pay continuous subscriptions to stay in. The subscription in this sense is their app store.
My five year old iPhone runs like it did when I first got it, and I’ve never formatted it.
My dads iPhone 8 is finally starting to lose some of its battery life. But it’s overall performance is totally fine.
I think a lot of people forget that most humans doesn’t need 100000000000gb of ram and 20trillion gbs of storage.
I’m using 65gb of storage, including the os… on my baseline 128gb model.
Most people aren’t editing 8k videos on their iPhones lol. They’re sending a text message.
Yeah seriously. This community hates Apple so much, but so many people here know nothing about their hardware or software. It’s really bizarre. I’m a Windows/Linux user, but I’ve got an iPhone because it’s the absolute best for longevity and privacy if you want a device where you don’t have to fuck about. I’m on my computers all day, I don’t want to have to think about my phone at all.
That makes it illegal. The DMA explicitly requires gatekeepers be "proactive" (that's their words) towards opening up their platform. Removing features just in the EU is the opposite of that.
Besides iPod and iPhone. What product category did Apple create that wasn't there already?
Imo Apple rolls good solutions, but they very rarely actually innovate.
Whataboutism much?