I appreciate that Cook shares the personal story of encountering clansmen, challenging them (at such a young age), but man there are some serious stretches of truths in the rest of the video. At 4:12 he says he found Apple and Steve Jobs to believe advancing humanity through the equality of all its employees. Is he serious? Not even any sign of cognitive dissonance while he says it? He was the COO, he had to have known something about the terrible things that were going on. It wasn't over nothing that nytimes pondered the question that if Jobs were alive today, whether he would be in jail or not ( http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/business/steve-jobs-a-geni... ).
As a tech person I'm excited and impressed by Apple products, but let's not forget the serious wrongs they have done and continue to do. I personally choose to vote with my dollars and stay away from Apple for this and other reasons.
> At 4:12 he says he found Apple and Steve Jobs to believe advancing humanity through the equality of all its employees.
Yes, it's clear revisionism.
For example, Jobs didn't believe in donating to charities. The first thing he did when he rejoined Apple after the NeXt debacle is to cancel all charity donations. After his death, restoring charities was one of the first things that Tim Cook did.
There's also ample evidence that Apple treated its employees very poorly, especially compared to the other Silicon Valley companies (for example, Jobs refused for years to provide commuting shuttles to its employees despite heavy complaints and internal petitions).
There is a reason why Apple has never been even in the top 100 companies to work for.
Jobs didn't believe in coddling employees. For him, the chance to work on amazing products (or in support of those products) with amazing people was ample enough reward.
You can treat people equally without treating them well. Yes they may have been harmed by the no poaching agreements but if gay, straight, black, brown and white were otherwise treated well and equally that is something that I could easily imagine someone could feel proud of.
The crimes in the listed article don't seem that terrible, the exceptional thing about them compared to other companies seems to be the direct CEO involvement and brazen lack of subtlety and subterfuge with which they were done. I'm not saying that these actions were right or that they shouldn't be punished but if you feel that way about Apple I wonder what your thoughts are about Samsung.
Out of interest what tech companies do meet your ethical requirements?
The no poaching agreement went all the way up to the top at Google as well. In fact Google even fired a recruiter for trying to hire someone from Apple, yet they seem to get a free pass in these discussions for some reason.
It's the same effect as the Chinese factory workers conditions all over again. Forget that workers at the Microsoft and Samsung factories have worse conditions and lower pay, the story is all about Apple, as always.
Apple paints itself in a different light than Microsoft or Samsung, which is one of the reasons that people focus on their flaws more than those of MS or Samsung...
Oh, of course. It's okay to kill migrant workers, as long as I don't create pretty products. Apple is like any other company, it doesn't matter how they paint themselves. What matters is the peoples lives that are being ruined.
> Oh, of course. It's okay to kill migrant workers, as long as I don't create pretty products.
Comments like this are not conducive to anything other than trolling or ranting. It might leave you feeling better/good about yourself, but it doesn't help to change the world around you in any meaningful or at least positive way.
I in no way claimed that it was 'ok to kill migrant workers.' I offered an explanation for why people focus on Apple more than other companies. When someone (Apple) paints themselves as 'hip' and 'progressive' (via marketing), people will fall over themselves to point out hypocrisy when they find it. It's just the way that people work.
In fact Google even fired a recruiter for trying to hire someone from Apple
Get your facts straight: that particular recruiter went to a top VP at Apple, offered them the COO position at Google which didn't exist. Once Google CEO learned of that, yes, they fired that super-pro-active recruiter. This is an instance of a mad recruiter who'll promise the moon to get someone interested in a bogus position. Firing sounds like a reasonable answer to such behavior.
EDIT: I got Apple and eBay confused, as pointed out by comments below. The Apple firing did happen as well, in the now infamous "smiley email".
The original report on that story says “a Recruiter for the ‘Google.com Engineering’ team formerly known as the ‘Site Reliability Engineering’ team” nothing about COO or any other exec position, just engineering. — http://pando.com/2014/03/25/newly-unsealed-documents-show-st...
>Last year, Apple for the first time introduced two new iPhones instead of just one: the high-end iPhone 5S, which sold like gangbusters, and the lower-cost, plastic-covered iPhone 5C, which disappointed.
So disappointing it was the second best selling smartphone in the US! Is it a law that every article about Apple must adhere to a certain number of press-created fictions?
I'm not sure about that law but it is a law that someone must always attack the press if they say something less than flowery about Apple somewhere. I don't think many people inside or outside of Apple are arguing that the 5C was a disappointment sales wise. This though was just one small point in a very lengthy, balanced article.
I think Jim Dalrymple aptly phrases it in his comment to the linked article:
”I found this profile frustrating, vexing. The tone is objective, but the prose manages to be damning at the same time, working in all the standard, shopworn stereotypes the Apple community has gotten used to having thrown their way.“
Hey Udo. Thanks for that. Quoting Gruber at the end though seemed like the final nail in the coffin to me. Jim appears to be in the same category as the original comment above. He's just too overly sensitive. I found the empty shirt comment up front particularly strange. It seems more than fair to state that Jobs is to Apple what only a handful of other iconic business leaders were to their company. That's just contextualizing the challenge Cook has vs saying he's an empty shirt. You could even argue that's the author trying to give Tim some breathing room by pointing out what he's following. But then that would be personal interpretation to the positive which makes me the same as the other folks (who are heading to the negative)
I know that Gruber is pro Apple. But what I like about his comments is that he has got his facts straight. Like in real hard numbers and statistics. Whereas the NYTs writing about Apple in the last years smells like hit pieces and/or click bait.
For another totally unbalanced and very hard to dismiss comment (because he's got his facts straight) I'll quote Mr. Dilgers latest piece:
“Unsurprisingly, the article's authors Matt Richtel and Brian X. Chen have to admit early on that Cook "declined to be interviewed for this article." It's not hard to understand why.
Richtel may be best known for his bizarre hit piece castigating Apple for working to sell iPads to schools in 2011.
Chen even more famously skewered Apple for even attempting to sell its iPhone in Japan, where he assured his Wired readers that the nation hated it. He even crafted quotes from people in Japan saying how "lame" the iPhone was, even if those quotes were actually completely fabricated.
Then of course, there's the New York Times itself, the publication Richtel and Chen are currently writing for, which printed its "iEconomy" series exclusively blaming Apple for everything wrong in the industry.”
It's not about a statement being less than flowery. It's about a statement that is misleading. You say the rest of the article is balanced, but how do you know that?
> It's not about a statement being less than flowery. It's about a statement that is misleading.
It is not misleading in the least to say that the 5C was a disappointment. It did not do a particularly good job of living up to its all-but-stated goal of penetrating the lower-income market in the developing world, namely China[0].
As GP said, you would be hard-pressed to find someone either inside Apple or outside who would seriously make the argument that the 5C was anything other than a disappointment.
[0] Nor did it even do a particularly good job of selling to lower-income households in the US (which wasn't even the goal in the first place, but since OP mentioned the US, let's address that). It's hard to say, but inferring from the movements in market share, it seems the 5C ate into 5S sales more than it converted Android or Windows Phone users.
That's a myth created by the media after they misunderstood comments Tim Cook made on an earnings conference call and ran with it. The 5C was actually very successful. It sold more than its predecessor in that tier (along with the 5s and 4s) and was responsible for bringing lots of new customers to Apple and converting many from Android.
> Speaking to analysts during Apple's Q2 earnings conference call, chief executive Tim Cook stated that 69 percent of iPhone 5c buyers were new to iPhone, while 60 percent had switched from an Android phone. For the cheaper iPhone 4S, the ratios were even higher (although the sales volumes were much smaller): 85 percent were new to iPhone, while 62 percent switched from Android.
> It sold more than its predecessor in that tier (along with the 5s and 4s)
What do you mean "its predecessor in that tier"? The all-but-stated goal of the 5C was to break into a new market that they'd previously been priced out of.
For weeks (if not months) leading up to the release of the iPhone 5C there were news reports of Apple's attempt to break into China by releasing a cheaper iPhone. Sure, these were based on "rumors", but since Apple almost never announces their strategy directly, this is how most of our understanding of Apple's strategy has always worked.
Apple's been able to take some market share from ZTE, but not from any of the other main players (Samsung's market share has increased since the release of the 5C).
(Also, your quotation doesn't actually refute the statement I made earlier. I didn't say that the 5C didn't sell to new iPhone users - I meant that, for those new users, the 5C sold to people who otherwise would have bought a 5S (thus eating into their potential profits). That's neither here nor there, though, since the main issue is how the 5C sold in China, not the US.)
'its all-but-stated goal of penetrating the lower-income market in the developing world'
This is where the fiction lies. You actually don't know what the goal was, but with a statement like this you can manufacture one that hasn't been met.
I think the 5C is part of a strategy that will ultimately allow Apple to address a larger market, but the goal of the 5C was not to cause that to occur immediately, but rather to conservatively introduce a second iPhone without destabilizing the whole product line.
If you consider the number of elements needed to make that happen: new design, new manufacturing, carrier agreements, marketing, etc, the goal here was to establish this second apparatus in a controlled manner. This is why the 5c internals are essentially the same as the 5 - i.e. the engineering element of the strategy is unchanged from before.
The 5c is the beginning point of the strategy, not the end.
The only people who think that the 5c was a disappointment, are those who think slashing prices is a 'strategy'.
Why do you keep using that phrase? You don't get to judge a company's achievement of goals that you have ascribed to it. Or, you can, but to do so is nonsensical.
>As GP said, you would be hard-pressed to find someone either inside Apple or outside who would seriously make the argument that the 5C was anything other than a disappointment.
Nope, that's not what they said. What they said was:
>I don't think many people inside or outside of Apple are arguing that the 5C was a disappointment sales wise.
It's always hard to say about the 5C because Apple isn't going to telegraph their punches - I suspect Cook & co are quite happy - it's like selling the iPhone 4S but with higher margins, which is probably what it was intended to do.
Disappointing is relative to expectations, and my impression was that several people expected the iPhone 5c to outsell the 5s. I got the impression during the announcement of both phones that Apple itself strongly believed so. See also Daring Fireball:
> With the iPhone 5C Apple may well have created what will prove to be the most popular smartphone in the world
And Apple would have made a lot of money if that turned out to be the truth, both by selling cheaper hardware, and by selling more phones when they bring the 5c down to its knees with software bloat in the next years.
I thought this piece was fabulous and a great insight to a man who is finally turning around the company from being completely oblivious to helping the world into a company that cares about the mark it leaves on the world and the actions it can choose to make with its money.
Instead of sitting on its money, Cook is choosing to use some of Apple's cash stockpile for good such as by building 100% clean energy datacenters and beginning to open up to donation to charity/education as well as working to force its supply chain to be more fair on the humans it relies on.
It's a great new direction for Apple; critics could say it's not enough, but it's better than the company was under Jobs in terms of philanthropy.
Seems egotistical as well as self-serving. "Health" is one of the few industries that will continue to provide solid revenues until the penultimate human perishes from this earth. And I'm not sure what Apple will bring to the table that noone else on earth can bring, other than Apple-branded products.
Actually revenues in the "health" industry aren't necessarily solid; there's a huge survivor bias and tons of companies making cures for rare diseases and _not_raking it in. (Note: I have a drug I worked on in clinical trials so I'm not simply pulling these claims out of my backside).
But what can Apple "bring to the table?" Well, to quote the variably-attributed saying, "quantity has a quality all its own." Apple can produce something compatible with an ENORMOUS installed base of active users, and can make a difference. Just getting people to exercise more would be great. By the end of the year they could have 10X the number of users fitbit does. Nobody else can do that.
Note I'm not trying at all to claim they are angels: they are definitely out to make a buck.
And they can make a great product or they could make a lousy one. They've done both. However I think, based on where they are right now, they will try to make something actually useful and beneficial.
These are great points but I would point out that "solid revenues" and "not raking it in" are not necessarily incongruous or exclusionary. What's wrong with steady and consistent revenues? It's not going to turn you into Mark Zuckerberg but it will sustain a business, employ people usefully, and provide a steady financial base to take chances from.
The point is that even for Apple, engaging on healthcare is risky. Yes, margins are available at volume, but it's not their standard modus operandi given the costs of regulation and reimbursement.
Does the average person involved in healthcare make the same sort of claims? They may feel pride in productive work that helps people but we are continuously told that a corporation's only function is to maximize shareholder value when they're ducking out on paying taxes but adopt a moral stance when they discuss blue-sky opportunities.
It's a specific attack on a specific company that has a long history of hyperbole about its position in this world. I don't swallow things that don't taste good, mang.
It's a company that has changed the world repeatedly, and one that has never stated that it's only function is to maximize shareholder value. Misrepresenting it doesn't make your point.
I dont have data to support, but I think the idea was to build the largest solar with an huge initial investment. Something not possible for majority of other company. Since most of the Datacenter operation cost are electricity, Apple essentially gets it for free, and the unused electricity are sold back to the grid.
On the conservative side I think in the long run ( 10+ years time ) the cost would have roughly the same. Or it is more likely to be a huge saving over time.
This is a great example of PR and "business journalism" playing out at the highest levels, and yet another example of why the NYT is the last of a dying breed, and not the future. Not one skeptical, much less difficult <cough>wage collusion</cough> question.
You could do much much worse than to keep the distinctiveness and high standards of Jobs's Apple while weeding out the bad idiosyncrasies a tyrant can leave behind. And doing that while preventing the oversize egos of a bunch of 3/4-scale Jobs wannabes from exploding over each other. Tim Cook's Apple is less random, but otherwise much the same as Jobs's, and that's good.
Isn't it enough to be the competent keeper of a visionary's flame without turning a business into a museum, or a self-parody? Eventually Apple will need to be really different from Jobs's Apple. But not for a while.
Apple has a simple and transparent strategy that is good for its customers: pay a premium and get a premium product. They don't violate your privacy, they don't usually show you ads (although they do have an ad network, limited to mobile apps, iTunes and the Mac app store I'd think).
They have a limited number of SKUs. Apple makes a few good products, each one representing the Apple brand in all its glory. The vertical integration from hardware, to software and cloud is something nobody else can do except maybe if Microsoft if it gets serious about the Surface (despite the poor sales).
It might be true that we see less of the innovation that the Steve Jobs era was known for, but they haven't changed at the heart. They're keeping their design quality, their finish, and the vertical integration. Apple isn't making any junk and exploiting its brand and deceiving its customers with shitty products.
Having said that, it doesn't mean that Apple's products are for everyone. I don't like iCloud and I don't particular like iOS, but even so I can see the value in what they're doing.
As compared to...who, exactly? They have an ad network, and they have a cloud product - by definition they're holding onto as much of your data as any other company in those businesses.
The privacy implications of their respective offerings are quite different. Gmail actively scans your email looking for keywords, while iCloud is not ad-supported and does not read your email. AdWords makes your web searches follow you on the sites that you visit; iAd does not allow your Internet activities to affect the ads that are displayed. Google's servers log what I searched for, and Apple's do not. Etc.
"Apple's unwillingness to share large amounts of consumer data is hurting its iAd business, according to Madison Avenue media buyers that spoke with AdAge. The company is said to be "downright stingy" with the information it shares, too slow at developing ad products, and "too reticent to foster relationships." "
You seem to be using a strange definition of the word "good". Are the ads you see on the internet (based on datamining your personal information) better than the ads you see in magazines and TV (which are based only on very coarse aggregate statistics)? Are today's TV ads significantly better than those of the 1980, when demographic information was far coarser still?
For all the promises of "only seeing ads for things you're interested in", data-mining based advertising has been a colossal flop from my perspective as a consumer. We've surrendered a tremendous amount of personal information and gotten hamfisted targeting attempts and obnoxious "viral" campaigns in exchange. It makes me nostalgic for the stupid but well executed beer commercials of the 1980s. Not giving away all your personal information is not the same as not being good at advertising.
Because almost all of Google's products are server based, they gather far more information about your behavior than Apple. Where is Apple's equivalent of Google Analytics, Adsense, and Search History, tracking you all over the web?
Also, when it comes to personal data such as email, Google openly reads your data to support selling your attention to the Advertisers who pay the most to influence you.
Apple doesn't examine your data to support the interests of third parties.
The parent said: "Apple makes money from you buying their products, not from selling ads." This is factually incorrect. Apple does make money from selling ads. Likely somewhere between $250m and $500m a year now as mobile ad revenue has increased quite a bit the last couple years.
While this would represent just a fraction of Apple's overall profits, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Sure, he is technically correct, which is the best kind of correct, if you get off on pedantry.
This is also technically correct: let’s assume Apple made $500M in iAd revenue in 2013 (his upper bound); they made about $150B in revenue in the same year, which makes iAd 0.3% of the revenue. That is clearly what’s driving the business.
> Apple makes money from you buying their products, not from selling ads. They therefore want to respect your privacy, compared to, say, Google.
was poorly worded. More precisely, TazeTSchnitzel used “makes money from” instead of “exists thanks to” or some more appropriate phrase. The response
> Apple made $125 million from their ad network iAd in 2012.
replies to that wording error, ignoring the bigger argument. This could've been an honest mistake—the parent did use figure of speech instead of precise term, after all—or an intentional use of fallacy.
Then the thread spirals into discussing whether TazeTSchnitzel or JohnTHaller is correct (both are and both aren't), and now ends up with HN meta-discussion.
It's a pretty common thing to happen on HN. You get it with Google Chrome, too, anytime you point out the fact that every character you type of every URL is sent to Google which doesn't happen in browsers like Firefox (it's the whole reason the search box is purposely kept separate, so only what you enter in the search box is sent to the search provider for auto-complete).
I think it's more likely that people disagree with your literal reading of the original statement. The money that Apple makes from iAds doesn't matter – there's certainly no indication that it drives policy, which was the subject under discussion. Responding that it's not exactly zero doesn't add much to the discussion.
I tend to think that a (likely now) quarter of a billion dollars or more a year does matter. It matters less than iPhone/iPad revenue, of course... proportional to the money if not less-so (as in mattering less per dollar than iOS). But saying a quarter of a billion dollars a year in revenue doesn't matter and doesn't drive certain decision-making within any company is a bit naive.
Sure, but it isn't in their interest to share that information, whereas with other companies that is their main business, to use your personal information to make money from you with advertisement. If you care about this sort of thing I'm not sure you have a better option than Apple except maybe to use linux and I don't know what you would do for a smartphone, maybe a Mozilla phone.
Huh? Who are you comparing Apple against? It sounds like Google/Facebook/Twitter but they are advertising honey-pots rather than product companies.
The more accurate competitor category includes Microsoft, Samsung, Dell, Sony, HTC etc. Like Apple, their first business is to sell product... but they will sell adverts too if they can.
The privacy "factor" is one of the main thing that binds me to Apple wrt other cloud providers. They seem to really care about it. And I confess I am a little worried about iAd and its possible future implicancies...
No, they're not. If you want to, you can buy an iPhone, sync it with iTunes, and apart from downloading apps and OS upgrades, that iPhone doesn't have to speak to the Apple cloud at all.
Literally every other company selling you hardware?
>by definition they're holding onto as much of your data as any other company in those businesses.
Retaining information and letting others see that information (privacy) are not mutually exclusive. Swiss banks store all sorts of private information, but are known for protecting their customer's information and privacy. Implying that Apple storing that information is the same as them letting someone who isn't you see it is dishonest and wrong.
Very true, they are good for consumers who are able to pay more to get online. Back in the early days of android, you definitely wanted to pay more for iphones as the quality difference was so large. Now that quality is more or less equal I guess the selling point is "privacy"? I'm not so sure what the quantifiable price is for that. It depends on how much giving my information out harms me, and I'm not quite seeing the harm. If I do a search from my desktop for a location then the driving directions appear on my phone, then that "privacy violation", or sharing of information between machines, is actually helpful. In fact, both companies want to give consumers what they want, in one case so they buy their phones, in another case, so they click on relevant ads. So what I see is that Apple is simply behind the times on information sharing and is catching up (new mapping service which collects data for example). But once Apple starts sharing information well to provide a good experience like what google provides, then I'm not sure what the selling point will be for paying more.
Is this the final piece in the soft PR work rattling through "journalism" this week? Daring Fireball did a piece not wholly unlike this as well. The timing is a bit odd for there to be this meta discussion that is pivoting Cook and Apple from the post-Jobsian "rudderlessness" to a New-New-Apple Cookian era that is both highly positive and would have been, to paraphrase, impossible with Jobs at the helm.
I wish Tim would actually do things like reduce Apple's secrecy. For example, technically Mac OS X prerelease seeds are under NDA, but how often does this actually get enforced? And I have wished for a Mac version of http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing for a while now.
"Apple has graciously relaxed its NDA for new technologies, meaning that we don't have to wait to talk about all of the shiny new toys we have to play with."
As a tech person I'm excited and impressed by Apple products, but let's not forget the serious wrongs they have done and continue to do. I personally choose to vote with my dollars and stay away from Apple for this and other reasons.