this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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Apple
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I think they've hit a point where they're doing more for shareholder value than for customers.
They're so scared of iPad chewing into Mac sales that they've hobbled iPadOS, leaving it just useful enough to encourage people to buy both. They're continuing to offer base 8gb RAM, despite it costing them pennies to increase that to 16gb, because they like the money they make from charging for upgrades.
They're one of the world's most valuable companies, and they've got there by shortchanging customers as much as possible over the past 15 years.
In many ways, I have no problem with what they charge for their devices. What they make is (generally) very high quality and can last for a long, long time. The likes of Amazon and AliExpress have given us a false sense of how expensive things should be.
But I do have a problem with feeling like I'm not getting the most from my purchase.
Like, I have a 6th gen iPad mini. It's a great little device. But I can't help thinking how much more useful it could be if Apple had allowed Stage Manager and external display support on it. But why would they when a 256gb version of it puts it on par with a Mac mini. For the majority of what I do, I could be happy with my iPad hooked up to a display, with the ability to side load apps, a la macOS, and the ability to be portable. But Apple don't want people buying the cheapest they can work with when they can charge twice for both a Mac and and iPad. So they've intentionally hobbled the iPad.
And that's a problem for me.
I think that’s a strong point, especially when you look at devices like smart speakers with voice assistants or TV steaming sticks. Those devices should not be $30. If you consider a 3x markup over the cost of parts to be a pretty standard rule of thumb to remain profitable for a consumer electronic product those devices should be a lot closer to $100. When they’re not it should be raising red flags about the company using information gathered from you to make their profits.
I suppose there’s no guarantee that Apple isn’t also collecting that data, but the pricing on those devices in a competitive market seems a lot more consistent with a company that needs a product to make a profit in a more traditional manner. Of course, they take a cut on subscriptions sold through the device, but I suspect that’s not as reliable per-device as a game console collecting a license fee for every device sold.
This nicely describes the way I think of Apple - they’re not an advertising company first like google is, their business model is selling overpriced hardware and hustling devs on the App Store, so they “don’t need” to sell my data too. But then there’s like a big asterisk on the whole thing that says remember they are a trillion dollar company which means they’re almost certainly doing it anyway.
Apple has been like this for ages now though. They succeeded despite of it, not because of it. What OP is suggesting (I think) is that there's less positives and those historically outweighed Apple's anti-consumer practices.
They weren't like this under Jobs.
They were, they just weren’t massive enough for it to be as obvious or egregious as it is now.
I mean, I remember buying my first Macbook in 2007 and only speccing it with 1gb of RAM because what they were charging to double it to 2gb was eye-watering compared to what I paid online. Same with storage. They only get away with it now because they solder everything on.
But while I never like to be all “Steve would never…” I do wonder whether they’d have walked a more fine line if he was still around. Some of the shit they’re pulling now feels downright hostile, where his approach was to make Apple the more friendly of the computer companies.
Well yeah it was a moot point when they were upgradeable.
And you could argue that they were only upgradeable because they hadn’t at that point, figured out how to make it not.
Certainly soldering chips to the motherboard wasn't an unknown technology to apple in 2007?
yeah. 2010 was sorta the end for me.
I'm not sure. IIRC pricing structure that pushes you to upgrade to high tier hardware was there under Jobs as well. And they'd solder RAM if it was a thing back then too - they always purposefully gimped base models.