More than any of the others, Apple at least tries to have values. Not everyone agrees with them. But I challenge anyone to identify a positive value mainstream America would associate with Microsoft, Google or Facebook.
Google -- for a while at least -- cared deeply about web user experience and performance. The Google start page ushered in an era of minimalist UIs that load fast and don't bombard the user with fifty irrelevant things. They came up with the trick to send more than the 4 initial packets after the TCP connect so that they could send the entire front-page content in the minimum feasible number of round trips. They're still working on protocols like HTTP/3 and QUIC with similar goals.
Facebook... umm... let met think... err... I got nothing.
These aren't advertisements, but I think they feel a lot like an advertisement in terms of what Google encourages others to post on their website.
Wasn’t it just found in the large ElasticSearch hack that a number of no-logging VPN providers were in fact logging?
At the end of the day they are a corporation whose job is to make profit not possibly die by being idealistic. I would even argue that the privacy thing, while commendable is a selling point more than an ideal they hold dear.
I agree. Note that I didn’t mention privacy. We both understood that implicitly. That’s partly marketing. But it’s underwritten by some truth, if not a comprehensive truth.
Values, in my view, are meaningful if strived for. They don’t need to be perfectly attained to be valid. Apple has made tradeoffs and incurred costs to strive towards protecting privacy, and it’s been consistent in that aim over its history.
Even to this imperfect standard, I struggle to come up with analogs for the others.
Take the example of Maps, for anyone to create a good maps experience they need a lot of money, A $1000 phone with about $200-300 actual component costs has enough margin for other things, even software. So the price is kind of included in the phone. Even if we just give $10 of this to Maps as it is a core experience, that is $2-3 billion per year.
For other companies trying to compete, it is either ads or subscription. So even if you charge $20 per year, you need 100 million paying users. Apple also incurs the cost of running it but it gets hidden the price of the phone, others don't have this luxury. Though, I think certainly a company like Samsung which has significant device revenue can try this approach.
Also, in case of ideals if I have to give an example of a company that tries to uphold one ideal very well would be, Google's efforts to improve diversity. https://diversity.google
- 5GB of free iCloud storage in 2020. I can imagine the countless number of people who have lost photos that weren’t backed up because they didn’t upgrade their iCloud storage plan. 50Gb should be the minimum when you buy a new phone.
- subscription apps not at least being able to say something vague like “go to our website to create an account”.
- not being able to change the default mail, browser, calendar, maps, music app. Some of that will be correctly in iOS 14.
Apple’s pro-privacy stance in merely a strategy credit. That’s not their business model.
Just like FB can say with a straight face that they won’t put data on servers in non democratic countries - they aren’t allowed there anyway.
Cook also kissed Trump’s golden ring and let him tell lies about Apple’s US manufacturing plans during a photo op.