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Comment by abellerose | Hacker News Reader

Curious why you phrased Apple listening to their customers in such a negative way. Maybe from pessimism bias?

I observe a lot of HN commenters don't vibe with how Apple controls & develops their ecosystem. Yet, instead of go elsewhere, complaining and acting like being oh so very special enough to know how things should be done is preferred; while expecting a major company to just cater to their personal whims.

I'm unsure if it's entitlement I'm witnessing or just people that feel like they have no faith in Apple's competition at making anything better than Apple currently has.

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To be honest I think having a pessimism bias towards large corporations is healthy. Sure, they might in the end do a good thing (or a less harmful thing than they could have), but they have a huge amount of power and very little oversight.

I like Apple products, but I try to avoid any illusion that they’re good guys on a corporate scale. They’ve proven they’re not in a lot of ways (see many recent articles about their labor practices). That doesn’t mean every thing they do should be equally scrutinized with a pessimistic predisposition. But I really don’t fault anyone for assuming a large for profit organization will prioritize their own priorities over everything else.

The thing I try to moderate that with is understanding their actual priorities and not just falling into blind cynicism.

Well, I've had a Mac continuously since the original 128k Mac, so I'm pretty well situated as an observer of all things Apple and more knowledgeable about their history and their machines/software then the vast majority of their employees, some of whom are close friends.

I want them to listen, since the decisions they make affect the ecosystem I've adopted for my extended family (for whom I'm the main technical point of contact,) and poor ones will affect me and them disproportionately.

So to me, it doesn't feel at all like entitlement, rather, the wishes of a longtime, loyal customer hoping they continue down the path of listening to those of us who have promoted their products and helped make them successful.

>have no faith in Apple's competition at making anything better than Apple currently has.

110% this.

Other laptops are awful hardware. Including the Dell XPS line and the new thinkpads.

There is no call to invent reasons of entitlement or faithlessness in engineering prowess when the desire is simply to control your own device.

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