Wrong, Apple puts money before everything.
Of course Apple cares about money but they make their money by customers buying their hardware. They put their customers first because that is where they make their money.
As a counterpoint, Apple refuses to pay employees on commission because Jobs didn't want them upselling to consumers because there is a less chance of them being a returning customer.
It's the goal of every business to make money. It's how you go about it that tells the story.
Apple shows a nice face to the public but then does only what it's needed to get more money. proved by both this article and how they treat developers.
If it wasn't for the developers that filled the appstore with content apple would be still years back. But apple doesn't care.
I had to go through the HN thread to see that it's more complicated than what you make it out to be but I also read a story by John Paczkowski regarding this:
http://allthingsd.com/20120702/italy-accuses-apple-of-misrep...
I think you're trying to paint a picture from a certain perspective that doesn't contain the whole truth. I'm not saying that Apple isn't greedy as everyone else but I do believe your argument has flaws.
All companies exist to make money. The subtleties of how they do so is not nearly so black and white as you want to make it.
Is that in the same imaginary universe where phones before the iPhone had tiny black and white screens? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1519377)
Because in this one there were several third-party mobile application stores and distribution platforms.
Please cite your figures for the pre App Store mobile app economy. I'm genuinely curious.
Plus, if it wasn't for jailbreakers and first Cydia not-native apps that Jobs hated and for a long time was against an idea of giving third-parties abilities to build so-called not-native apps, Apple would still not had their App Store and never grew to today's sizes.
Meanwhile, the device setup really wasn't designed to run third-party apps, and we were actually able to watch as the software was ripped apart and rewritten to work around those problems. Had you actually been there, in the field, developing for the platform at the time, you might not consider the opinion so naive. I agree, however, that people oft fail to look at how long it takes to accomplish things like this, and somehow take the release date as the point of inception: but here we could actually watch the progress.
Regardless, it might be they had it "on the horizon" (although I'd even question that, after years of talking about this story with people at conferences), but the idea that it was going to happen at that point--sufficiently early and with sufficient unknowns that they actually slipped on their release dates (not thforties slips got much press)--for that first device.. to me that is far-fetched (but I sadly realize that most of my evidence is not transferable).
Any notion that Apple has altruistic motives is absurd. All companies exist for one reason: to make as much money as possible. Apple is no exception.
EU law mandates a two year warranty for only those defects present at time of sale. Within the first 6 months of sale, the burden of proof is on Apple to prove that the defect wasn't there at sale. After those 6 months are up, the burden of proof switches to the consumer to prove that it was there at sale.
Apple complies with this law.
Apple also provides a 1 year warranty from time of purchase for defects that develop after the time of sale. This, too, is perfectly in the law, and Applecare extends this post-sale defect coverage to two years.
tl;dr EU law involves two different kinds of warranties (covering present-at-sale and post-sale defects). You've confused them.
[0] http://www.fnac.com/Console-Xbox-360-250-Go-Microsoft-Halo-R...
So, even if they are as evil and plotting as you claim, they seem to be confused on how to be efficient and effective in implementing their evil plan.
Anyway, there are some horror stories regarding the defective Nvidia GPUs where Apple denied repairs and said it was another problem - even though Nvidia fully paid the repair because it was their fault.
http://www.seattlerex.com/seattle-rex-vs-apple-the-verdict-i...
I thought Apple was over priced non-sense years ago, until I bought one thanks to a spending account from my employer. Now I find it hard to justify buying anything but.
As for maximizing shareholder value, I think they've done pretty well there. I don't care for their software that much, but in terms of running a publicly-traded corporation, they've done an excellent job.
Microsoft wants money. Microsoft makes a product that its customers (until recently, third party hardware manufacturers and enterprise IT) buy to put on their crappy products in the hope of selling them to me. To support their wafer thin margins, they rent out advertising space on the hardware they well.
Google wants money. Google gives goods and services away and convinces its customers (advertisers) that they will be able to sell its users stuff that they see advertised when they use their free product or service running on some crappy product someone else sells them.
Everyone is after money. It's called capitalism. When it works well it leads people to do things that make other people happier in pursuit of getting money.
Apple is making money because they're better at capitalism than these other guys. For as long as it's existed, Apple has believed that the way to make money is to create products people -- actual end-users -- want to own and use, and for a long time this was successful but not as successful as making PC manufacturers happy, or making advertisers happy. Right now, it's working very well for Apple, and once they stopped doing stupid random half-arsed things they started making ridiculous amounts of money.
Is Apple doing something illegal w.r.t. warranties in Italy? Who knows? (a) It's the register. (b) There's no telling if the warranty Apple is obliged to provide in Italy in any way resembles AppleCare.
In general, Apple seems to handle "defects in manufacturing" very generously everywhere the world over. AppleCare covers you against all kinds of stuff that you'd be very lucky to get covered by warranty anywhere else. And if this Italian warranty policy is so all-pervasive, why do Apple's customers need to be told about it?
"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy." John Updike