Is anyone else bothered by usage of "we" here? I suppose it's not unlike a sports fan referring to their team as "we". There's just something disturbing about someone saying "we're in trouble" because a corporation they are a fan of produced a slightly less than stellar advertisement.
It's not that they're turning OSX into a consumer platform. It's that they're doing it so clumsily, with such garish hubris and lack of focus or reality, that it's worrisome.
Really, I think it's hard to dumb down an operating system enough to make it impossible to be productive with it. However, one can try. To my terms a consumer is the exact opposite of a producer. Therefore a consumer platform is obviously a platform for people who consume products, like software, and whatever they've got on iTunes, rather than for those who make it.
Now this is a bit awkward, cause you provably can still do productive work on OSX - lots of people do that rather successfully. So it's really hard to put your finger on what exactly is "consumer" about it and since I haven't used OSX more than a couple of hours (didn't like it), I frankly don't really know. Maybe somebody else can elaborate on that?
So not sure what you mean ?
I will concede that I forgot how long ago Apple started going consumer centric. Maybe I just felt iMacs were geared towards young artists.
Young artists become older artists who continue buying hardware and software.
Not much weirder than the number of people who referred to "Steve" as if Jobs were a personal friend.
I was, many years ago, an Apple retail employee. After that, I worked as an Apple Certified Technical Consultant. Referring to Apple as "we" is a old habit that manifested itself in a moment of surprise.
People who buy Apple products need, on some level, for Apple to continue making great products. I have a self-interest in the iPhone and the Mac continuing in their tradition, and not deviating along a path I find less than promising.
Samsung buyers are maybe not in the same exact position, since you could buy a very similar phone from .e.g., HTC.
Don't construe this as a defense of fanboy-ism though. Buying a Mac or an iPhone is, for me, a decision that accommodates my preferences as a user. It's not an afront to me if someone thinks that Apple sucks as a company, I don't take that to mean my preferences are dumb.
Words cannot express how terrifying that sentence is to me. At the end of the day, we're talking about stuff. Physical things. Things that you buy. If you're investing in a brand, what is the return on that? If you're being loyal to a brand, does that mean that the brand owns you?
Before people invest in brands, they should invest in themselves and in each other.
Jeez. Hyperbolic much? Turn the knob down a bit, you might some day have to talk about the time the doctor found a black mark on your chest scan, or when you were robbed at gunpoint.
At the end of the day, we're talking about stuff. Physical things.
You're talking about stuff. I'm talking about getting stuff done and being productive by having my preferred tools continue to exist, continue to be improved, and continue to be preferable (to me.)
If you're being loyal to a brand, does that mean that the brand owns you?
No. It means I'm invested in the brand. Similar to the case if I had bought stock in the company -- my return is productivity and user comfort.
...they should invest in themselves and in each other.
Presumably by doing real work, with actual impact? And with the help of the tools which make one productive.
I hope you won't mind if I have a continued investment in doing work and creating value for myself and others. Sorry that it involves caring about having good tools.
For an extreme example, if you are a long time Mac user and suddenly Apple came out and said "sorry guys, we've changed our mind. There will be no new Macs or versions of OS X after Mountain Lion. We will also be ending all support for current versions of OS X by 2013". That's going to be anything from a minor inconvenience to a serious nightmare for you.
I might imagine that long time Mac users are particularly sensitive around this because there was a time when this might have been a real possibility because Apple seemed to be on the road to going bust.
I think this concept of investment is perhaps an American or Silicon Valley-specific thing. To me, the concept of investment implies that you should get a return. If you're not getting a financial return, it's not an investment, it's a purchase. You can get other types of return from a purchase, but you can't necessarily exchange those types of return directly for goods and services.
The idea of an investment in a brand is something I find horrific. To me it sounds like a nice way of saying that a brand has you by the balls and can extract money from you as and when they want knowing they don't have to try. If people 'invest in coca cola' it means they won't buy pepsi or sprite to me. It means that they no longer even consider what's best for them, instead slavishly sticking to a brand that they self justify by claiming a false return.
Apple has my purchasing balls in a vice as far as the iPhone is concerned, it'd take me a lot to move to Android as I've spent a small fortune over the years on various apps. That isn't an investment, that's being owned. If I was able to take the apps I've bought on iPhone and run them (or reacquire them) on Android, they wouldn't have that hold over me.
Thankfully I have an iPad so switching phones is feasible for me (although I'd have to buy a whole new set of apps for the things I use on my current phone), but switching phones and tablets means I no longer get any value from the purchases I've made and that's where they have my balls in a vice.
From now on, when someone says they're invested in a brand, I think I'm going to use the term 'balls in a vice'.
Chuck Palahniuk wrote it best in Fight Club:
"The things you own end up owning you".
This is especially true of computers where platform lock-in is rife and there are high opportunity costs to adopting a particular platform, especially if you plan to develop for it.
Buying coca-cola is not really an investment (unless you buy stock in the company of course) since you're spending a small amount of money for a short term good. You buy a computer with the intention of using it for a few years at least and you learn a development stack usually with the intention of using it for even more years.
I'm not trying to assert any of this as being the case for the author, but when I was in my teens during the early days of the web, entranced by that heady feeling of being on the vanguard of something truly special, with a little fiefdom at my fingertips simply by being there, I too felt an emboldening, a sense of purpose and grandeur and the emotional vitality and certitude to make sweeping statements, to talk of The Community and be a bold spokesperson. To be figuring out the world, positing ideas and learning about where they take you and how to communicate and convince and argue and wax and eulogize, these are valuable things to learn at any age. Let Apple and Samsung tremble before a critique written with passion and determination long before any such fire is quenched, we are always free to be our own filters for taste.