Can you ever imagine Apple pulling a stunt like this? No, because it’s astonishingly user hostile: Lenovo should be hanging their head in shame, not making out like it’s no big deal.
I can believe that management at Lenovo simply can't understand how serious this incident is - they're unlikely to have the technical knowledge needed to understand how severe the security problem is. I'm sure there are hundreds of Lenovo engineers tearing their hair out in frustration right now. Not that this excuses the management - they should be listening to their engineers.
[1] http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/24/apple-responds-over-iphon...
I believe you are raising this point in good faith, but it verges on disingenuous to compare them.
The thrust of my argument was that most large companies are bad at communicating about technical problems because of the way the message gets filtered through management, PR, lawyers etc. It's probably fair to say that Apple hasn't ever done anything this bad - but it's also disingenuous to hold them up as an unfailing bastion of niceness and competence.
Why would you jump to that conclusion? Apple is just a company... and through the right view-port, even something like this can appear to be "consumer oriented" to management ("we're helping customers locate products and services easier").
Recently Canonical thought it was a great idea to bake-in Amazon ads into their search lens... so ads and product placement tagged with their affiliate link were baked into your OS.
No company is immune to doing stupid things, even Apple.
Apple have also made tons of mistakes when it comes to security and privacy.
But I still have a hard time seeing Apple ever intentionally adding a feature that proxies all a user's encrypted connections to inspect the content and insert ads.
Tim Cook's recent speech at the Cybersecurity summit sounded pretty earnest to me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI6DvV2muDE
But I've never heard about AV software itself being a vector. Where can I find out more?
Case in point; Lenovo pitched this as a "way for our customers to find new products". This is not a problem most users have, which is why the starting point for customer-centric design should ALWAYS be user feedback. This can be collected any number of ways (focus groups, surveys, etc.) but if you ask leading questions, you're going to get the answers you wanted to hear.
I don't doubt that the people who put this product together thought that it was an enhancement to the user experience. The problem is that they didn't do the research prior to even developing the project. So the end result is a product that solves only one problem: how can Lenovo get in on some sweet advertising dollars?
About the closest they've come to that was the "goto fail" bug from a year ago or so, and that gave every appearance of being a mistake, and Apple didn't try to claim that it wasn't a problem (although they were, as usual, pretty quiet about the exact nature of the problem).
This is why I'm willing to pay a bit more for things I rely upon and care about. If you were a climber, would you try to save a buck by using an off-brand, bargain rope?
And to that extent, just because you paid more for an aluminum case with exactly the same internal components doesn't somehow make it seriously better... Macbook Air's for example have notorious overheating issues that kill the laptop...
Difference in kind. Massive, massive difference in kind.
That's not an excuse for this, but it smells like incompetence rather than deliberate malice (at least on Lenovo's part - Superfish/Komodia may be another story).
Such as interoperability deficiencies, deleting competing apps from the store, etc.
Wake up.