Turnover
The preponderance of the evidence is undeniable. Too many times, in too many ways, over too many years, Apple has made decisions that do not make its products better, all in service of control, leverage, protection, profits—all in service of money.
To be clear, I don’t mean things like charging exorbitant prices for RAM and SSD upgrades on Macs or taking too high a percentage of in-app purchases in the App Store. Those are venial sins. It’s the apparently unshakable core beliefs that motivate these and other poor decisions that run counter to the virtuous cycle that led Apple out of the darkness all those years ago.
Apple, as embodied by its leadership’s decisions over the past decade or more, no longer seems primarily motivated by the creation of great products. Time and time again, its policies have made its products worse for customers in exchange for more power, control, and, yes, money for Apple.
The iPhone is a better product when people can buy ebooks within the Kindle app. And yet Apple has fought this feature for the past fourteen years, to the tune of millions of dollars in legal fees, and has only relented due to a recent court order (which they continue to appeal).
Steve wrote these rules. [email of Steve Jobs insisting on iBooks primacy]
It's not just about Intel Inside. When you buy any off-the-shelf PCs, the boxes are covered with confusing logos and messages and icons. You open it up, there's stickers to peel off displays and keyboards, they're all over the place. And then you start it up and you find junkware all over your desktop and in your menus that they've littered with, they're trying to upsell you on junk and that whole philosophy, you know, we try to just give you a great product that you're gonna love, you don't have to peel stuff off to make it look better.
Got a new iPhone, paid a lot for it. Even so: as soon as I open Settings, Apple is advertising more stuff they want to upsell.