CMV: Apple is a terrible company that treats its customers as children and abuses its brand in an effort to over charge for computational devices.

Apple has a very misunderstood ethos -

When a business is tasked with creating their first phone, they might look at the existing phones on the market, conduct surveys to find out what people like and engineer a package of features that will make people genuinely like and want to purchase it. That's reasonable, it's also a smart approach.

The thing about Apple is that they take a fascinatingly different and consistent approach: make something that works great on its own merits, no matter how it seems or what the trends are and people will come to love it and buy it. Fill it with features that users will love, even if they don't realise it yet.

The first iPhone wasn't a very marketable product at the time, it was expensive and weird and did the same things any other phone could do (albeit in drastically different ways). It's easy to forget that it was kind of panned by critics and other tech companies at the time - Steve Ballmer famously laughed at it in an interview. Apple aren't ignorant, they knew that removing a physical keyboard would be a tough sell for enterprise users, they knew that the price tag was hefty and they knew that having non removable batteries and storage would confound people.

What Apple decided was that people didn't need a physical keyboard, that touchscreen was the way of the future - they just didn't realise it yet. The iPhone's true strengths were in its ease of use and superior user experience, things that people not only didn't realise we're important to consumers at the time, but also thought were unnecessary in consumer electronics. And that's why The iPhone at least was a revolutionary product - it designed to sell, it was designed to take a leap forward. It's popularity began to set standards and suddenly user experience, large screens, UI and touch interfaces became 'important' for consumers.

This unusual approach is what sets Apple up for much of its criticism. Many people (especially those who don't like Apple and see it as a cult) don't really understand Apple's ethos and on the surface it seems like everyone is just focussed on the marketing and blindly buying whatever Apple says they should buy.

When Apple ditched Flash support people couldn't understand why and took it as a shortcoming. If a company like Apple wanted Flash support - one of the most widely adopted web standards at the time, they would have. Steve Jobs ditched support for it because it was an unstable, clunky architecture not suited to mobile web and decided (I'm sure against the pleas of the board and investors) to drop support for it entirely, predicting that it would soon die and be replaced by an improved platform. He guessed right and Flash is now a shadow of its former self - Android dropped support for it last year. What's important wasn't that Apple was right, but that they were willing to take some flak in a controversial decision just to streamline their OS a little bit.

Apple just announced a new MacBook that will only feature one port. That's one USB Type-C port used for charging, data transfer and anything else. It was met with outrage - people are panning the design and forums are full of comments about how impractical it is. Apple here can be taken two ways - one of being arrogant enough that they believe they can shovel terrible design decisions onto its fan base and still be successful. Or, and really consider this: Apple believes that the time is ripe for a new breed of laptop in a new age where physical ports will soon become redundant.

People forget that Apple isn't afraid to cause a stir and in terms of purely making money, that's not the easier path to go down.

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