I’m Sorry I Criticized You, Apple. You Win
This is a time when an entire driverless car industry is trying to convince the world that its products are safe before it can even come up with convincing stats — or prevent deadly accidents like the one in Tempe, Arizona, earlier this year. This is a time when Google is trying to subvert new privacy regulations to turn them against content producers. A time when Facebook, blasted by media and regulators for ignoring people’s privacy concerns, starts a dating service which will collect people’s most intimate data.
This is a time when companies whose innovations are more intrusive than useful, more gimmicky than problem-solving, operate with business models that either burn investors’ cash or turn the users into products.
At a time like this, Apple is a rock of common sense, sobriety, dignified engineering supremacy, prudent financial and supply chain management, effective marketing, and customer-oriented retailing. It’s a traditional business that does most things well, demands a high price for it, and receives that high price. With Apple, what you see is largely what you get, and when it’s not, the company will not just apologize but offer a fix.
While I think Leonid Bershidsky is overblowing the “boring maturity” angle here, there’s a valid point to be made. #Apple is taking its role of being a primary purveyor of computing devices and online services seriously, and is doing its utmost to design products that provide top-of-the-line performance, usability, security, and #privacy — which is what users actually want. So much of what many other tech companies put their efforts into is not what users want…it’s what those companies and their investors want. It’s definitely time we as consumers stopped accepting whatever it is that Silicon Valley hands to us, and maintain a more critical eye towards whatever the Next Big Thing is that somebody’s peddling.