Love it or hate it, it’s the kind of company that leaves no one indifferent. It showed the world (at least to the masses) the personal computer, the graphic interface, the decent portable music player, a real smartphone and what a tablet should be like. All very nice and disruptive. All products are incredible well made, beautiful design and taste, and they just work out of the box like no other in the market. I should love it. But the sad true is i don’t.
Company culture runs top down, and Steve Jobs was indeed a visionary and incredible smart person, but also a manipulative, control freak, indifferent to his own child’s, cruel kind of person (probably a big jerk). Unfortunately a lot of that spilled over to Apple.
Lot’s of (unnecessary) proprietary stuff.
Long story of conflicts with other companies and standards. Adobe, Google, just to name a couple.
Closing the market with all kind of patents and legal tricks.
Mac OS X has a huge portion of FreeBSD on it but i don’t see a cent donated by Apple (list of donors include Cisco, Google, Juniper, NetApp, McAfee, Dell, etc).
I see Google doing some incredible work at a social level, Google foundation, X-Prize. In counterpart is there an Apple foundation?
One buys an Iphone/Ipad and must pay a developer account or jail brake. The SDK is only available for Apple computers.
One must get his OWN files to his OWN device trough Itunes…
And the list goes on and on… does the profit, a vision, or whatever justify this kind of policies? Do the ends justify the means? For Steve Jobs sure, for Apple sure, but not for me. So me choices are rather obvious (check here, here and here).
FREEDOM, FREEDOM, FREEDOM bitch!
One more thing 🙂 … it’s kind of sad that all those geeks that were upset some ten years ago by Microsoft monopolistic actions and autism, most of all switched to Apple, giving their love and support to an even worse company in that matter. You can get in a meeting with IT staff and 90% of those that were running Windows laptops some years ago now proudly show their Apple gear… talk about brainwash… i can only recall the old Apple motto “Think different”… probably will glue this to my Linux laptop one of those days.
I bought myself a MK809II, a Chinese TV stick running Android that connects to the HDMI port of your dumb TV and transforms it in a smart TV. It’s pretty inexpensive, going for about 50 euros and pretty power efficient: