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Even after the emergence of Google and Facebook, Apple remains the most watched technology company of all. From Apple’s II debut in 1977 to the iPhone, the defining artifact of the 21st century, which allowed Apple to reach new profitable levels, skeptics and hyper-loyal fans followed every move. It should not surprise anyone that Apple has always generated an unusually high number of misunderstandings disguised as common knowledge.
Myth No. 1: Apple is the most valuable company in history.
Apple achieved a historic feat by reaching a value of $ 1 trillion (about Rs 74 million) in August. For many observers, this made it “the most valuable society of all time”.
But Apple’s milestone was specific to market capitalization on a US stock market. Eleven years earlier, PetroChina, China’s national oil and gas company, had briefly hit $ 1.2 trillion the day it opened on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. (It later became what Bloomberg News called “the collapse of world history stocks.”). worth $ 1 trillion to $ 1.5 trillion today, according to estimates by most analysts.
In any case, a trillion dollars is not what it was. As Motley Fool’s Alex Planeshas has pointed out, secular mail conglomerates make Apple completely depressed. The value of the Dutch East India Company reached a peak of more than $ 7 billion in modern dollars during the bubble of the “tulip madness” of the seventeenth century.
Myth No. 2: Apple doesn’t profit from its users’ personal information.
Apple CEO Tim Cook reminds us that the company is different from other tech giants, like Google and Facebook, because their core business is selling equipment and not attracting consumers with targeted advertising. based on the information collected about them. “We could make a lot of money if we monetized our customer, if our customer was our product,” he told Kara Swisher of Karade and Chris Hayes of MSNBC in March. “We chose not to do it.” Steven Milunovich, analyst at UBS, said: “The monetization of hardware has the advantage of creating a climate of trust.”
It is true that Apple has chosen not to participate in the advertising sector and does not search users of its products. this complicates things for other companies (the Safari browser was the first to block third-party cookies by default). But a recent report from Goldman Sachs estimated that Google would pay $ 12 billion to Apple next year to remain the default search engine on the iPhone, iPad and Mac. Why Google is willing to pay anywhere in this range is because targeting Apple fans with ads is very profitable. Apple earns a lot of money by following the search results of its customers; he simply praised the right to examine users to a third party.
Myth No. 3: Apple designs its products to quickly become obsolete.
From the moment Apple announced its first iPhone in 2007, experts have accused the company of deliberately limiting the life of its smartphones, to convince us to buy new devices at a steady pace. The product is “a slam dunk of obsolescence programmed,” wrote Seth Porges of TechCrunch during his debut on the phone. Last December, when Apple admitted to modifying iOS to slow down older iPhones, the cynics thought they had found their gun obsessed with the plan. “The slowing down of older devices seems to have the deliberate goal of pushing Apple customers to buy the new model,” said a group of French consumers whose complaint had prompted a government investigation.
The sensible (and true) explanation of Apple was lost: it consisted in “strangling” these iPhones because their aging batteries tend to cause brutal power outages. This has also led consumers to replace their phones prematurely. The company reacted to consumer anger by offering low-cost battery replacements and adding an option on iOS to disable the battery condition monitoring feature that caused the slowdown, which Apple would have taken in the first place. allowed to take a step.
In addition, Horace Dediu, analyst at Asymco, believes that users keep their Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, Mac, iPod Touch, Apple watches) for a considerable time, given the speed with which computer technology evolves years and three month on average. And there is evidence that the company is making good faith efforts to ensure that users continue to get good value for their purchases. iOS 12, its new mobile operating system, is optimized to extract maximum performance from the oldest hardware, extending the life of even five-year iPhones.
Myth No. 4: A disruptor under Steve Jobs, Apple now plays it safe.
A frequent accusation is that the company has “lost its pace” under Cook, written in 2017 by an NPR editor, as it no longer yields entire sectors. “It’s no longer Apple … that has apparently upset the world of consumer electronics with such an innovative product that has upset the industry,” said a 2013 ABC News reporter, reacting to the iPhone 5S and 5C.
But this revisionist story has some problems. First, the gaps between Apple’s innovations in jobs were far greater than we remember: for example, nearly six years passed between the iPod and the iPhone. (Cook has not been CEO since much longer than that). Secondly, Jobs has often been criticized for offering incremental and unattractive improvements. A Jobs presentation in August 2006 produced “one yawn after another,” a Wired writer commented, dissatisfied with the new Mac and the new operating system that “consisted of more tweaks than new big features.”
In fact, Jobs product development skills still have as much to do with evolution as with the revolution. Yes, the 2007 iPhone was a breakthrough. But the App Store, which has released most of its power, arrived a year later. A year has passed until the phone’s camera gains features like auto focus and the ability to record videos. Today, Apple, which is constantly improving the Apple Watch 2015, follows a similar strategy.
Myth No. 5: Macs aren’t susceptible to viruses and other malware.
In 2006, Apple launched the Mac on television with an advertisement showing comedian and writer John Hodgman posing as a PC, sneezing uncontrollably and then collapsing, to highlight the fact that there were “114,000 known viruses for PC “The actor Justin Long, who plays on a Mac, was not sensitive to any of them. “There is, to our knowledge, no viruses in Mac OS X in the wild,” Fortune said in 2009. The question of whether Macs can contract the virus is still an online question.
It is true that Macs are less full of malware than their Windows counterparts. But that’s partly because Apple only sends 7% of the world’s computers, making it a much less juicy target for bad guys. However, the Malwarebytes software publisher reported a 270% increase in Mac-specific viruses between 2016 and 2017.
And a fixation on viruses neglects the greatest threats of the modern era. Social engineering attacks, which try to make you make mistakes, such as the delivery of credit card details, passwords or corporate secrets, are increasing. Owning an apple does not offer protection. The other series do not require any access to your computer: nearly 150 million consumers in the United States. UU Personal information, including social security numbers, was leaked during last year’s Equifax breach, which occurred when the credit bureau was unable to fix its servers . In terms of security, we are more and more all in the same boat: Mac and Windows users.
