They have somewhere near 10% share of the laptop market and the new Apple Silicon stuff absolutely cooks. For an afterthought, they're an exceptionally well-built and well-loved one that people enjoy using.
> (In my experience as an app developer, getting any traction and/or money from your app can be much more difficult than actually building it.)
This. The app I built has maybe 50 downloads despite me trying quite hard to promote it. It's very difficult work, even with the app being completely free of charge (save for a donation button).
They do that because shipping things that have (potentially) faulty lithium-ion batteries is generally frowned upon, so in lieu of returning them some (potentially explosive) e-waste, they have you destroy it to ensure that you're not just trying to get a second headset for free.
> It's funny being old because the thing that confuses me is why people have reactions to reactions, ex. people saying "based, why should they have to apologize anyway, it wasn't offensive"...it clearly wasn't offensive in that sense!
Some people just really seem to object to the idea that anyone could ever experience an emotion and have it not be based on some kind of cold rationality.
The idea of feeling something in your gut, something visceral, is anathema to them.
Steve Jobs would have probably fired whoever suggested this ad, at best. He always saw the Mac as an enabler of and conduit for peoples' creativity, not a replacement for other forms of it.
Jobs' death is truly tragic in the context that Apple - and by extension, the rest of the tech world - could have gone in a very different direction if he were still around. He would probably be screaming his head off at the idea of generative AI.
It's the needless destruction that really gets to me. I have a fairly visceral reaction to seeing things that someone put time, effort and scarce resources into making get destroyed for no reason, and Apple's ad hit so many nerves in that respect. It's just a complete waste, and that's before we get into the whole subtext of "tech is going to destroy 'IRL' art forms" that many people got.
> If you want to be the next Apple, stop to think about the tasks you envision normies doing with your thing and build around those tasks, making them stupidly easy, at the expense of a cohesive general system design.
I like your point, but to be fair, Apple is one of the absolute last companies I would accuse of having an incoherent system design philosophy.
