Forget iPhone X–Apple's Best Product Is Its Privacy Stance

Re:Forget iPhone X–Apple's Best Product Is Its Privacy Stance by danieldk on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @11:29AM (#15602152)

It has always been clear to me that this privacy stand is maybe 20% Tim Cook and 80% strategy. The privacy card works well as a differentiating feature from Google products. So, we have a situation where the interests of Apple and a chunk of users are temporarily aligned.

We have stay continuously aware that this is probably a temporary situation and laying all your eggs in one basket is a bad idea. When governments of larger economies start forcing their hands with bans, etc., they will follow the money.

In hindsight, I think the popularity of macOS among UNIX fans has been detrimental to the development of open source software and open ecosystems that can provide more long-term privacy, by sucking a lot of manpower/energy out of the Linux/BSD ecosystem. (I am also guilty as charged.)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Forget iPhone X–Apple's Best Product Is Its Privacy Stance by jernfrost on Thursday November 02, 2017 @03:51AM (#15608584)

Quite the contrary, macOS has been a boost to Unix. You are rather naive idf you think all macOS users are potential Linux users. macOS helped make Unix a strong competitor to Windows. It helped demonstrate that a Unix system CAN be user friendly something many people used to think was impossible.

Thanks to the rise of macOS windows has become a second class citizen for many development tools.

The non-gui layer of macOS and Linux can for the most part easily be shared. It means open source developers of non-gui tools have a much bigger usergroup and potential contributors.

[ Parent | on HN ]