I've argued this in another post recently, but I almost feel that we need a new word that means "so gross a misrepresentation that your average person would have a completely different view of the reality of the situation."
I feel like (especially on the Internet) it's pretty easy to deliberately mislead, and then when people call out a statement as BS, it turns into this game of "But see, screens are parts, a screwdriver is a tool!" Yes, I understand Apple is not technically lying here, but they are deliberately misrepresenting the repairability of their products.
It's almost like that game kids play of "I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you" when they sit half an inch from their siblings to annoy them.
Maybe "intellectually dishonest" would be a better term. I do think they are being intentionally misleading by putting iPhones in the same category as washing machines, while conveniently forgetting that Android and Windows exists.
Technically telling the truth below the fold or in the fine print, while misleading consumers who only give the literature a glance. This is very typical behavior from a corporation, it shouldn't surprise us. Except that Apple's marketing team has managed to dupe a huge number of consumers into believing Apple 'thinks different.'
I agree! It's been misused to mean things someone doesn't agree with too often :)
In this case we have been gettings tons of claims that what apple doing will see them charged with child porn felonies etc with almost no foundation.
We've also had lots of claims based on a failure to actually read about what apple is doing (ie, will scan all content not just that scheduled for upload to icloud etc).
Is there an argumentative equivalent of "damning with faint praise"? Because if the best you can do to prove that Apple lied is pull out some black and white scan of a 30 year old newspaper ad where they might have taken a bit of license with the very fuzzily-defined term "personal computer", then you actually make it look like Apple is the most scrupulously honest corporation in the history of the world.
Part of me wants to believe Apple and Amazon, but they're really under no obligation to tell us the truth. It's way more harmful for them to admit this happened.
Care to set the record straight? What's actually going on if not what they're presenting?
They're making an assumption about intent. Unless you can prove you're part of the Apple team responsible for this hardware behavior, you're just going to be doing the same.
We're not defending Apple. We're against misinformation. In the same way that people hurt the "Right to Repair" movement by claiming that Apple sues third-party repair stores merely for existing (they don't, they only sue for IP infringement), this misinformation hurts this cause because it makes it easy for people to ignore it. If you can easily disprove an accusation like this, it makes it easy to ignore other accusations coming from the same sources or surrounding the same arguments.
I'd say "transparency is better". They should've done years ago what they're now doing, especially given the rumors that have swirled about phone slow-downs for so long. By not addressing them when they knew them to be true, they were tacitly denying them or--and this is a very generous read--at least denying even their concerned customers the right to know.
>people would still complain that Apple is pushing users to replace their batteries
You seem to be suggesting that purposely deceiving customers is better than being honest with them and having them think they are being deceived. I don't see a moral universe where that's the right choice. At the end of the day, that argument essentially says that a company is right no matter what it does, as long as it can get away with it.
From a technical perspective, their scheme was certainly explicable, as evidenced by the fact that so many people are willing to accept it now. So, they could've just as well been forthright years ago and taken precisely the same approach they are taking now, without having to be "caught" first.
But, in the meantime, they enjoyed years of upgrades, many of which can reasonably be assumed to have been at least partially incentivized by performance issues.
I don't think you have to be a conspiracy theorist to find this a little too coincidental.
Apple won't come clean until they can sweep it under the rug like they did with the other debacles (see: keyboards). Being honest about those things undermines their "Apple knows best" image attempt.
Just because something isn't surprising doesn't mean it is necessarily legal or ethical; meanwhile, Apple refuses to admit that "tl;dr" in public--quite likely because they appreciate the practice might not be legal and certainly isn't ethical--and so are attempting to instead claim it is justified, and so it is important to refuse to allow Apple employees that cop out and instead call them out for what we know to be the actual truth here.
It is, it is not an off the shelf component that apple just bought and assembled as other people were claiming.
I think its funny that people are responding to what I said, pretending I said something else, and then others are attacking me for saying what I didn't say... and you're saying I said it!
I guess it doesn't matter what I say does it? Everything gets distorted by the google distortion field.
Quote the whole phrase: a "well-designed compromise". What's well-designed about secret behavior that angers users?
But it's hard to trust that statement anyway. I'd be more likely to trust them if they'd reported that on their own, instead of hiding it for a year then issuing a PR statement when users proved it was happening.
And if that statement wasn't contradicted by their behavior in shutting down phones after the screen was replaced.
"First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades."
...
They forgot to mention the "unless the user tries to repair it" exception.
I see you are trying to draw attention away from the fact that Apple has on repeated occations shown to be dishonest, disengenious and outright misrepresenting competitors by presenting information in ways they knew to be wrong.
I see you do that and I wonder why on earth anyone would be so loyal to a corporation that they would be willing to drag their own credibility down to defend the credibility of a corporation which in they have no vested interest. It baffles me and makes no sense.
That aside, let's get back to what you said:
I don't think he meant truth in terms of marketing ...snip... but truth as design fundamental.
Can you elaborate on what you think this is supposed to mean, apart from being a divertion away from the fact that Apple, more than any other company currently out there, manipulates and lies to their audience and to sustain their image as "different"?
Both yourself and the GP are technically correct depending on how you choose to interpret harm on the company.
The problem is that the tone of that claim implies the kind of harm that is significant while being just vague enough to also be covered under your interpretation should they get challenged on that statement.
Thus I would argue that Apple are still being disingenuous even if they are technically correct.
I feel like (especially on the Internet) it's pretty easy to deliberately mislead, and then when people call out a statement as BS, it turns into this game of "But see, screens are parts, a screwdriver is a tool!" Yes, I understand Apple is not technically lying here, but they are deliberately misrepresenting the repairability of their products.
It's almost like that game kids play of "I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you" when they sit half an inch from their siblings to annoy them.
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