Part of Apple's image that earned it loyal customers is that they care more about their customers than most other companies. Apple doesn't sell your data, it protects your privacy, will fight government agencies asking for user's data, etc.
>Part of Apple's image that earned it loyal customers is that they care more about their customers than most other companies.
>Apple doesn't sell your data, it protects your privacy, will fight government agencies asking for user's data, etc.*
That's a quite recent thing, say starting around 2015 or so, as a differentiating branding to Google, Amazon, and Facebook. They might mention it here and there, but they didn't tout it all the time before, and almost none before 2012 with Jobs. And Apple had already had its huge rise by that point. It's not like the "privacy conscious" are a large enough market to make for the later growth. In fact, if anything, the privacy conscious would have moved to Apple first.
Plus, Apple is not "pro privacy" because it's some political champion of privacy, but simply because it's business model (hardware, software, services tied to them) doesn't need selling ads and user data. Whereas Facebook's and Google's whole business model revolves around turning user info to targeted ads...
Apple's image was "the computer for the rest of us", "empowering people", etc. Even the 1984 ad was about corporate sameness and drudgery of then computing, not about some anti-government rebellion.
Apple was never in politics or taking some stance to world affairs (besides "Against AIDs" etc), and before Cook came out (and the cultural/marketing climate was friendly to jumping on the bandwagon), they'd never cared for the LGBT movement either.
A lot of that was for PR, especially against rivals like Google and Microsoft. Apple definitely made some improvements but there were better approaches for just about everything they did that would've helped users and industry alike.
Who thought most of these things? Every Apple customer knows that Apple overcharges for everything but the alternative is not acceptable to them (Android, Windows, etc) l.
Apple doesn’t sell your data because it’s not their business model.
Most people don’t care about privacy, if they did, they wouldn’t use Facebook or Google.
I wonder how much this "Apple is fighting for your privacy" image isn't even intentional PR, but just an accident. Watching HN threads over the years, as Google kept doubling down on surveillance capitalism, the usual "Apple vs. Google" / "Android vs. iPhone" threads started to point out that Apple is not doing what Google is doing. I have a feeling the opinion of Apple being pro-privacy has spiraled out from this.
