I don't understand how you draw a connection between this and Stockholm syndrome. "The products are great when they work, but Apple is horrible to deal with when something goes wrong" is a completely sensible opinion.
And after all, the 99% case is that things work well. Choosing products which are worse 99% of the time but where the company is more pleasant to work with in the 1% case where something goes wrong is a tough sell. (Omitted from this discussion is whether Apple products are truly better when they work or not. That's a wholly unproductive discussion which comes down to opinion and mattcantstop clearly thinks that they are.)
It's a completely sensible reason to avoid products that are undependable by design.
Many Apple "engineering" decisions favor the walled garden over robustness; for example, I am unable to update many important applications on my old work Macintosh because they were installed from the app store using an "Apple account", or whatever it's called, that cannot be used anymore because the colleague who knew the password has left the company; having a privileged account on the computer isn't good enough.
That sounds a lot like your company allowed either a personal account or an account tied to an individual to be used to purchase the software. Surely a better policy would be to use an account not tied to an individual in that case?
This is universally a bad design. It's not just Apple. I know, for example, Microsoft closed a loophole with Microsoft accounts being allowed to be opened using a company email address when your organisation has a hosted domain. This is stupid. Every year I now need to purchase my MSDN subscription using a personal email address based account because my corporate account is not allowed to buy anything from the Microsoft Store. To add insult to injury - unless I am very, very careful and make sure the personal account is completely logged out, I then can't apply the activation code correctly to my corporate account that is associated with the subscription renewal. Before this renewal, which was successful, I have had two years in a row where I have ended up needing to file a support ticket and wait for the "magic" activation flag to be re-set because my browser was half logged in. This year I just logged in to my personal account with Edge and use Chrome for my corporate one to register the activation for the renewal. It shouldn't be this hard!!!
Also - yes, this should probably all be done by IT for me in the background, but we are a small company and that is just the way it is. The subscription was set up years ago and I inherited it from another developer when they left about 3 years ago.
> That sounds a lot like your company allowed either a personal account or an account tied to an individual to be used to purchase the software. Surely a better policy would be to use an account not tied to an individual in that case?
It wasn't even obvious that the personal account existed in the first place; if the app store "just works" and the former designated Macintosh user doesn't care about software updates too much, forgetting that the account was necessary and it should have been either handed over to posterity or purged by uninstalling the involved apps is a reasonable outcome.
The way Apple handles this sucks. It is not clear how you can transfer purchases, or if that is even possible. It would be nice if there was an easy way to merge obsolete/outdated accounts in to a valid one.
> It is not clear how you can transfer purchases, or if that is even possible.
I agree, but there are at least a few clear reasons I can imagine why Apple don’t want this:
1. They don’t want people to resell software that they bought.
2. If you could transfer licenses, a group of many people could share a single license between them, transferring it back and forth. Instead of all of them buying one license each.
3. If licenses could be transferred there would for sure be cases of scammers tricking people to transfer their licenses for paid software to them.
I used to think so, but it gets difficult with DRMed digital downloads.
For example, I owned a piece of hardware called Akai MPC X. It came with a companion software for the computer, a DAW called “MPC2 Software”.
When I sold the hardware Akai MPC X to someone else, I wanted to transfer the companion software for the computer to them. Akai demanded a ridiculous €100 fee to transfer the license for the software from my user to their user. I had other software on my user as well, so me handing over the user as whole was not an option and therefore only Akai could have helped us transfer the license.
In the end the buyer of the hardware therefore got only the hardware and not the companion software for computer.
That experience soured my opinion of Akai by a lot.
The MPC X is still nice hardware and I kind of want to buy an MPC X again in the future. But it sucks that Akai is like this with the software license.
Microsoft has the tools to manage these subscriptions in a business, they work pretty smoothly even for a small org. There's no reason for you to continue to do that other than just inertia of the way you've done it in the past.
Microsoft makes the tools you want available, you're just not using it and acting like it's Microsoft's fault.
I don't get mad at the knife maker when I cut myself cooking.
Probably, but my org leans very heavily on outsourced IT, and so we are at the mercy of whatever their policy is. Also - if I let the said outside IT take over management - it will go wrong. The current system just means I need to go find a director and ask them for a company credit card - it really isn't any more complicated than that. The big drama is that I never created a personal work account, so I only have my AD one, and I am not allowed by MS to create an account associated with that identity now. If I go to renew, I guess as we have always done it via retail, that is the only option. The pain I went through to transfer this account to my identity after the original owner left the company, I am not really likely to mess with it again if I only have to do this dance once a year.
Apple's system design is brittle and forces both the individual and the company to be meticulous about stuff that shouldn't matter. How is that not an Apple problem?
I mean, yes, fairly literally; this is not how any company should be installing software. Anywhere; they'd have the same problem if they were using the Microsoft one, or had just had a former employee register commercial software directly with their personal email on the company's behalf.
Maybe that account with a personal name and company domain as an address is a company thing and maybe it's a personal thing. In the case of the former, that's bad company IT practices. In the case of the latter, it's bad personal IT practices. In any case, I'm not sure I want a vendor to just hand over access because there's a company domain in the email.
Maybe there are circumstances where it makes sense to do so, but it's not clear that as a general rule, setting up an account with a company email should magically hand over all the data and other information associated with that account to the IT department. Maybe you should assume it does though.
It is definitely reasonable to avoid Apple products! For both these sorts of reasons and others. I'm not trying to argue otherwise. However, the claim "it's reasonable to not use Apple products" is very different from "using/liking Apple products is a sign of Stockholm syndrome".
It may contravene some sort of HN guidelines to point this out, but the fact that this comment has not been downvoted by a large number of people is quite an indictment of the mindset here. In my opinion, of course.
there are various programmer types who find the Apple way really onerous and problematic, because they want to control everything, these can be either Windows or Linux since both give you the ability to control and mod your system at very high level.
Every example of bad behavior by Apple in relation to their products, customer service etc. connects in the mind with this underlying philosophical difference between how computers should be used, and so the indignant feeling wells up in their brain that Apple users are misled and abused, and if you are misled and abused you must have Stockholm syndrome.
This however is just my reading of the phenomenon I have observed quite a lot.
Before anyone tells me I'm an Apple lover, I would say until the M1 I considered all OS'es equivalent with some various benefits to each, but as long as I have M series Macs I do believe they are very superior (but haven't tried recent - this year - non M machine)
>there are various programmer types who find the Apple way really onerous and problematic, because they want to control everything
Treating customers like renters after they buy your products at a premium is a pretty onerous practice and it's pretty surreal to see the pushback characterized as megalomania.
Funny, because I get the impression that users of Windows and Android systems are treated as renters. They're certainly not treated as owners, because the devices and OS continuously give the OS and software more control over the device than they give the end user.
Sure, Android has improved lots, mostly because of comparisons with iOS, but who can forget that it used to be the case that you literally couldn't install and run certain apps without agreeing to ALL of the apps' demands? What if someone doesn't want to give Facebook access to your microphone and location?
The fact that you can't uninstall Edge or even have links reliably open in your browser of choice just shows how Microsoft thinks of you, and it's only getting worse, with the extra steps you have to take to even just have a local account. They'll phase that out eventually.
Sorry, but most people, myself included, want and are happy to use a "walled garden" device, particularly if it means I don't have to deal with spyware and apps trying to steal all the data they can.
when one makes a statement it happens in context, this context is often important to consider to get the meaning of the statement, this is especially important in the English language.
This importance of context in English is the reason why "Buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo Buffalo" and similar expressions are valid sentences.
One should try to be precise in usage, but it's also reasonable to assume interpretation follows normal usage all of which is preamble to pointing out that:
Hey, given the context it should be obvious that "because they want to control everything" actually means "because they want to control everything on their computer" which is a commonly expressed desire by a large portion of this community and thus the expression is not an accusation of megalomania.
The problem with the "walled garden" is that it is insidious.
At some point they control everything and at that point, it's too late to create an alternative product as it would be like 20 generations behind in performance.
You don't have to go so far back as to build your own NAND gates or a computer out of falling marbles, but giving the user almost zero ability to customize is just crazy.
Right. 50 step manual fix! Only that it actually is like generally 3-4 step fix.
But I get it. As opposed to trying to let it sink in that something that could have easily been fixed and diagnosed you get to hear “buy a new one; nothing can do”, I am sure being able to fix something is less appealing. Because we must not lose sight of things like the organismic satisfaction one experiences when being able to pay for something Apple. That opportunity! Oh, my breathing is going up already. Just the thought of it.
I mean, right, right? Once friends and family agree to promote you to their voluntary tech support position, you are installing, reinstalling, upgrading no end.
But if they have sony, apple or any of those - endless vacation!
There are times when I find this utterly infuriating, but other times it's an absolute blessed relief. I know there's no point wasting time hunting for a solution (that may or may not make the situation worse) and I should just walk away and do something more meaningful instead.
It's interesting when somebody lists A, B, and then comes to the exact opposite conclusion C that you would. What a different life you and I must have lead.
The 50 step manual fix is actually just generated by chatgpt and sounds plausible, but does not actually work. It's just a red herring to get page clicks / ad views.
Stockholm Syndrome was invented by a man who didn’t even talk to the people he accused of it, but simply asserted it as explanation for why former hostages were criticizing the police, while those former hostages were clearly stating that it was because the police were aggressive and irrational, escalating with acts like unnecessarily pointing guns, and generally disregarding the safety of the hostages. The only other famous case turned out to be acting under duress. It is to this date not a real psychological diagnosis.
Similarly, if you’d like to understand why people put up with Apple’s moderate abuse, maybe ask not how one might write them off as insane, but instead what their alternatives are.
I think it's more like defence of investment. They have spent tens of thousands of money, time, knowledge on this brands ecosystem of devices and software. It's not just airpods it's the phone, watch, desktop, laptop, all the software purchased over their lifetime and the identity that goes along with it. In deciding to leave there's also future costs of moving to something more free but "worse".
The pain needs to be way greater than the cost of what they have invested. In a way they are not captors of peoples freedom but bankers who hold people's time, effort and money. Even with OP's case I can almost guarantee that whilst he might consider moving away from Apple because of his bricked laptop, he won't - he will side with his investments. Leaving this ecosystem would also cause psychological pain - its very hard to tell oneself that "I was wrong".
The genius is that Apple makes good stuff and they know that what they make "just works" and it all works great together and people will invest not only money but their very selves in the company. The company is the world biggest tech company for a reason.
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