Apple in IT World
After sharing 2 posts criticizing Apple, I believe its time to tell a few things about why I do love Apple. Let me tell you why they are market leader.
First of all, most of people don’t know technical details, they just consider the outfit. We can easily tell that Apple is designing beautiful products. When you take their products in your hand they feel nice, when you place them on your desk they look fancy. They are just nice furniture when they are not in use on top of their functionality as an electronic device. So why not buying one…
They complement their devices with a user-friendly software. In addition to be user-friendly, their software design also looks awesome competing with hardware. To be honest I’m not fan of their modern lean designs. Still, I miss their design paradigm from Jobs times. I think it is called skeuomorphic. After Jobs passed away they started moving towards lean design paradigms which I still cannot understand why modern designs needs to be that lean. I love 3D look&feel from their old designs. Maybe I’m old, huh? But in any case, I do insist that their designs are the best of market. So why not buying one…
Their software and hardware compatibility is also best of market. Taking the advantage of providing limited hardware options (more on that later in this post) they can implement their software running smoothly on their hardware. I do believe their products are always running snappy even though they sometimes do not come with a cutting edge tech. Their software is quite reliable, they do not crash easily and disappoint you in a critical moment. So why not buying one…
Their displays are always the best. I’m so confident about this topic. They always unveil their products with the best display technology of their time. Despite they often don’t use high end tech behind the scenes, they always choose high end tech for what you see. As a result Apple software runs on Apple hardware. They take the advantage to compensate old tech with software optimization. As a result what you get is always a software running flawlessly. So why not buying one…
They provide long term software support for their product. This fact is by itself enough to be a game changer. I think there cannot be a better selling point than this. You can use your 10 year old Mac with latest OS. Even if they cannot provide latest OS for their phone because of hardware limitations, at least you still receive some security updates for your phone. I do not know any other brand, forget about competing, cannot even be compared with Apple. This is one of the most important point for providing a good customer experience. So why not buying one…
Integration, this is also one of the things that I want to point it out. Integration is also my profession almost for the last 20 years. I know difficulties, challenges… Apple is doing an awesome job with providing the best integration within their ecosystem. I do love to authenticate myself using my Apple Watch. I love to ping my iPhone from my Apple Watch when I forget where I left it at home. I even found my stolen iPhone once using the find my phone feature. I love to unlock my Mac when my Apple Watch is close by. I can continue with examples but long story short you have great integration as long as you stay in Apple ecosystem. So why not buying one…
Customer support; I believe this is another important selling point for Apple, even though I cannot say that my experience was nice in my home country, Turkey, but in other countries that I used their customer service like USA, Australia, Germany, it was really good. I didn’t have any problem for making reservation, they welcomed me friendly, solved my problems quickly etc. With one exception I do not want to skip huge disappointment. They charged me for a replacement half of the price of a new Apple Watch when my watch screen was broken. They declared as a reason they cannot change just the screen. I think I covered this topic already in my previous post. I highly recommend you to read if you haven’t so far. As a result it was also easy to have it replaced. Then provide a good workflow to figure out your problem. Employees are well trained to keep you entertained while they are solving your problems. As a result, they make sure to keep a smile on your face. So why not buying one…
Hardware meeting with software to realize a use case. I chose to start with a weird sentence, let me try to clarify what I mean. They do not place a new hardware technology without making use of it. If we want to criticize Apple we can say that without monetizing they don’t provide the technology but Apple and its monetizing approach deserves a post itself. So let’s say more on that in another post. I can give NFC as an example. Before they announced Apple Pay service they didn’t place NFC technology in iPhones. As a person who spent a lot of his energy to explain what SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is to people especially upper management that I was working with, I do appreciate Apple’s approach. For them products are designed from the perspective which services they need to provide with those products. Without a certain service to be provided there is no reason to place a technology. So no overhead, no additional battery consumption etc… When they design the service to be provided, they include hardware with a robust software to their products. So why not buying one…
One another topic that I want to discuss here in this post, is getting rid of old technology. We can give this as an example to how Apple ruling the market. Sometimes I’m really getting pissed off what they cut like the 3.5mm headphone jag. But I really appreciate when they cut 32bit support or they move to Arm architecture with Apple silicon. Backward compatibility is always a burden for IT. Technologies join our lives when they are invented but they should be also retired as if they were unveiled. Mostly Apple is leading the market for cutting such kind burden as a leading brand. I would appreciate more if they were cutting prices when they had taken out charger from their iPhones. Anyway, pushing forward is good and they do this quite well. So why not buying one…
Privacy; This topic is being advertised by Apple quite a lot but still I need to place this here in this post. I want to write about privacy in a future post but to keep it short if you don’t want your data to be processed, if you want to stay away from getting hit with marketing calls, emails, advertisements than you need to pay for the services that you are consuming. This is the main difference of their business models of two well known companies Apple & Google. (Actually Google is the name of search engine product for the Alphabet company but I don’t know how many people knows Alphabet company if you call them other than Google). I want to go into details about privacy in another post comparing Apples and Googles approach and also challenge Apples privacy. For now let’s say, Apples privacy policy is better than Googles. Just as a tip from that future post you cannot be independent and free if you are using something which is used by masses.
Final words; I do recommend using Apple products, to stay in a well integrated, robust ecosystem with a minimum learning curve need… There is no better option than Apple for now. I believe some Chinese companies (Huawei, Xiaomi) started to create ecosystems like Apple but still they need more time to compete. Buy Apple, but just be picky about which generation of their products, which configuration to choose. When buying a product go through these questions?
Which use-cases will it be enabling for me?
Am I really limited with my existing product?
How long will I be able to use?
Keep in mind technology is a tool for realizing our goals don’t let companies to fool you as if owning the product is the ultimate goal…