I read the CWD comment column for Friday 13th, written by Conal Hanna and thought back over my experience with Apple.
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I bought my first Apple in 1980 it was an Apple ][+ with the innovation of a disk drive, colour output, a word processor and the first spreadsheet Visicalc.
All these combined were innovations for the time of which the most significant from an industry programmers view was the code used by Steve Wozniak to operate the disk drive.
At the time the piracy of software began and proved to be an ongoing issue for the next two decades evolving into data hacking across the planet.
This was followed in due course by the Apple //e which cleaned up and improved many of the hardware and software operating system features.
Apple had one poor seller at this time the Apple /// and one failure the Lisa, Lisa however was the template idea upon which the Macintosh was designed.
These failures led to one of the key features behind Apple’s ongoing success - each time a new product is developed or continued the basic business case for it is re-examined from the ground up.
It also made a key design requirement of extensive focus on how the user interacts with the device, rather than how the programmer decides to implement their interface.
The Macintosh came out in 1984 and introduced the Graphic User interface which still lies at the heart of all Apple products.
In the late 1990’s Apple introduced the Newton - this was the first cut at a portable battery powered lap top - it did not sell well but gave the company a lot of feedback into what users wanted, so like the Lisa formed the template for the Mac range of lap tops.
Around this time the first iMac range was introduced which later incorporated a free word processor, free spreadsheet and free slide display system.
This sort of added value could only be done when both hardware and software come from a single source.
In 2003 Apple introduced the iPod which basically rewrote the rules for portable music.
In 2007 came the iPhone which rewrote the rules for mobile phones by putting the user interface at the heart of the system and providing a way for programmers and software developers to get a guaranteed return for their time and effort.
The App store process means that developers get a guaranteed return provided they follow the Apple design rules and submit their code for line by line testing.
Shortly after came the iPad which expanded upon the iPhone.
iCloud was developed around around this time to provide a way for users to have added security and flexibility for their various Apple devices and to store data so it could be accessed where the user was at the time.
Then a few years later came the iWatch which is steadily rewriting the rules for watches.
The latest iPhone the X has focussed upon using facial recognition to identify users whilst the latest iMac Pro has built in a security cache system in hardware.
Right through this period from the beginnings till today the Apple focus has been to carefully analyse the market and produce a product that satisfies the vast majority within that market.
They have only had one quarterly loss during the whole of their existence, have no debt and a huge bank balance available to support research.
So where does this fit with the plaint made by Ms Hanna.
As she readily admits there was provision for her to not use the Maps app and therefore not have her child-care centre named.
As to her suggestion regarding the user choosing whether to allow data collection and use Apple already do this when a new operating system is installed or upgraded on the iMacs so it would be simple to add this option to other Apple devices.
They now do something similar in Settings which could be expanded.
However her final sentence jarred somewhat with me as over the 38 years I have owned and used Apple devices the Apple focus has always been to "put the user in the drivers seat”!!!