Privacy and Security: How Apple thrived in a season of tech scandals

“The business world has long been plagued by Apple catastrophists — investors, analysts, rival executives and journalists who look at the world’s most valuable company and proclaim it to be imminently doomed,” Farhad Manjoo writes for The New York Times. “Companies that make high-priced hardware products aren’t supposed to be as popular, as profitable or as permanent. To a lot of people in tech, Apple’s success can seem like a fluke, and every new hurdle the company has faced — the rise of Android, the death of Steve Jobs, the saturation of the smartphone market, the ascendance of artificial intelligence and cloud software — has looked certain to do it in.”

“But this year, as it begins to roll out a new set of iPhones, the story line surrounding Apple has improbably shifted,” Manjoo writes. “In an era of growing skepticism about the tech industry’s impact on society, Apple’s business model is turning out to be its most lasting advantage.”

“Because Apple makes money by selling phones rather than advertising, it has been able to hold itself up as a guardian against a variety of digital plagues: a defender of your privacy, an agitator against misinformation and propaganda, and even a plausible warrior against tech addiction, a problem enabled by the very irresistibility of its own devices,” Manjoo writes. “Though it is already more profitable than any of its rivals, Apple appears likely to emerge even stronger from tech’s season of crisis. In the long run, its growing strength could profoundly alter the industry.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Smart people who are concerned with protecting their privacy use Apple products. Certainly not Google and/or Facebook.

Smart users who value their security and privacy certainly do not use Chrome or any other Google products. If it’s from Google, you’re not the user; you’re the product. – MacDailyNews, October 21, 2017

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