True, but Apple has so many interesting spaces it could grow into through M&A activity as opposed to putting ads in its TV service. Off the top of my head, wearables and gaming are just two that could promote a ton of genuine growth as opposed to promoting pirating by introducing ads.
There are plenty of whip-smart folks at Apple, surely they know people adopted streaming services due to lack of ads, and have the ability to pirate stuff pretty easily.
What's interesting is how this all worked out for them, whether it's serendipitous or purposeful.
Conventional consumer data collection relies on users coming to the collection mechanism i.e. spending time on a website or interactions on social media.
Apple is poised to withstand many privacy protection measures because their collection mechanism is in millions of peoples' hands and pockets. iPhone users are providing high-resolution data to their platform. The accuracy of your personality profile and related data are nicely packaged and easy to convert into highly targeted advertising.
However, it does seem fairly likely that he's a bit of a pushover, politically. I hate to beat a dead horse, but this is the guy who doubled-down on China while even Google was appalled by how they were using personal data to hunt dissidents. He's not Batman, but he's also not powerless to stop the incredible human suffering caused through Apple's deliberate labor partners and political allies. If Tim Cook had the gall to start moving away from China 10 years ago, maybe he'd have a shot at being even better than Bruce Wayne.
All of this is to say, Tim Cook is certainly not going to stand up for your data privacy when national interests step in. The best he can do is encrypt your device and give you a copy of th- I mean, your keys.
When your business partners are world governments, unfortunately mass suffering is the table stakes. Even ignoring Apple's exploitation of cheap laborers who subsist on a standard-of-living magnitudes below you or I, their repeated inability to admit failure is what scares me. Apple gives the US government access to too much data without a warrant. That's a fact. Here's another fact for you; the CCP has equally oppressive access to the data of their citizens. Apple has no right to sell entire nation-states access to their citizen's data, especially if they want to educate everyone else about how "privacy is a human right" and all that.
> When your business partners are world governments, unfortunately mass suffering is the table stakes.
You haven’t mentioned any suffering Apple is causing.
If you mean to say anyone who does business with a government is causing untold suffering, then I guess you are advancing an anarchist agenda. Fair enough.
> cheap laborers who subsist on a standard-of-living magnitudes below you or I
Orders of magnitude above the average in China, a developing country.
I mean, Apple has put Lidar into a decent percentage of iPhones over the past few years. Wifi and cellular signals can be used in a similar way to generate low-resolution maps of the world around your phone. And there's of course cameras on the front and back.
All running on closed source Apple software, with no physical on/off switch for those data collection pathways... or even the phone itself, which never fully shuts down. So maybe Tim Cook really is Big Brother.
Ok, so I trust Apple about privacy, but back when I tried self publishing on the App Store I kept every copy of the developer agreement because running diff was the only practical way to know about half the changes they made, and for which I was only given a Hobson's choice to accept or stop using the store.
I don't trust them to stay good forever.
I definitely don't trust them to not get infiltrated by government agents who want the sensor data. I only mostly trust their digital security enough for Apple Pay and Keychain.
I recognise none of this is evidence against Apple as it is today, and that my concerns speak of hypotheticals. But then, I don't think of anyone at Apple as Big Brother; the closest is that I find their content rules to be that frustrating Anglosphere dichotomy which treats sexuality as vastly worse than violence.
