There’s nothing wrong with submissiveness, as long as it’s consensual 
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It was more Jef Raskin’s vision than Steve Jobs’.
Folklore.org has a lot of the stories from the Apple II/Lisa/early Mac days, from some of the people who worked there.
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So you are saying that the review system that they had in place, imperfect as it was, was working? You could go read the reviews, find out why people were unhappy, and decide for yourself if you gave a shit? This feature is now gone and you consider this a win?
I’m always amazed by how subservient people are to Apple once they have bought in.
As others have alluded to, I think the whole experiment of crowdsourced reviews has been an interesting one, but a failed one. Everything is astroturfed, and anything that isn’t is useless ranting by outliers with bad experiences (or bad childhoods).
I’d like to say we should have a return to professional reviewing, but the concern there is there might be too much stuff to do that with. The rate at which the market is flooded with clones, crappy versions, and counterfeits of every single possible widget imaginable…
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I SEE THE FNORDS
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If you’ve ever really read those comments you’d realize the headline should be “Apple stops practice of providing forum for Apple Trolls”.
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Hardly. The first of all, the review system was NOT working, in that the star ratings — which are all you see until you dig — were wildly off base. If I hadn’t been so surprised that the ratings were so low, I would not have read further, and I doubt most people do.
If they took the star ratings away and left only the individual reviews, then you could argue that it was working, but it would also be next to unusable. But the intent of stars is to indicate general quality of a product, not whether people are unhappy with a policy that’s tangential to the product.
Secondly, there are plenty of non-Apple sites with reviews of the products; I mentioned two of them in my comment. They were perfectly adequate for judging the quality.
I’m surprised online reviews exist at all. You really can’t trust any of them when you know there are services that pay people to leave good or bad reviews on certain products. It’s like any kind of astroturfing… and there isn’t a good way to prevent it, unless you ask for everyone’s id. Even then, I’m sure groups with enough money could find a way around it.
At least partially because the average English-speaking consumer is a bit of an airhead.
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Unless the giver of stars is an unbiased reviewer who’s very familiar with the competition, stars are next to useless.
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Companies do try to game the reviews but an honest reviewer is still going to give an unbiased review. It’s what we do.
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Apple rating system, 2 out of 5 stars. Rating system disabled by recent change. Will change my rating when this bug is fixed.
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I’m totally OK with them taking the reviews off. They weren’t the slightest bit helpful to shoppers and were the usual Yelp-style crap: “I dropped my phone and ran over it with my car and it broke, zero stars, would not recommend!” “The music I listen to sucks, so I give these headphones no stars!”
This is pretty much what I was thinking when I came into the comments. “If only there was an alternative location on the internet where people could give reviews…”
I ran into that too, when I was trying to find out if I could charge my iPad using my Switch’s cable since only one short charge cable came with the iPad. I never did find anything decisive, but so far so good.
I was thinking that too. A BS review is useless.
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