Ask the same 100 people if they make bread when they get somebody else to make it for them. People’s understanding of words often sucks less with concepts closer to them than mass manufacturing/logistics.
Ummm… Because we’re discussing Apple in this thread?
No, but it correlates.
See the bread example. You’re still wrong.
The alternative is that he is trapped in a bubble of people without enough of dissenting views. Groupthink sets up fast in such settings and one can then honestly believe that “everybody” is like that. “Nixon has no chance, I don’t know anybody who’d vote for him.”
People buy bread from just like they buy computers. Just like people will say Apple makes computers, they will say Wonderbread makes bread (even if it turns out that Wonderbread outsources bread baking or shares factories).
Read the title again. Apple doesn’t make Windows. Dell, Google, etc. have also been discussed here, and you yourself said we should acknowledge that all companies operate this way:
Apparently we shouldn’t call it this way if it means we won’t be able to single out Apple for criticism.
Not really. There’s not a lot that is manufactures in the US anymore, even if the companies making them are American. And these offshore products don’t get preferential tax/duty treatment based upon being American companies.
Well, that basically is @popobawa4u’s view, which is ironic because it assumes the hell out of what other people are and how they act/think while at the same time @popobawa4u criticizes “the armchair populism of knowing what most people supposedly do or think.”
I said thread, not the discussion. This one somehow deviated from the theme in the title. Other thread can be started by the “Reply” button at the bottom of the overall discussion. Sorry if I am too accurate to accept handwaving.
All deserve it. Apple merely deserves to come for seconds.
There are assembly plants in Europe. US is only a small part of the world.
Sure they can. But majority usage tends to define language and what words mean.
By your standards, it’s not clear that Foxconn or Pegatron actually “make” anything, either. They assemble parts made by other manufacturers, from Intel and Smasung to LG and Panasonic. Who in turn “make” their parts from other components and materials. And so on and so forth back down the supply chain.
OK. This thread was started by someone saying Apple was unique. You disagreed, because they don’t make anything and every other manufacturer does the same. You’re even making this point above. So, in you eyes, Apple isn’t unique or unusual… except when they’re doing something you want to criticize.
Sorry if I am too accurate to accept handwaving: your argument is that Apple is the same as every other company.
Sorry if I am too accurate to accept handwaving: offshoring and Made-in-China is a phenomenon everywhere. VW has factories around the world, and has for a long time.
The US and the EU have about the same nominal GDP (around $17 trillion for the US, $18 for the EU), despite the EU having lots more people. The dollar valuation of Chinese exports to the EU is about the same as the dollar value of Chinese exports to the US. In short, Chinese imports are just as large a part of the EU economy as the US.
Once the major dictionaries reflect the shift, I’ll accept it. Until then, the plebes are wrong.
We can define “making” along the lines of transformation of inputs. Get a raw copper-clad, etch it, you’re making a circuitboard. Same with soldering parts on it. Same with moulding plastic granules into housings, smelting metal into ingots, milling parts from said metal, laser-etching the keyboard caps, assembling circuitboards into housings…
…but certainly “making” is not “asking somebody else to make” and then just moving and selling the stuff. That’s logistics and sales, not making.
Apple is not unique by its substance. On that level, it is the same crapware vendor as any other. Apple is unique by having an army of annoying fanboys that swarms out whenever somebody utters blasphemy against The Superior Fruit - e.g. that the crap tends to be deliberately incompatible, pushes walled gardens, dooms people onto intrinsically unreliable wireless, and with some things you cannot at the same time charge, use a monitor, use an external disk, use a thumbdrive, use a nonstandard HID device… pick just one, or carry around a hub - another gadget that not only negates the size/weight advantage but also can be lost or forgotten a bit too easily. Say something like this and a chorus follows, singing praise to Holy Jobs and His Unerring Ways.
There are different levels of that argument. Sorry that things are more nuanced and less black-and-white. If you want it more detailed, contract Gartner for a report.
I know that. I did server support in one such factory.
Show me a dictionary that unequivocally rejects the contention that Apple makes devices.
What major dictionary is that from, again?
Does Apple designing their products, prototyping them, creating molds and inventing technologies used in manufacturing them, designing the A-series chips, etc., not count as transformation of inputs?
So, inventing stuff, designing stuff, dictating the manufacturing process, etc., is simply logistics and sales.
Oh, yes, the fanboys. Lots of fanboyism in this thread… if by fanboyism you mean suggestions that Apple is meeting the needs of a particular segment quite well. On the other hand, we have emotionally-charged and irrational hatred of Apple and their users, as illustrated in the suggestion that it would be nice if there was a biological weapon that would target people who like and buy Apple products. I’m sure that Apple fanboyism is the problem in this discussion.
So you know it, you just ignore it if it isn’t convenient to your (non-fanboyish) approach to arguing.
I had the same thought in 1995 and began to explore Linux. Moneysoft did not have the technology to do it back then, but they have been working assiduously to get to this point. They did have the “Microsoft Tax” back then, however. You couldn’t buy a new machine with, for example, DR DOS on it. You could get OS/2 from IBM, but nobody cared about OS/2. Except IBM.
20 years later, and I am astonished that Microsoft is still in business. Apparently not everyone had the same thought.
Yeah, same here (or similar). I count it as a hopeful sign. My wife wants a Mac now. It has been hard to describe it to her, but I don’t really want a Mac. Been there, done that, got the T shirt.
T shirt got holes in it and became a dog rag. Then used to wipe up some motor oil from the garage floor. T shirt now in landfill.
