It seems the “in thing” to do lately is bash Apple for non-existent threats to freedom that the company is supposedly perpetrating. People from left and right across the web are taking minor issues and blowing them out of all proportion to create this false sense of “outrage” against some perceived threat from the cupertino company. It seems the politics of “phoney outrage” has become so prevalent in the world of political discourse that it’s seeping into the mindset of everyone with an axe to grind. Here’s just two examples that popped up in my RSS inbox today. The first is from Slate magazine warning magazine publishers of the threat of doing business with Apple or supporting their products. As usual, the argument transcends technical or even computer issues and becomes one about freedom. Here’s some of his comments:
They’re claustrophobic walled gardens within Apple’s walled garden, lacking the basic functionality we now expect with electronic journalism: the opportunity to comment, the integration of social media, the ability to select text and paste it elsewhere, and finally the most basic function of all: links to other sources.
The technical issues he raises have absolutely nothing to do with the App store or its controlled environment, and are frankly completely false. It’s just that some of the existing Apps might have been designed that way, but there’s absolutely nothing in Apple’s App store rules preventing any of this. He goes on to say this….
The bigger mistake some publishers seem only too eager to make is embracing an Apple-controlled marketplace. The 30 percent revenue share Amazon originally offered newspaper and magazine publishers on the Kindle was so awful that it makes anything else look good by comparison. But Jobs is an even more ornery gatekeeper than Jeff Bezos. If you want to play in Apple’s playground, it decides what apps it deems acceptable and then takes a 30 percent cut. It collects the data about users and decides what it is willing to share with publishers (so far, none of it). It intends to sell the advertising though a platform called iAd, controlling the standards and taking what sounds to be a 40 percent cut. If Apple succeeds in taking over the relationship with their customers, it will be no less of a disaster for print publishers than it was for the music industry.
Do you like the way he used “30 percent” twice but in different contexts to give the impression that Apple was also offering publishers a bad deal? Instead of saying that unlike Amazon, Apple gives the publisher 70% which in the context of his piece would have been a more transparent way of making that statement, he goes with the sneaky option. But I digress. As for Apple deeming what it finds acceptable, we have most of the major magazine publishers in the store already and there hasn’t been an issue, so lets stop trying to flog that dead argument. He’s implying that being in the App store gives Apple editorial control over the magazine, which is false but the implication is there. Of course I’m sure some people will believe that, but that’s a whole other blog post.
It’s the whole nonsense about iAds that’s really glaring. While what he says may be technically true, as with all phoney outrage pieces it’s taken out of context and without comparison. What he doesn’t tell you is that there are plenty of other companies out there providing user usage data for your iPhone apps, none of which are “controlled” by Apple. There’s also no requirement on the part of a developer to use iAd either. Plenty of the current magazine apps in the App store have their traditional adverts intact. But of course there’s no story in that. Why peddle fact when you can sell fear. Fear that Apple is going to control the world. How long before people start accusing Jobs of having hitler like ambitions? (I’m sure some people already have)
The second of today’s “phoney outrage” pieces comes in the form of an email exchange between Gawker’s Ryan Tate and Steve Jobs. Steve is calm and collected and Ryan is in my opinion childish and hot headed. Of course blogging about it afterwords Mr. Tate decides to focus on Steve’s comments about keeping porn off the App Store which of course Tate decides to make a freedom issue. You know you can still get porn on your iPhone OS devices through the web or by loading it yourself off your computer, but no, it’s an issue of freedom. Steve correctly points out that you do have a choice, you have a choice to buy something else. What gets me about this is that people like Tate are arguing that this is somehow unique for Apple to be doing this. It’s not unique at all though. Where’s the porn software for the Nintendo Wii or Nintendo ds? Or how about the Playstation store or the Xbox Arcade. All of these are as tightly controlled as the iPhone OS and yet where’s the outrage against those devices? You could argue that they are games consoles or for the family, but then thats the argument that Jobs is making for the iPhone. As with many of Apple’s innovations, Apple has created a widely successful product that defines a genre, and then a group of highly vocal commenters rails against it because they think the product should actually be defined their way, not Apple’s, and because it’s not their vision that is somehow limiting choice.
People seem to think it is their right to have every Apple product be what they want it to be whether or not that’s the intended design of the product. Apple created the iPhone platforms with the intention of keeping them a closed and range of products, just like Nintendo’s or other consoles. The only reason people are so outraged by this is because it is Apple. To be honest I just don’t understand why, because as I said in an earlier post, it’s as bogus as “death panels”. The only reason I can come to is that for years the seething resentment of Apple’s success from diehard Windows and Linux users has been seeping into the social network of the web (through places like digg) and creating this false sense of Apple secretly being the spawn of the devil incarnate. The belief that all the time Apple’s successes have really been just the company manipulating the minds of the gullible. All these people are now coming out of the woodwork, latching on to any opportunity to say I told you so.
The real culprit though is the way the world’s political and news discourse has devolved, especially over the last few years. Phoney outrage has become the de-facto response to any news about your opponent, or that you can make about your opponent. It’s so pervasive, and so insidious that of course the same style of reporting would permeate the fabric of every other corner of journalism. The rise of super-blogs (independent publishers calling themselves blogs so they can write without any of the responsibilities of traditional journalism) has pushed this even further. On many of these sites writers publish opinion as fact, and then because very few are doing actual reporting, this gets picked up by all the other blogs and spreads like wild fire. Of course this isn’t all about Apple. Its affecting everyone and at some point it will have to stop. For the moment though, until a bigger target comes along I guess we’ll just have to put up with article after article accusing Apple of some new infringement on the liberty of all.
[Updated to fix a few typos]
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You are right on with your comments about the phony outrage. For decades the Windows world had many hardware vendors, Microsoft providing the operating system, and hundreds of software companies writing software for Windows. There was no control and many programs conflicted with each other with a lot of finger pointing when problems developed.
Apple is all about the “user experience” and seamless integration of hardware, software and the operating system. This is what the vast majority of users want and a major reason 50% of the people buying Macs at Apple stores are recovering Windows users. They had the world you are pushing for and rejected it as problematic.
To achieve this goal “control” has to be exerted. The people who want total freedom to do what they want would then be the first to complain when software and hardware did not play nice together.
Find a real issue to blog about and ask some of the older Windows computer users you know what those old days were like.
I also see many bloggers adding a level of phony emotional impact to their comments about statements made by Steve Jobs, Apple or other companies that was not there in the original text. When Steve Jobs explained his case regarding “Flash” it was done in a matter of fact tone of voice and yet computer bloggers described it as a rant or diatribe against Adobe or in similar tones when Adobe responded. Bloggers need to keep there own personal agendas and emotions out of their commentary when it was not in the original work they are commenting on.
Thomas Fitzgerald, it was a pleasure and relief to read your comments. I agree on all counts and with all the implications of your article (i.e., those points that go beyond the world of computers).
Rather comically, sadly, the tone of America has seeped into the tone of IT.
Deep down, it is a “plume” of irrationality spreading thru the social undersea, surfacing here and there. It is the infectious irrationality that creates this surreal air in the public discourse.
But you say it has to stop, as if to say, it must stop. Why do you think it will? I, too, like to think it will burn out (historically this sort of thing always does), but I find it hard to watch the damage and abuse that persists in the meantime.
In any case, thanks again! Good luck.
Alarik
Purchasing stolen (California laws are specific regarding the requirement to return property whose owner in known) property, exposing trade secrets and damn the consequences is just what triggered this set of events. I hope the $5K that the kid got for selling the phone helps to offset the tens of thousands in legal bills he will now have to pay.
There is a difference between right and wrong and even the outraged should know this. If they don’t then that’s where we all should be outraged.
Actually there is nothing “phony” about the so-called death panel — it was passed in the The Stimulous Bill. Leading the way for the panel will be Raham Emauel’s brother – a leading proponent of population control.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/death_panel_is_not_in_the_bill.html – Dr. Death, Ezekiel J. Emanuel: Chair of the Clinical Center Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health and Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research – http://www.hhs.gov/recovery/programs/os/cerbios.htm – signed into Federal law in The Stimulous Bill, aka HR1
Nice try. Here’s a more grounded viewpoint – http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/euthanasia.asp and here – http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/seniordeath.asp
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/08/palin-vs-obama-death-panels/
I don’t want to make this a political issue, but I think that says it all.
You are a sad, misinformed person, PIF. Sadly you can’t even spell either. Boy, sucks to be you.
I find comments to be very entertaining. They run the gamut from well-reasoned and thoughtful to incoherent. I think the reason for the incivility has more to do with the relative anonymity provided by the amazing meta-platform that is the world wide web. Although it is not the only Internet service, only email has remained as central to the everyday user experience. Even that can be done over the web.
I say Adobe’s best course of action is to output both legacy runtimes and HTML 5 markup and JavaScript. Rich media experiences such as what Macromedia’s flash provided as de facto standard should now become a de jury one in HTML 5.
Then all that would be left to argue about would be the quality of individual vendors implementations.
And hen there’s outrage over the outrage – (a bit off topic, but funny nonetheless) –
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-may-12-2010/back-in-black—glenn-beck-s-nazi-tourette-s
I laughed so hard when that was on last week. Love the stew beef !
OMFG… Brilliant!
Excellent piece.
The crazy loathing of Apple, Apple’s products, Apple’s user base and especially Apple’s numerous successes, is truly bewildering.
I’ve been a Mac user since the beginning and sure I’ve read (and spewed) some anti-Microsoft opinions from time to time. But there was nothing of the venomous, toxic tone and the outright lies of today’s Apple loathers. It really borders on the insane.
If Apple users are fanboys, then what are these people?
Phony outrage, indeed.
It also shows in how the “press” wants to turn simple and healthy competition among business rivals into open warfare, as manifested in the Flash and Android debates. Dramatic headlines get more clicks and by whatever means necessary to get those clicks trumps all hope of rational reporting or discourse.
Thank you for calling out the likes of Ryan Tate. His email exchange with Jobs was not only extremely vulgar (while Jobs, the notorious hothead, was completely professional), it adopted an air of familiarity as though the fact that he was able to exchange email with the Apple CEO suggested they could as well have been kicking back watching the ball game together.
What we’re seeing on the web is a continuation of what grew in a big way when cable TV took off in the ’80s–a need to fill more and more air time, and a willingness to do that by being more extreme, more outrageous, more mean-spirited, and flat-out louder than anyone else.
It is tabloid journalism, nothing more.
Same way Today Show goes over same topics
month after month. Apple is dominating
the computer magazine because Apple people
actually click on all these stories but so do Apple
haters.
So Now the mainstream press has gotten in this
trick because they need to hype to save themselves.
I am sure once Android and Microsoft copy iPad.
Journalists will go back to bad mouthing iPad just
like they did with iPhone.
Say you are long Google and are disappointed by Google’s lame attempts at creating an iPhone killer– or even an iPhone “wounder”. You might try to create phony outrage/buzz/whatever, too.
Sad thing is, Google and Apple could have continued to be powerful allies. MSFT is still out there, making billions per quarter. There’s always a chance that MSFT might magically get their act together and arise from their current slow march to irrelevancy.
Feigned outrage is nowhere more apparent than with the flash debate. People (especially the freetards) hate flash, but since it gives them a stick to beat Apple with, they suddenly are flash’s biggest supporters.
People should kiss Jobs’ ring for helping to get rid of this abomination.
Well said!!
I am a mechanical and software systems engineer and find all the writings about constraints and individual freedom is garbage.
Windows PCs are like automobiles that are thrown together from junk-yard parts and selling them to the unsuspecting end-user with no control over quality or no accountability on the part of the seller as to the performance of the end product.
Apple is no different from BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Boeing etc. that focus on satisfying customer needs, but exercise tight control over the product.
I 100% agree with this post. While there are some fair criticisms of Apple’s model, most stuff written is click bait, pure and simple.
Love how Ryan Tate, of Gawker, claims he “didn’t intend to pick a fight with Steve Jobs.”
Let’s look at that again. Ryan Tate. of Gawker.
This is like the National Enquirer saying they don’t intend to pry into people’s private lives.
I am a happy user of Apple products and I used it in my work without a hitch and without much IT hand holding (unlike my colleagues who were on the window platforms). I understand wholly that this state of affair was brought about because Apple cared about producing a very useable platform that is controlled vertically instead of the window model which purport to give any joe and jane the choice to pick anything they want to load onto their computers thus creating a situation that is less than satisfactory to use. This article brings home all these points very nicely.
Steve Jobs runs Apple the way I would want to run a business if I had the ability to run one. He builds the company and products to his vision and doesn’t seem to be able to be manipulated by things like the board of directors or bean counters. I suppose he also regulates the morality of the App Store to reflect his own morality. In other words, he’s his own man and he seems rather successful at what he does. I’ve been a Mac user since 1984 and an Apple investor since 2004. I’ve made quite a bit of money from my Apple stock and have enjoyed many different models of Macs.
However, I’m starting to get scared from all the blogger anti-Apple articles about how Apple ruining the computer industry by have a tightly controlled company. Apple is being sued by HTC and Nokia and smaller companies. Adobe has turned the FTC on Apple for anti-trust actions just because Apple doesn’t want cross-compilers and doesn’t want to support Flash. Everyone keeps saying that Apple is going to fail from having a “walled garden” yet they’re still actively trying to bring Apple down by other means.
I’m all for how Apple runs an extremely tight iPhone platform because I think it’s best for the majority of consumers. I personally don’t mind porn, but I think that should be Steve Jobs call as to what is allowed in the store and what isn’t. I trust his judgment because I think he knows what he is doing better than I do as to how to run a company.
Why are people complaining when they can easily go to another platform like Android and get everything they want from porn apps to tethering and modified ROMs and all the geeky stuff? I don’t want the iPhone platform to be like the Android platform because I think there is too much lack of control and it think that will complicate the UI for average consumers over a length of time. That’s just my personal opinion seeing how quickly the platform is fragmenting. However, I’m not complaining about how Google runs it’s platform because that’s their choice and they’re not forcing me to use it so what difference does it make.
I don’t see Steve Jobs as some evil overlord because I like his decisions of tight platform control and keeping the App Store more or less PG-rated. I think it gives Apple’s mobile platform an edge over all the others and that’s what will be the best for iPhone and iPad users. I hope Steve Jobs is able to keep doing his control thing without outside interference but I worry about all the FUD that outsiders are stirring up.
Keep up the good work Steve.
Where is all the righteous indignation over:
HP, Dell and Microsoft protecting us from elegant design
Butcher shops protecting us from vegetables
Fresh produce markets protecting us from “BHA added to preserve freshness”
Automobile companies protecting us from crashes (seat belts and airbags abridge my freedom!!)
Major American newspapers protecting me from diatribes written in Cyrillic, or worse yet, porn written in Arabic
The list of abridged freedoms is endless, I can’t stand it!
Finally, a voice of reason in the wilderness of tech blogs!
I’ve been a Mac user since 1989. I thought I saw the worst Mac trash talking during the dark days of the mid Nineties.
Well, I was wrong. The extreme bitterness and acrimony of the anti-Apple comments on the net is plain stunning! Must be something in the water!
What I wanted to say was already said by the other comments but I want to thank you for being a sane level headed voice in this sea of unnecessary drama. As if they never had a choice in the first place, Apple never pointed a gun at their backs.
Finally. Sanity. Bookmark!
Steve Jobs will continue to make great products for the end user no matter what the detractors say.
Bravo. Best article about Apple that I’ve read in several months.
Excellent comments, well positioned arguments, cool presentation.
The traditional recourse, if you don’t care for a company’s products, is not to buy them; it does not make sense to go beyond this and bash the company, its products and its customers in the most venomous terms possible, in every forum you can hijack. Obviously something else is at work here, perhaps an irrational hatred of those who do not conform or whom you suspect of feeling secretly smug because they don’t share your tastes or criteria as consumers. And I don’t think Microsoft-bashing by Apple users was ever like this: in my case, I never objected to what other consumers were using, but their attempts to force me to use the same.
Ayn Rand wrote “The Fountainhead” in 1943. This kind of journalism is not new. The amount of phony outrage over the lack of porn apps is like nothing compared to the amount of phony outrage there would be if there were porn apps.
Apple’s position on porn is easy to understand. You can use Safari to buy porn via the web. What’s the difference between the web and an app? Why would someone want to sell porn (or anything else) via an app when they can sell it over the web? Answer that, and you will understand why Apple doesn’t want porn apps.
The web is http and www. Apps are not part of the web. It is possible that some people are concerned that apps might “kill” the web. Why? Because, to many people, the web = free, and apps = money. I don’t know if this is a legitimate concern. I just know that sensationalizing it obfuscates it.
Let’s face the fact: whether we like it or not, we are all in one form of walled garden or another from the time we were born until the time when we hit the bucket. Control is the universal law of nature. Control has a duality: it is good when it is used wisely, but become bad when it skirts on the boundary of abuse. So is freedom. Freedom is good when it can be controlled; it becomes bad when it is abused. Think of the case of substance abuses such as narcotic, alcoholic intemperate and sexual incontinences. A drug addict, a sexual miscreant or an alcoholic have no capacity to control their behavior and choose to have the freedom to abuse themselves and thus self-destruct. These are all freedoms that have gone haywire and have turned into bondage instead.
Remember when you were a baby? Your parents surrounded you with a walled garden; you were protected, loved and taught. Do your parents abandoned you to the freedom of a street urchins? When you attended school, worked for an organization or you run your own business, aren’t wall gardens being erected so that it is protected and safe? Do Google or Microsoft allow any Dick, Jane or Harry to wander into their premises without having to check themselves at the guardhouse?
It is very sad to see that many American firms has fallen for rhetoric of “freedom” as expounded by Wall Street. Qualities that have made America great were slowly been adulterated. The recent economic meltdown caused by the greed of Wall Street was the result of regulators removing the wall-garden of prudence, control and responsibility. Banks were given the freedom to self-regulate themselves and to sell toxic products to the American public without any control from the regulators. This freedom leads to self-destruction to the financial fabric of the nation.
Many companies were led astray by Wall Street into short-termism where mediocrity is celebrated. Apple, to its credit, has not succumbed to Wall Street’s wisdom and seduction and has thus escaped from the mediocrities of the PC commodity producers. Apple has followed the traditional control of thrift, innovation and long-termism and thus enjoyed the freedom from indebtedness, lack of focus and mediocrity of the PC world. The PC world is saddled with the freedom of being lackluster, me-too imitators and dog-eat-dog behaviour.
I prefer the certainty of a wall garden than to the freedom of the jungle.
All of this goes to actually show how these people actually lust after the hardware which Apple makes but their geeky side wants it to be just like their computers where it can do whatever they want without restrictions.
The issue that some of these folks have is one of a company formerly known as Apple Computer. Yes, Apple, Inc still makes general purpose computers (Mac Pro, iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro) but in addition to this, they also offer a line of consumer electronics devices. And it just so happens to be that some of these devices utilize a scaled down version of OS X for its underpinnings. So how does the technorati perceive this? Their take is that devices like the iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad ought to be just like the desktop ecosystem; that developers and users alike should have free unfettered ability to program and install whatever they want on these devices. Apple’s goal does not seem to align with this particular crowd though and have their reason for a tightly controlled ecosystem for these gadgets. While these products can do quite a number of tasks, Apple has also not been shy about not positioning them as replacements for their computer line (i.e. the iPad is positioned between the iPhone and the MacBook).
That unfortunately does not sit well with these folks who for some reason, want the hardware that Apple designs but would like it to work the way some of Apple’s competitors software operates; i.e. Android. My own personal take has been that Apple is within their full right to define the parameters of their devices and software including the app store. If these decisions do not align with those of a developer or consumer, then they are more than free not to purchase any of these Apple designed products and can instead, acquire something which fits their needs from the growing Android market. It is called voting with ones pocket book.
Using mobile Flash as an example, if one really needs it on their device, then Apple’s mobile products (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) are not going to be for you as Jobs is not going to change his decision anytime soon. If that decision proves to be the wrong one, then they will pay the price in terms of lost marketshare, lost revenue, and lost shareholder value. Adobe itself has very little ground to stand on in terms of their antitrust complaint with the justice department and the Federal Trade Commission. Why? Because it does not take a genius to see that Apple does not have a dominant position in terms of its market share for the iPhone OS which powers these devices. Furthermore, there is healthy competition out there with market leader RIM in addition to an up and coming Android ecosystem.
Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch at the Web 2.0 Expo claimed there are many great devices (game consoles, smartphones, TVs) coming out that will run their Flash software. Adobe’s Mike Chambers previously said they (Adobe) were working with a “ton” of companies with regards to mobile Flash. So what exactly is Adobe complaining about? As mentioned before, Apple does not have any sort of lock on any of these markets and recent statistics (whether you believe them or not) even state that Android has now surpassed iPhone OS in marketshare in the US. Since consumers have a free choice (no one is forcing them to buy these Apple devices), what is stopping them from closing their wallets to Apple?
Adobe for their own part should concentrate on proving Apple wrong by delivering a version of mobile Flash (the current versions of Flash lite do not count since they result in a neutered experience) which can run the vast majority of content currently on the net for as many devices as possible without sacrificing battery life, device performance, and device security. Adobe’s lame advertising attempt fails to address some of the key criticisms Jobs mentioned in his open letter. The burder is on Adobe to prove they can deliver come June for Android 2.x. If they delay the public release and/or it proves to be buggy and crash prone, all that will do is affirm Apple’s position of moving on. If however, they do a bangup job and ship something which provides these other platforms with a competitive and marketable advantage over Apple which also shuts up the anti-Flash critics, then more power to them. The positive about that is it will spur competition and innovation which spells good news for consumers.
What these other companies need to realize though is they are only now trying to skate to where the puck currently is. Apple in the meantime has already been working on the next revisions while also planning for where the puck will be in the future. Apple is and has been disrupting the entrenched status quo for the past 3 years now where the players that dominated desktop computing are looking in from the outside. That itself leaves a great many including those technogeeks uncomfortable with Apple’s growing dominance in the mobile space. So it isn’t a surprise to see outrage and attempts at astroturfing to beat Apple down.
The issue though is that the tech crowd is far too small to make any sizeable dent in terms of impacting the vast majority of general consumers out there. With one million plus iPad’s sold in the first month and counting, that is proof enough that Apple’s walled off ecosystem and lack of Flash is not much of a concern. It may just look that way online but for the average impulse buying consumer out there, they don’t know nor do they care. All they want is a product which exudes quality for the most part and Apple delivers a complete turnkey ecosystem which other companies are trying to emulate.
Android stands to be a formidable alternative but its fragmentation in terms of OS versions as well as hardware stands to become a hurdle. As the Android marketplace grows, Google is going to find their wide open stance will come back to bite it in the rear. Open is one thing but having some well defined standards in place is another and some developers are already finding generating the same level of revenue for their product is far more difficult on Android than it is on the iPhone OS. Part of that outcome is a result of going for the lowest hanging fruit while racing to the bottom in terms of average selling prices. Apple has never really chased that demographic and as a result, its consumer base will spend dollars for well designed hardware and software.
Furthermore, what future consequences are going to result from Google having yet another piece of software (Android and in the near future, Chrome OS) which collects information from the many who are championing it? Google’s interests are not benevolent as the vast majority of their free software products have one goal, to collect as much information about you as possible such that they can perfectly target advertisement at you. And what a win it will be for them if they can collect far more personal information about its users as a result of running the key piece of operating software providing the user interface. If anything, I’m hoping HP does not screw up their purchase of Palm and does something good with webOS because Google itself is a company which needs to be put in check; more so than Apple.
Finally, Apple has for the most part since Steve Jobs return to the company, never listened to anyone. As Guy Kawasaki said in that Welcome to Macintosh documentary, Apple’s focus group is Jobs’ left brain hemisphere connected to his right hemisphere. Apple listened to no one when they created the iPhone; yet it was initially widely derided for not having any hardware keyboard. But for all the critics out there, no one other company came out with something better. As a matter of fact, the smart phone category is now filled with multitouch slabs similar to the iPhone form factor. Then for all the years of guessing about the tablet Apple was working, none of the other big companies could envision and conceive on their own, a product which would grab and define the market the way Apple did with the iPad. Stylus based tablets running a desktop version of Windows was the main entry and it failed to take off. Yet you have a whole bunch of critics coming out deriding the just released iPad on what it cannot do or does not allow. If they knew any better. why didn’t they come out with something like it before which did everything they want it to do? The answer to that is obvious, they don’t know nor do many of these companies have the internal culture and vision that has been cultivated over the past decade at Apple to design and solve the hard problems in order to distill the key mechanisms into the software.
Apple isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination either but no one can deny their ability to take existing complex problems and make them simpler (though not always complete idiotproof) for the vast majority of general consumers out there. And again, if an Apple product does not meet ones needs, there are a number of alternatives out there for consumers to choose from.