Criticism of Apple

Apple is one of the world's most recognized brands. However, they have been heavily engaging in planned obsolescence and vendor lock-in practices, have historically built functionally inferior devices, and have been involved in many scandals.

This article documents criticism of Apple. Everyone is invited to contribute.

Planned obsolescence

Apple is known as a primary example among modern-age technology companies for invoking planned obsolescence.

Popularizing non-replaceable batteries

Main article: Benefits of user-replaceable batteries § History

No entity has contributed more to the market transition to the great transition from user-replaceable batteries to non-replaceable batteries than Apple, a design trend that is by definition planned obsolescence.

Poor design

Even though Apple purports itself to be a premium and high quality brand, Apple products have been suffering from repeated design-related and circuitry failures.

Examples include a design where the fans of a Mac Book laptop computer blew hot air against the part that fastens the upper (display) part to the bottom (keyboard) part, causing it to wear down and disintegrate very quickly.

Apple products are deliberately designed for poor repairability. Practices include proprietary fasting screws and the presumably deliberate Error 53 restriction that makes the device unbootable if it can not verify that its home button is manufactured by Apple, rather than third-party vendors.

Form over function

See also: Function over form

Apple is notorious for building devices in a way that discriminates functionality.

Extreme minimalism

Apple products have historically been designed with form over function-extremism, such as sacrificing battery capacity for slim design and overprioritizing minimalism (also known under the euphemism cleanness) by, for example, designing some laptops with no more than one port, making it heavily dependent on adapters which would have been criticized by Apple cult members as bulky, had any other vendor done it.

Laptops

As mentioned above, several laptop computers (so-branded Macs) by Apple only have very few, sometimes only one port, making it heavily reliant on adapters and sacrificing user convenience.

Magic Mouse 2

In Apple's poorly designed Magic Mouse 2, a wireless computer mouse with a charging port located "at the bottom surface and a non-replaceable battery, making the device temporarily unuseable after running out of battery charge.

Battery inferiority

In the years 2012 to 2014, the then latest iPhones (iPhone 5, 5s and 6) had, in addition to their batteries not being user-replaceable, around half the battery capacity as the then latest Galaxy Note mobile phones: the Galaxy Note 2, 3 and 4, all three of which were equipped with user-replaceable batteries, and the Note 4 with 15 Watts of charging power using Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0.

Even in the years afterwards, iPhones had significantly smaller battery sizes than devices of competing vendors.

Also see § Slowdown scandal.

Poor functionality

See also: List of features iPhones got late

Many generations of Apple iPhones lacked functionality that had been present in the devices of competing vendors for years.

Apple products have exclusive restrictions built in such as requiring an Internet connection to initially set up the device.

Since 2013, the screen resolution and pixel density of iPhones have been heavily lagging behind.

In addition, no iPhone so far had any of these features:

• User-replaceable battery
• MicroSD card reader
• Navigation keys such as “Menu”, “Return”, “Tasks”
• MHL-to-HDMI (Mobile High-Devinition link) output
• Universal serial bus charging port
• File transfer over:
  • Bluetooth
  • NFC
  • WiFi Direct
• FM Radio receiver
• LED notification light
• Infrared transmitter

Pricing

Although offering less functionality, Apple devices tend to cost more.

Vendor lock-in

Apple takes extraordinary measures to keep users trapped in their proprietary ecosystems (vendor lock-in). Such measures include proprietary ports, protocols, file systems and messaging services.

Proprietary messaging services

Apple has the messaging service iMessage and the video conversation service FaceTime, which is exclusively supported on Apple devices.

On non-Apple devices, these services may only be accessible by heavy unofficial and unreliable workarounds.

Proprietary file systems

By default, Apple computers only have poor support for file systems other than those developed by Apple themselves.

For the default Windows file system NTFS (New Technology File System), Apple computers preclude read-only support. Support for the common Linux file system formats ext2, ext3 and ext4 is missing entirely, making Mac OS dependent on third-party software to access such file systems.

To comply to Apple's compatibility restrictions, some hard drive manufacturers pre-format their disks with the technically deprecated exFAT file system, rather than the more modern and reliable NTFS.

Proprietary plugs

Most non-Apple mobile phones released between 2010 and 2015 use an USB-B-Micro charging ports, and USB-C since 2015.

In contrary, Apple has always used proprietary connectors in their mobile phones.

iPhones until the iPhone 4 (2011) use the iPod charging port while iPhones since the iPhone 5 (2012) use a connector branded as “Lightning”.

Proprietary communication protocols

Apple devices use exclusive proprietary protocols, such as AirPort for file sharing (AirDrop), multimedia streaming and screen sharing (AirPlay), while historically lacking support for file sharing over Bluetooth, WiFi Direct, NFC and Miracast (also known as Screen Mirroring), the first of which many mobile phones have been equipped with since the early 2000s, and the other three since the early 2010s.

Although being equipped with Bluetooth hardware since the first generation (iPhone 2G, 2007) and NFC since the 2014 iPhone 6, the usability and versatility of the hardware has deliberately been severely limited.

AirDrop has been introduced in iOS 7 (2013), while other methods of file sharing have been available on other devices, namely Bluetooth, several years earlier.

Scandals

Signal issues

Due to its metal frame antenna system design, the signal receptivity of the 2010 iPhone 4 could be disturbed with a specific hand grip, known as the death grip.

This scandal pressured Apple into giving away free phone cases made out of rubbee.

Bendgate

Due to the flat and slim form factor of the iPhone 6+, the device is more vulnerable to being bent from torque. The metal frame may not be able to handle stress caused by bending with bare hands.

This problem has persisted on iPads released towards at least 2020.

1970 time bug

A 2015 software bug in “i Operating System” (iOS) caused the system to become unuseable and get stuck upon setting the system date to 1970, caused by an integer underflow error by a date/time calculation attempted near the UNIX epoch time.

Water resistance hoax

Shortly after the release of iOS 7 in 2013, a photorealistic hoax infographic appeared on the anonymous image board 4chan, claiming that “advanced algorithms” introduced to iOS7 control the delicate circuitry in a way to prevent water damage.

Several users have destroyed their device getting fooled by the hoax.

Apple wave hoax

An internet hoax in the year 2014 has encouraged users to put their iPhone in a microwave oven to allegedly charge it within seconds.

Some iSheep have destroyed their devices getting fooled by the hoax.

Effectively powerless

In early 2015, an iOS vulnerability known as the Effective Power bug surfaced, where sending a specific text string using iMessage could crash the device's operating system and cause a reboot.

Crash from video file

In November 2016, a video file known as IMG_0942.mp4 has spread on the Internet, which exploited a vulnerability in the iOS hardware video decoder.

After playing back said video file, the system would appear to run normally for a few seconds, then gradually slow down until becoming entirely unresponsive, then crash and reboot.

Some people jokingly shared it using social media and online video platforms, hoping to crash viewer's devices, not knowing that social media and video platforms usually re-encode the video file.

Website crashing Safari

In April 2015, a website named CrashSafari.com was created, exploiting a discovered JavaScript pushState vulnerability in Apple's Safari browser, caused by attempting to store longer strings in the browsing history than the mobile phone's RAM could handle.

The website gained popularity in January 2016.

The narrow 1 GB RAM capacity of the iPhone 6 and 6+, which already was a low-tier capacity upon release date, has contributed to this vulnerability.

Throttling scandal

Upon the late-2015 release of iOS 9, the earliest released device type to receive an update to it was the 2011 iPhone 4s.

However, due to the increasingly decrepit and failing non-replaceable batteries in the three to four year old devices, the operating system deliberately significiantly throttled the processing speed to prevent unsolicited power-offs.

Such power-offs would be caused by the voltage of the overwhelmed battery dropping to deep because of too much current being drawn from it for the chemical reactions of the Lithium-Ion battery, which slow down with battery age, to keep up with.

The voltage threshold below which mobile phones cease to operate is around 3.0 volts.

Because iPhones historically had a low battery capacity to begin with, their batteried were susceptible to faster degradation at similar amounts of absolute usage compared to counterpart devices of competing vendors.

This throttling lead to significant performance drops and massive user complaints.

Low overvoltage tolerance

A 2010 test of the iPhone 4 showed that an input voltage of slightly more than 6 volts, just one volt above the default USB voltage of 5 volts, is enough overvoltage to destroy the device.

Although not tested so far, this suggests that several later Apple iPhone models also have a poor tolerance for USB port overvoltage.

Censorship

People sharing legitimate repair advice on Apple's self-hosted tech support forum have been banished, including Jessa Jones, the founder of iPad Rehab and Right-to-repair advocate.

Customer service

A 2018 video by Linus Sebastian (Linus Tech Tips) describes how Apple refuses to repair an iMac tabletop computer that costs over $5000 dollars, even if Linus was ready to pay entirely for the repair.

A 2018 short documentary by CBC News exposed how Apple's Genius Bar customer service suggested charging over $1200 for a repair that would have cost a mere fraction of that price, or purchansing an entirely new device as the alternative option.

Advertising

Japanese camera

In a hypocritical and projectory 2006 commercial for the iMac computer, the person representing the iMac is able to communicate to a Japanese woman representing a camera, while the nerd character representing the Windows PC is not.

It is unclear which protocol Apple was referring to, regarding Microsoft Windows supported both MTP and PTP, commonly used by cameras over a USB connection next to mass storage.

The irony of the commercial is that Apple historically is the one electronics vendor with the greatest vendor lock-in tyranny, having proprietary plugs such as Lightning, poor support for non-Apple file systems and proprietary communication protocols such as AirPort (used for AirDrop and AirPlay) while never having supported file sharing over Bluetooth, WiFi Direct, NFC or screen sharing over Miracast.

Apple cult

Main article: Apple cult

Members of the Apple cult tend to devalue functionality on devices of other manufacturers while envaluing the same functionality if released often years later.

Resources

Related articles

Related navigation boxes: Electronics • Mobile phones • Data storage • User experience and user interfaces

External links

• Playlist of videos criticizing Apple

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