People often assume my criticism of Apple is about the products. It is not. There are countless products on the market that I dislike, find overpriced, or have no interest in using. I do not lose sleep over their existence. People should be free to make their own choices, including choices I would not make.
My concern is that Apple has become one of the most influential companies in shaping how technology is designed, owned, controlled, and experienced. The values embedded in Apple’s products increasingly shape the expectations of the entire industry. What troubles me is the worldview behind it.
It Started with a Macintosh
My skepticism began long before smartphones, app stores, or cloud services. In the early 1990s, someone asked me to help troubleshoot a problem on a Macintosh. Coming from an MS-DOS background, my instinct was straightforward: inspect the system, verify the settings, identify the cause, solve the problem.
Instead, I found a machine that seemed unwilling to reveal how it worked. The information I wanted was hidden. The settings I expected to find were inaccessible or obscured. I could not understand the system because the system did not want to be understood.
Looking back, that first encounter exposed a philosophical difference that has stayed with me ever since. I view computers as tools that users should be able to understand. Apple views computers as products that should shield users from complexity.
The Philosophy of “We Know Better”
At the heart of Apple is a simple idea: the company knows better than its users. This philosophy has been present since the days of Steve Jobs and continues to shape the company today.
Apple decides which software can run on your device. Apple decides which applications may enter its ecosystem. Apple decides how you repair your hardware, how you access your content, and increasingly how you interact with your own data. Supporters call this curation. I call it paternalism.
The assumption behind many Apple decisions is that users should be protected from complexity, risk, and sometimes from themselves. The result is a technology ecosystem where consumers are treated less like owners and more like participants in a carefully managed environment.
Quality Through Control
One of the most common defenses of Apple is product quality. Apple’s supporters often point to integration, reliability, and design quality as evidence that the company’s approach works.
I see the same products differently. The very controls that many users experience as simplicity often feel restrictive and frustrating to me. Quality becomes easier when you control the hardware, the operating system, the application marketplace, and the repair ecosystem. Quality becomes easier when competing approaches are excluded.
That Apple succeeds at this is not in dispute. What I dispute is the conclusion many draw from it: that control is therefore justified. A highly optimized product is not ethical proof of the philosophy that produced it. It simply demonstrates that centralized control can manufacture profitable outcomes at the cost of user autonomy.
The same logic applies to security. Apple’s ecosystem is more secure partly because users are prevented from making certain choices. For some people, that is a reasonable trade-off. For me, it raises a more important question: should security be achieved by limiting agency?
Batterygate and the Problem of Incentives
One of the most revealing episodes in Apple’s history was the battery throttling controversy. The engineering explanation may have been legitimate, but Batterygate was not primarily a technical failure. It was a failure of transparency.
Apple made decisions affecting devices people owned without providing the information necessary for informed consent. Effectively, it encouraged users to upgrade or replace. Whether the outcome was intentional or incidental is almost beside the point. The episode demonstrated a willingness to prioritize management of the user experience over the user’s right to understand what was happening to their own property.
The Open-Source Question
Years ago, I was involved in implementing Moodle, one of the world’s most widely used open-source learning management systems. One recurring challenge was integrating Apple’s ecosystem with a platform built around openness, interoperability, and community collaboration.
What struck me was not simply the technical friction of trying to make an open, collaborative platform function smoothly inside a locked-down environment. It was that Apple seemed far more interested in preserving the integrity of its own ecosystem than in supporting open, community-driven initiatives.
Open-source communities generally begin with the assumption that technology should be transparent, adaptable, and collectively improved. Apple begins with the assumption that technology should be curated, controlled, and centrally managed. These are fundamentally different visions of how technology should relate to its users.
The Slow Death of Ownership
Perhaps my greatest concern is Apple’s role in normalizing a world where ownership is replaced by access. Technology once allowed people to own their software, music, and media outright. Increasingly, consumers merely license them. Content can disappear. Services can be discontinued. Accounts can be suspended. Entire digital collections can become inaccessible overnight.
Apple did not create this trend alone, but it helped legitimize and accelerate it. The company demonstrated that consumers could be transformed from owners into subscribers, from customers into permanent tenants. Much of a person’s digital life now exists only through continued permission from a corporation. Most people accepted this transition so gradually that they barely noticed it happening.
The Hypocrisy Problem
What ultimately makes Apple difficult to accept is the gap between its image and its reality. Apple presents itself as progressive, ethical, creative, and human-centered. Its marketing emphasizes individuality, empowerment, and social responsibility.
This rhetoric, however, stops where the physical manufacturing begins. Apple’s business model is built on the premise that centralized control produces superior outcomes. Yet when confronted with labor abuse, predatory working hours, or environmental hazards in its supply chain, the company’s philosophy suddenly shifts. When convenient, Apple emphasizes the independence of third-party suppliers and the strict limits of its corporate responsibility.
The contradiction is difficult to ignore. A company capable of controlling the smallest details of product design, which software you are allowed to install, and ecosystem participation, clearly possesses significant leverage over the conditions under which its products are made. They choose total control over the software, but less control when it comes to the human supply chain.
Apple’s Philosophy Became a Blueprint
My concern today extends well beyond Apple. What troubles me is how much of the technology industry has adopted the same assumptions.
For decades, Microsoft represented a different philosophy. Imperfect, expensive, often frustrating, sometimes chaotic, but a platform that generally allowed users, developers, and hardware manufacturers considerable freedom. Over time, Microsoft has moved steadily toward cloud dependency, subscription, account requirements, telemetry, and managed experiences.
The company has not become Apple, but it has clearly learned from Apple’s success. The lesson it appears to have taken is that control is profitable. The result is an industry that increasingly assumes users should be guided rather than empowered, licensed rather than allowed to own, and managed rather than trusted.
The Real Debate
Apple’s defenders and critics often have different conversations. Supporters point to convenience, integration, simplicity, and security. Critics point to autonomy, ownership, openness, and repairability. Both sides frequently describe the same features.
The difference lies in which values they prioritize. Apple’s success shows that many people are willing to exchange autonomy for convenience. An exchange that often takes place without fully recognizing the trade-off.
I understand that choice. I simply don’t share it. For me, technology should not merely work well. It should be understandable. Designed to empower participation rather than encourage dependence. It should treat users as capable individuals, honoring our fundamental need for agency within causation, rather than treating us as consumers to be managed.
A company that chooses total control over the product it ships, but limited responsibility for the people who make it, has told you exactly what it values.
AI Transparency Statement: The author defined all core concepts, direction, and parameters for this work. In the writing of this article, AI assisted in drafting some text, conducting research, and correcting grammar. The AI tools used include ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. All AI-generated content was thoroughly reviewed and verified for accuracy and appropriateness. The final work reflects human judgment, expertise, and experience.
