Apple wants money. Apple makes nice product I want to buy.
Microsoft wants money. Microsoft makes a product that its customers (until recently, third party hardware manufacturers and enterprise IT) buy to put on their crappy products in the hope of selling them to me. To support their wafer thin margins, they rent out advertising space on the hardware they well.
Google wants money. Google gives goods and services away and convinces its customers (advertisers) that they will be able to sell its users stuff that they see advertised when they use their free product or service running on some crappy product someone else sells them.
Everyone is after money. It's called capitalism. When it works well it leads people to do things that make other people happier in pursuit of getting money.
Apple is making money because they're better at capitalism than these other guys. For as long as it's existed, Apple has believed that the way to make money is to create products people -- actual end-users -- want to own and use, and for a long time this was successful but not as successful as making PC manufacturers happy, or making advertisers happy. Right now, it's working very well for Apple, and once they stopped doing stupid random half-arsed things they started making ridiculous amounts of money.
Is Apple doing something illegal w.r.t. warranties in Italy? Who knows? (a) It's the register. (b) There's no telling if the warranty Apple is obliged to provide in Italy in any way resembles AppleCare.
In general, Apple seems to handle "defects in manufacturing" very generously everywhere the world over. AppleCare covers you against all kinds of stuff that you'd be very lucky to get covered by warranty anywhere else. And if this Italian warranty policy is so all-pervasive, why do Apple's customers need to be told about it?
"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy." John Updike
Microsoft wants money. Microsoft makes a product that its customers (until recently, third party hardware manufacturers and enterprise IT) buy to put on their crappy products in the hope of selling them to me. To support their wafer thin margins, they rent out advertising space on the hardware they well.
Google wants money. Google gives goods and services away and convinces its customers (advertisers) that they will be able to sell its users stuff that they see advertised when they use their free product or service running on some crappy product someone else sells them.
Everyone is after money. It's called capitalism. When it works well it leads people to do things that make other people happier in pursuit of getting money.
Apple is making money because they're better at capitalism than these other guys. For as long as it's existed, Apple has believed that the way to make money is to create products people -- actual end-users -- want to own and use, and for a long time this was successful but not as successful as making PC manufacturers happy, or making advertisers happy. Right now, it's working very well for Apple, and once they stopped doing stupid random half-arsed things they started making ridiculous amounts of money.
Is Apple doing something illegal w.r.t. warranties in Italy? Who knows? (a) It's the register. (b) There's no telling if the warranty Apple is obliged to provide in Italy in any way resembles AppleCare.
In general, Apple seems to handle "defects in manufacturing" very generously everywhere the world over. AppleCare covers you against all kinds of stuff that you'd be very lucky to get covered by warranty anywhere else. And if this Italian warranty policy is so all-pervasive, why do Apple's customers need to be told about it?
"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy." John Updike