Secretive Apple's super-secret university is full of BULL chic – leakers Loose-lipped peeps have provided a rare glimpse into Apple's internal training college. A trio of employees, none of whom were willing to go on the record with a name or position, described the top-secret university Apple uses to indoctrinate new hires. According to their whispers to the New York Times, Apple maintains its …
As one employer stated to me, 'I buy crap toilet paper to save money and make sure the people that work for me have no incentives to go and sit on the toilet and waste time'.
The same person also said, 'Keep the temperature low and save money, also there's an added benefit in that people move faster and get the job done quicker, that's why I don't have many chairs.'
Still, it's hard to argue with the methods of a tech giant that posted a $7.7bn net income in its latest financial quarter.
Are you suggesting that profits forgive all improprieties? Back to conflict minerals and child labour sweatshops it is then!
It has actually been shown that sweatshops were an important part in allowing Hong Kong and Singapore to move from development countries to fully industrialised with a welfare today far surpassing many european countries.
Without the sweatshops to bootstrap growth, the countries most likely would still be stuck without any economy at all.
When it comes to child labour, this might actually sound a bit counter intuitive, but parents generally do not enjoy having to send their children out to work, BUT, the opportunity for them to do so is what keeps the family from starving. Therefore, by banning child labour in underdeveloped economies, you would move hundreds of thousands of families closer to starvation.
As the economy growths, the need for children to work, and sweatshops, will disappear organically.
It has actually been shown that sweatshops were an important part in allowing Hong Kong and Singapore to move from development countries to fully industrialised with a welfare today far surpassing many european countries.
Same thing happened in industrial revolution-era England. These days people are all too willing to impose modern rich first-world morality on developing countries who'd really rather be left to do things the way they need to. It's just another form of colonial missionary work.
Maybe it's kind of like the stories about Google's mythical fun-to-work-in workplaces The tech press has produced more than a few stories about the Chocolate Factory giving an insiders' view to outsiders who "wish they could work there." I've never worked there, don't really have a desire to, but I'm sure a lot of people do, and it makes for good page impression numbers.
The fact that everyone gets indoctrinated in that minimalist design philosophy explains a lot of the product decisions they make. I know that they're designing for simplicity, but IMO Apple software and products are too simple now. I'm not going to go back to the 90s for the single-mouse-button joke, but the fact that the iPhone doesn't even have fixed soft keys makes some operations harder than they have to be.
The original NYTimes article had a good comparison -- 78 buttons on a Google TV remote vs. 3 on an Apple TV remote. Having only 3 buttons means you have to rely on a complex menu/gesture/whatever interface built into software. I think I'd rather have the simple interface for dummies, but also have the other 75 buttons under a flip-out cover kind of like the 80s/90s remotes did for power user features. Mac OS does have this in the form of the terminal and the UNIX kernel underneath all the shiny, but you really do have to hunt for it. I want my 78 buttons. :-)
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