Tim Cook has been uncharacteristically (well, for Apple, not for himself) direct in stating that Google is their top competitor and making implicit jabs at their business model.
On the other hand, what this also says (to people who like awesome cloud services) is :: "Unfortunately this also means that our predictive keyboard, Siri, and other predictive services will never be that good."
Apple was very clear in the 80s that IBM was their main competitor, and was very clear in the 90s that Microsoft was their main competitor: in both cases the competition was not just argued against, but ridiculed with unflattering characterizations (IBM as Big Brother and their users as peons, Microsoft's users as not just awkward but physically unattractive businessmen). Steve Jobs himself took shots at Android, including my "favorite": """You know, there’s a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go – so we’re not going to go there."""... can you say more about how this is "uncharacteristic for Apple"? Is it just that the jabs are specifically at business models? If so I bet I can dig up some examples of that from the Mac vs. PC as series, if not from an earlier Steve Jobs iPhone keynote ;P.
I see your point, but Steve always seemed to think Android never stood a chance anyway. He didn't have to say WHY Apple was better than Android, he just pointed out some major (philosophical, not product) negatives, as you say the porn store, etc.
"We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t “monetize” the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you."
I don't think this precludes Apple from ever building better predictive services. Tim Cook is specifically saying that Apple does not sell or give away your data to third-parties for advertising purposes. He is NOT saying that Apple would never ask permission to read your e-mail if it meant that they could offer a compelling Apple-created product and user experience as a result.
For example, with Apple Pay, Apple is technically using and storing my private information (my credit card data) to offer me a compelling service. They are not going to then figure out which credit card I own and/or how much I spend, and sell that info to banks so that they can target me with specific credit offers.
Apple Pay is actually designed specifically so that Apple does not see your individual credit card data, purchase history, etc.
Apparently they will know total aggregate spending through Apple Pay since it's been reported that they get a cut. But that's completely different from, "Hey we noticed you just bought X, why don't you also buy Y, or maybe next time get a better price at store Z"... which is more like the Google approach, and my personal preference is to avoid such 'features' like the plague.
Apple does not store your credit card data. They generate some sort of tokenised account information with your card issuer when you first add your credit card. They do not store the tokenised account information, it is only ever stored within the secure area of the SoC on the device.
From that point, Apple is completely out of the payment equation. The tokenised data is used to generate a once-off payment authorisation with your bank when you pay for a product using Apple Pay.
But I agree with the point of your post: if Apple thought collecting data would result in a significantly better product, they would probably do it.
How exactly would it make predictive typing and Siri better if Apple decided to invest engineering resources in new and clever ways to sell your private information to advertisers?
well, seeing that every time i enter my own address into google maps, i am first given a result in another state and have to manually type the zip code (and i do have cookies enabled) i don't think they have much to worry about yet....
On the other hand, what this also says (to people who like awesome cloud services) is :: "Unfortunately this also means that our predictive keyboard, Siri, and other predictive services will never be that good."