Apple - The consumer non-so-friendly company

Some of the people who know me personally consider me an "Applefobe". But the truth is that I consider Apple to be one of the most influential companies that created a huge chunk of the computer history. But that doesn't mean I'm not angry when they do something awful to their customers.

Even those who really hate Apple cannot deny its contributions towards the creation of affordable computer technologies, especially those with a graphical interface. I personally really admire the very first Apple products - those that were mainly made by Steve Wozniak.
The Apple of Wozniak was very different to rest of Apple history that focused more on profitability instead of promoting modularity, openness of software and hardware and overall cleanness of the products. And while chasing profitability Apple tends to do some things that are, to say the least, unfriendly towards customers.

So let's look today at two of these things

Planned obsolescence

Irremovable batteries or the massive usage of glue and other similar techniques make Apple products last only a somewhat predetermined time. I'm not saying that Apple is using substandard parts as they clearly don't, but the fact that you cannot replace them easily if they do get broken makes the customer much more likely to just replace the whole device.
And sadly, this trend is being picked up by other companies as well, just look at the latest Microsoft Surface Pro 5 that is almost unrepairable because of the excessive use of glue and a soldering gun.

The lack of connectors

The recent elimination of the 3.5 mm jack was completely unnecessary. There is just no argument against it. Just look at the iPod Shuffle 4th gen. - a durable connector that works for charging, data transfer and listening to music - that's the ideal connector.
Taking away the 3.5 mm jack has two basic positives. But neither of them is there for the consumer, both are there for Apple itself. First of all, it's them who is producing all the Lightning connector accessories or licensing them and secondly, they get to completely reign over the ecosystem even on a hardware basis.

The same goes for the elimination of the ethernet port on Apple laptops - no bonus for the consumer, but it means less spending on licensing and on the build for Apple.