Consumers Trust Amazon More Than Apple

Okay, it’s a survey. Surveys must be very well constructed. They must be repeated. They must be analyzed for the soundness of their methodology. The sampling is crucial. They must be put in perspective. That said, this survey by Morining Consult, published by Business Insider, shows that 69 percent of those surveyed trust Amazon to keep their data secure. Apple’s number was 60 percent.

Credit: Business Insider and Morning Consult.

The margin over Apple isn’t dramatic, but the effect does bear some inspection. Why didn’t Apple win in this race more dramatically?

After all, Apple went to enormous ends, hiring the best attorneys on the planet in the spring of 2016 to battle the FBI. Apple’s approach, along with others organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), argued that the public has a right to be secure in their smartphone data and its privacy protections. A government mandated backdoor (or a modified version of iOS that might be leaked) would also, eventually, allow those clever hackers to pry into any, say, iPhone. It was a big and important fight.

Apple’s Tim Cook has been vocal about the protection of our data, whether it’s encrypted messages, Apple Pay, our fingerprints, or our HomeKit infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s (failed) Fire Phone didn’t even bother with hardware encryption.

Now Jeff Bezos is very influential in certain ways. He urged the President not to reject the Paris climate accord. He has invested in and acquired the Washington Post. He’s investing heavily in commercial space exploration. But he’s not exactly known for championing privacy and trust in the style of Tim Cook. Just look at the design of the Amazon Echo and Look.

And yet neither company has been hacked. To my knowledge, each company with hundreds of millions of credit card numbers on file has never given up so much as a single number to hackers.

Consumer Psychology

Perhaps Amazon’s better number is because people buy more often from Amazon, and the security of their purchase is more on their minds. Perhaps, because some fraction of Amazon customers don’t use Apple products, they wouldn’t make any affirmations about a company they don’t do business with.

Or maybe Apple does a poor job of touting the security of its products. The ad below, for example, falls very flat for me and has little emotional impact. Yes, that’s a hard thing to do in a 30 second TV ad. But the challenge should be considered. On the other hand, with just about every company and agency on the planet getting hacked, boasts about your own company’s security may be taken with a grain of salt. (Why must that be?) Or merely serve to elevate the hackers to new levels of inspiration.

Finally trust in “Your cell phone manufacturer” seems misplaced when it comes to Android-based smartphones. See: “New Android malware found every 10 seconds.”

No Deep Answers Yet

I don’t have a lot of answers here. I know that the network security of both companies has to be and is superb. Maybe it’s just that the difference in the chart above is statistically insignificant. And yet … consider Twitter’s number. That’s a telling, contrasting result.

I think Apple should have done better in a survey like that, and I want to eventually understand why it didn’t.

Next Page: The News Debris For The Week Of June 19th. Top U.S. Supercomputers falling behind.

Page 2 – News Debris For The Week Of June 19th

U.S. Supercomputers Falling Behind

China has been working hard to build the world’s fastest supercomputer for years now. They did it not long ago. Not big news anymore. But now even Switzerland has surpassed the U.S. in the Supercomputing Top500 list. From the Top500 announcement:

As a result of the Piz Daint upgrade [Swiss National Supercomputing Centre], Titan, a Cray XK7 system installed at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory [TN], drops to number four in the rankings. Its Linpack mark of 17.6 petaflops has remained constant since it was installed in 2012.

For constant, read stagnant. On the brighter side, “… the U.S. has 169 supercomputers in the top 500, followed by China with 160.”

Supercomputers are used to tackle the grandest scale problems known to humankind. They’re instrumental in keeping the U.S. competitive, attracting talent, and maintaining U.S. technical prestige. We better get to work on this.

Perhaps Apple would … ah, never mind. There’s no financial return on that investment. Oh, wait. IBM’s Watson shows the way.

More Debris

Remember FireWire? I don’t know about you, but I loved it. I can’t count all the FireWire drives I bought over the years. But then the technology died. Removed from the face of the Earth. Here’s the lamentation at ars technica “The tragedy of FireWire: Collaborative tech torpedoed by corporations.”

You’ve heard of the iPhone’s Secure Enclave. It’s where important things like the boot certificate and fingerprint data are stored. Well, it may be coming to the iMac Pro, according to AppleInsider. “High Sierra firmware suggests Secure Enclave, Intel ‘Purley’ chips coming to iMac Pro.”

This will likely lead the way to Touch Bar enabled keyboards for the iMac Pro, something lacking in the latest iMacs announced at WWDC and something we all wondered about. Mystery now solved.

Paul Thurrott calls it like he sees it with the Apple Pencil.

Yes, critics—myself included—mocked Apple for the Pencil’s silly name, and for its ostensibly silly charging system, which involves a Universal port hidden under a cap that plugs awkwardly into the bottom of your iPad Pro. And for being derivative in copying Microsoft so obviously.

Well, bad news, haters. In my admittedly limited testing of Apple Pencil last year, one fact became immediately clear: Apple Pencil, despite being a 1.0 product, immediately overtook Surface Pen in performance—in lack of latency, in other words—and in just feeling like a more natural experience. And that silly charging experience everyone is so upset about? In just 15 seconds, you can charge the Pencil for 30 minutes of use. So it’s not silly, it’s useful.

Build great hardware and people will praise it.

I have space for one more item. Here’s a concept from Lenovo for a future notebook computer. It’s not on the drawing boards, and details of the technology are non-existent. I think of it as more inspirational than practical. And you gotta love the retro red button cursor control, sans trackpad. Still. Fun to look at and ponder.

A notebook concept. (Shown folded on the left.) Image credit: Lenovo

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Particle Debris is a generally a mix of John Martellaro’s observations and opinions about a standout event or article of the week (preamble on page one) followed on page two by a discussion of articles that didn’t make the TMO headlines, the technical news debris. The column is published most every Friday except for holiday weekends.

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