Apple famously "ignores" its users, partly because users usually can't see far beyond what is in front of them, often because they don't know about impending advances in technology or clever new designs. They'll ask for faster, cheaper versions of what they already have (faster horses, cheaper buggy whips as they say) rather than the next big thing. Faster/cheaper weren't the primary draws of the Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc. (though price/performance is a big draw of the M1, the big breakthrough is performance/watt which leads to all-day battery life and better thermals.) Instead it was a quantum improvement in design, usability, and functionality combined.
As another example, consider that in 2007 Apple developers were begging for an iPhone SDK, and Steve Jobs crushed their hopes by telling them to just make web apps. A year later Apple came out not just with an iPhone SDK, but with an entire App Store. (Though I suppose some developers [Epic] and users [HN] wish they had just come out with an SDK, and that the iPhone wasn't locked down.)
That being said, they do a lot of user testing of the next big thing before it is revealed publicly.
It's really not that useful for Apple to collect analytics because they make physical products, where the potential of analytics is limited. When it comes to a SaaS or a web page, the possibilities of analytics are much greater.
And yet, Macs will still send usage and performance data to Apple so they can incorporate that information into future product versions and find out about system software issues.
We're pretty deep in a single thread here, but the original article isn't saying "don't use analytics", it's saying "don't use Google Analytics".
Your SaaS or webpage probably gathers 80% of what Google Analytics does in your log files. It could without doubt provide deeper insights that GA is capable of by adding your own behaviour tracking code (which can be written with the understanding of your specific problem dom ain, rather than be an "everything to everybody" generalised solution).
Nobody is suggesting we shouldn't collect usage and performance data, the thesis here is that we shouldn't send all that directly to the worlds most profitable advertising agency, just because they'll draw us some pretty graphs for free.
Well, you can't really opt-out of all analytics. It's really hard to completely stop all server logs, or them tracking how many purchases you make (eg. invoices).
Where exactly do we draw the line to what's core for a company to track in order to run their business and what can be opt-out?
As another example, consider that in 2007 Apple developers were begging for an iPhone SDK, and Steve Jobs crushed their hopes by telling them to just make web apps. A year later Apple came out not just with an iPhone SDK, but with an entire App Store. (Though I suppose some developers [Epic] and users [HN] wish they had just come out with an SDK, and that the iPhone wasn't locked down.)
That being said, they do a lot of user testing of the next big thing before it is revealed publicly.