“One more thing!”
How many times have the millions—or is it billions—of Apple geeks across the globe thrilled to those words as the geniuses from Cupertino unveiled yet another dazzling product?
Sometimes these new gizmos arrived a little late but almost always with a better result for the user than their competition. They were usually more elegantly designed as well.
Steve Jobs changed our lives with the Apple II, the iPhone, and the rest, continuing into the present day when so many of us are hooked on what Apple does. (Are you ready for the Apple Car? When do we get our new AR goggles?)
Too bad the company is such a reactionary, morally narcissistic organization, admonishing and lecturing the world to be what they decidedly are not, while censoring those with whom they disagree.
The latest display of this nauseating hypocrisy came from them denying entry to the app store for the conservative-leaning social media site Parler, not once, but now twice.
“‘After having reviewed the new information, we do not believe these changes are sufficient to comply with App Store Review guidelines. There is no place for hateful, racist, discriminatory content on the App Store,’ Apple wrote to Parler on Feb. 25.”
Commenters on AppleInsider pointed out the painfully obvious hypocrisy here, of which many readers of The Epoch Times are, I’m sure, well aware.
Facebook and Twitter were loaded with at least as many—I would bet hugely more due to their size—incendiary posts before the Jan. 6 Capitol event than Parler.
Someone using the amusingly apropos handle “1984called” put it this way:
“You have got to be kidding. Apple, seriously, putting out this statement and yet they allow Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and just take a look at the top hip hop songs on Apple Music. Disgusting. Apple is spitting in your face and telling you it’s raining.”
Not bad. That about says it all about their naked partisanship… but… dare I say it…
“One more thing!”
Apple—like its Big Tech brethren—has an horrendous record when it comes to the People’s Republic of China. For many years, until others pointed it out, Apple cooperated completely with the communist regime in order to manufacture its products in China.
The astonishingly onerous working conditions for their Chinese employees would never have been tolerated in most Western countries, but why would Apple have cared? It’s all about the bottom line.
And after all, they didn’t seem to mind that the same regime was well known—I’m certain to high level and undoubtedly educated Apple executives—to have concentration camps in Xinjiang Province reeducating and doing far worse (rape, torture, forced organ transplants) to their Uyghur and Tibetan populations as well as to Christians, political dissidents, Falun Gong practitioners, and others who dare to question them.
For a long time, Apple barely even criticized this. I don’t even know if they have now.
And yet they take offense at social media sites like Parler, playing the censorship game as if they had some kind of moral high ground.
How shameful. How repugnant. How opposed to the Bill of Rights.
But, alas, “one more very depressing thing.”
The Apple hypocrites have us trapped. Those of us, like me, who have been on their ecosystem for years (I went on around 2003 when we were developing Pajamas Media and my co-founder, who handled the tech end, put us on Macs. I’m writing this on a MacBook Air.)
We could go off, but where we would we go? Are the other systems any better? Microsoft? Android? Oh, please.
Not only that, transferring to another system with all our devices and storage is a difficult task for most people, fraught with the possibility of losing valuable documents and information of all sorts, not to mention consuming tremendous amounts of time and incurring considerable expense.
Apple knows that. So they go on their merry way.
What are we to do?
The problem with Big Tech in general is that it evolved through people with great technical expertise and monumental ambition, but little knowledge of history and less knowledge of the human soul.
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