Apple’s most valuable intangible asset isn’t its patents or copyrights - it’s an army of people who believe that using products from a $2.89 trillion multinational makes them members of an oppressed religious minority whose identity is coterminal with the interests of Apple’s shareholders.
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones
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Every time Apple finds a new way to cheat its customers, the cult is there to insist those aren’t true Apple customers at all!
Think of Apple’s years-long war on repair. When Apple gets a veto over where you fix the small, slippery, glass object you carry everywhere and hence break a lot, they can get up to all kinds of mischief. They can gouge you on parts and service charges, sure. But they can also simply rule out fixing your device at all, declaring it beyond repair.
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This prompts you to buy another gadget from them, and they get to offer you a trade-in. That means that your old gadget gets “recycled” by Apple, who - uniquely among electronics manufacturers - drops all its “recycled” gadgets in giant shredders, ensuring that parts from old phones don’t find their way into the secondary market for use by independent repair:
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Apple isn’t coy about all this! #TimApple’s 2019 shareholders letter spelled it out explicitly: Apple’s revenues are falling because its customers are fixing their phones rather than replacing them:
Apple led the coalition that killed dozens of state #RightToRepair bills for years.
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When repair advocates pointed out that this was creating mountains of immortal #ewaste that included tons of #ConflictMinerals, Apple’s religious adherents stepped into insist that Apple customers preferred to get their iPhone fixed by Apple and its approved depots.
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Again, this is obvious nonsense. If it were the case that No True Apple Customer would patronize a third-party repair depot, then Apple could simply step out of the way of Right to Repair campaigns and those independent phone fixit places would sink without a trace. People who own Android devices don’t get their phones fixed with unauthorized iPhone parts.
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The chorus of credulous, faithful shouters gives Apple enormous cover to get up to the worst behavior. Apple keeps making announcements about its commitment to repair that get trumpeted to the heavens, even though these announcements barely bother to cover up how Apple will continue to block repair in practice:
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This #RealityDistortionField is remarkably durable. It remains intact even when rivals take the exact opposite position and demonstrate exactly what a real, non-pretextual pro-repair policy looks like:
A key tenet of the Cult of Mac is that Apple’s sins are actually virtues, because all its monopolistic conduct is in service to its users’ privacy and security.
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After all, this is the company that faced down the FBI when the US government tried to force it to weaken its encryption:
And it’s true, they did! They also added anti-tracking features that shut down Facebook’s ability to spy on iOS users, a move that Facebook claims cost it $10b in the first year alone (you love to see it):
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But Apple’s commitment to your privacy and security is always contingent, and when its own profits are on the line, the company will swiftly stuff you and your safety out the airlock. Apple refused to weaken its security for the FBI, but when China threatened its access to cheap manufacturing and hundreds of millions of customers, Apple eviscerated its products:
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