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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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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Apple blocked Facebook from spying on you, but when it wanted to build its own surveillance advertising empire, it switched iOS spying back on, gathering exactly the same data as Facebook had, but for its own sole use, and then lied about it:
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Then there’s #iMessage, Apple’s default messaging tool - “default” in the sense that there’s no way to use other apps without taking additional steps. IMessage has #EndToEndEncryption - but only when you’re communicating with other Apple customers. The instant an Android user is added to a chat or group chat, the entire conversation flips to SMS, an insecure, trivially hacked privacy nightmare that debuted 38 years ago - the year Wayne’s World had its first cinematic run.
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About 41% of American mobile phone users have an Android phone, which means that any time an Apple customer tries to have a conversation with a colleague, a merchant, a loved one, a friend or a family member, there’s a 4 in 10 chance it’s going out “in the clear,” with zero privacy protections.
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This is not good for Apple customers. It exposes them to continuous, serious privacy risks. Our mobile devices are keepers of our most intimate secrets, and when mobile security fails, the consequences are grave, as Apple discovered in the hardest way possible, ten years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_celebrity_nude_photo_leak
Apple’s answer to this is grimly hilarious. The company’s position is that if you want to have real security in your communications, you should buy your friends iPhones.
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Presumably, if those friends - or merchants, or colleagues - don’t want to change operating systems and throw away their device and all their apps, you should just stop talking to them:
One of the clinical signs that someone is in a cult is that they are encouraged to isolate themselves from people who aren’t also in that cult:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_to_facilitate_abuse#In_cults
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