Apple is a company. Apple is not your friend. Apple doesn't care about you. Apple just wants to make money.
This is okay and this should be expected.
That people are upset about this kind of behaviour is disconcerting.
This is okay and this should be expected.
That people are upset about this kind of behaviour is disconcerting.
Sure, you can hate on Tim Cook or whoever as much as you want, but will that change the behaviour of Apple as a company? Extremely unlikely. The responsibility of a CEO is towards the share holders (who only care about the profit). The responsibility of a manager is towards his superiors. Very few people in a company of this size have sufficient power to change this kind of behaviour and the (dis)incentives are simply (and demonstrably) not sufficient.
You can and should hold Apple the company, as well as the relevant decision makers personally accountable for this kind of behaviour. But if you expect them not to act like this, you're simply being naive.
Find a way to prevent this kind of behaviour in the future. Or at least make sure you're not supporting it. But boycotting evil corporations turns out to be nearly impossible considering how many evils are being committed by nearly all significant companies and how few companies can actually be called independent or untainted.
Be outraged. But don't be surprised. Unless you learn from this so the same thing won't surprise you if it happens again in the future.
Companies are constantly in imbalance but heading towards what consumers want. If you were to engineer "perfect" actors, Soviet style, you'd get perfect balance in the initial second and nightmare scenarios in the long term.
It's okay because this is the kind of behaviour we have come to expect from large, for-profit corporations. It's how they're expected to behave, it's textbook behaviour. If you're outraged that a company would do this, you've simply not been paying attention to the business world for decades.
Whether it's morally okay or not is a different question. Companies are amoral. They can't be expected to act on conscience because they have none. If you want them to act on morals, you need to codify these morals in regulations -- or you need to make sure your moral outrage is big enough to directly create a disincentive for that kind of behaviour (e.g. be in a position of power where that outrage directly translates to a significant change of their bottom line).
I'm not saying this is how it should be. I'm saying this is how it is. And that is nothing new.
The problem isn't that Apple all of a sudden misbehaves. The problem is that apparently a lot of people have a really flawed mental model of what kind of behaviour they should expect from a company like Apple and make bad decisions because of that.
The walled garden has been called out as horrible from day one. To Google's defense, it's still easier to install Android software without Google Play than it is to install Apple software without the App Store.
It's mind-boggling why the tech scene seems to be so oblivious (or hypocritical) towards Apple's vendor lock-in. Heck, even at its peak Microsoft wasn't nearly this powerful (or effective).
When the Apple Watch came out I actually considered whether it's worth buying. But in order to use the Apple Watch I'd have to replace my smartphone with an iPhone. And then I'd need to use iTunes, which only really works well on OSX (there's a crappy Windows version that's really a second class citizen but I'm on Linux anyway). So I would have also had to replace my laptop with a MacBook or MBP. And since all the syncing and cross-device stuff is stuck in the Apple cosmos there'd really be no point in not also replacing my tablet with an iPad. Boom, the entire stack is now Apple because of a single product.
And that's just a hardware purchasing decision -- I haven't even mentioned software lock-in (e.g. Chrome on iOS being really just a wrapper around Mobile Safari because there's no way to swap out the actual engine, or the lackluster integration of third-party apps compared to the OS defaults).
I have an extremely hard time seeing how it can possibly be beneficial to consumers for Apple to attempt to censor this kind of content. Even a "well, App Store censorship of jailbreaking talks is ultimately beneficial in the long run for consumers because Apple making more money means more R&D investment" sort of argument falls flat because nobody who could possibly make use of technical descriptions of jailbreak techniques would be in the slightest bit hindered by the availability of the content in the iOS App Store.
You can't force them to behave morally. But you can inform your market decisions if you understand that companies will behave like this if there is no sufficient disincentive.
You're not to blame if you think this is bad. It is bad, and you are right to be morally outraged. But you are totally to blame if you're a happy Apple customer and are only offended because the behaviour surprises you.
Apple used to be a pretty good friend, but they are slipping. Personally, I never bought/needed the friend experience, and might be the only person thrown out of a Apple Store. (Still don't know if it was my comment I made to the Genius Manager who was barking orders to the employee helping me? I politely asked the Genius Manager, "Why are you checking the inventory, when you are walking with my item in your hands?". Yea, it was my fault, I don't like power hungry little managers. Why are they always little in stature? I had the incident video taped on YouTube, but felt sorry for the little guy, and didn't want him to loose his job. It was priceless though. It was a clear video of him holding the metal door, screaming at me to leave. It was priceless. I did question my own sanity after the incident though. Am I that bad, or was he having a bad day? I will never know.)
Back to my point. The people I steered towards Apple spent thousands, so they can have Geniuses hold their hands like a good friend would. I got tired of holding their hands while on a Microsoft product. I gave them to Apple. Apple can fix their whiny problems. Problems caused because they never bothered to learn anything about computing/programming. A problem Apple was complicit in? 'You don't need to think with our products. They just work! Sit back and push those buttons!' (Sorry, just finished helping someone who had somehow ended up with 12 Photos Applications on their computer, and I still can't figured out what they did.)
The problem is, these people, I steered towards Apple don't know an App from a website, so they wouldn't even understand this argument--and they would never get the concept of a "walked off garden". The people who spend the most at Apple seem to know the least about computing, so Apple isn't affected if the few people, like me, leave?
Until the masses stop buying their products they will still be selfish dictators? I hate to say this, but my Apple days are over. One--because I can't afford their products anymore, and will patch up my gadgets from the unending supply of parts on EBay. And two--I just don't like the company since Jobs died. I didn't want to think one man could make a company, but in this case it's arguable? Yea, I know it was "walked off garden" with Jobs too, but I didn't care as much back then, or maybe I was one of the clueless masses?
Thinking a company can be a friend is no less wrong than thinking a prostitute (as in: someone you actively pay for sex) can be your romantic partner. You're paying for a fake relationship and both parties should be conscious of that. If you think it's real, feelings will get hurt -- or worse (just ask a sex worker about creepy patrons who mistake them for friends just because they paid for sex).
EDIT: Actually it's worse. At least prostitutes actually are real people (well duh) and have a real identity outside their job allowing them to have an actual relationship with someone. Corporations don't even have that.