Dear Apple: Your Services Are No Longer Required
lowendmac.com
lowendmac.com
Maybe I'm missing some context but it seems like something huge has to be omitted from author's narrative.
There's just no way Apple Inc's ~137000 employees are all saying to friends & family, "nope, sorry, I can't help you with your iPhone/iPad/iMac because it's a conflict of interest and I'd get fired."
So... maybe the company/boss has other issues with the guy, but no solid ground to fire him, until they caught him "violating" this "conflict of interest" rule.
Yes, this does not make sense. But that is the reality of law enforcement, and of border patrol. It doesn't take a conviction to cancel your visa and deport you.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/27/armed-police-wes...
Without being able to prove that you have given money, or undergone training by terrorists, or support or plan to commit a specific act then it would be otherwise difficult to remove someone from the country.
However asking on the form grants two options.... first they can simply deny entry, and second they can deport you for lying if it turns out you are the press secretary for the IRA for example.
A lot of these types of complaints, they don't / won't sign a release allowing the employer to release their records.
https://www.cultofmac.com/39931/woz-accidentally-gets-apple-....
Just because the employee got lucky and gambled successfully with Jobs’ reaction, doesn’t make them trustworthy in future.
Poor Woz, rofl
Woz is a deity-like figure to my peeps (not because of Apple) and he says what he wants, when he wants to. Need something kept secret? Use the Cone Of Silence to tell it to a real businessy-marketing-greaseball. Want your cool new tech (even the OG Samsung smartphones!) to get it's name out there, be certain it truly is cool and only then, show it to Woz! https://youtu.be/AWQKNxuGqg4
Selective enforcement of rules is far worse than rules you just think can be broken because “hey, this would be harmless, I without any authority have decided!”
This is why I love this website.
There was that one time he was fired for trying to break (or at least work around) the rules:
This is why Steve Jobs got fired from Apple — and how he came back to save the company https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-apple-fired-retur...
[1]: https://consumerist.com/2014/09/12/how-corporations-got-the-...
The key thing in Citizens United isn’t that “corporations are people,” but that an association of people be the same First Amendment rights as an individual person. And that makes sense: a newspaper is published by a group of people, spending money to distribute their message. A newspaper editorial is published by the paper, not by the individual. So restricting an association of people’s First Amendment rights, you would necessarily restrict the right of a newspaper to publish, unless the newspaper is completely self-funded by the writer/publisher.
So no, corporations don’t have all the rights of an individual, they can’t for example, vote in an election, join the military, hold elective office. A corporation is nothing more than a group of people sharing a common goal. A corporation is no different from a club, a union, a rock band, or an activist group. It’s just a legal structure that allows people to join together for some common purpose.
I agree 100%.
I was sales for a long time before getting out and going the developer route.
As a sales person, you're constantly pushing the line and boundaries, but once you get one someone's radar (whatever level of management that is) then you get back on the straight and narrow pretty fast or you're on your way out.
To me, it sounds an awful lot like he got on someone's radar and instead of jumping back on the straight narrow, continued to push the line and finally got caught and they axed him.
It's so hard to fire someone from a corporate gig these days. You never have just once chance and they "investigate" and then you're let go. There are multiple warnings, write-ups, PIP's until HR has enough documentation to fire you if you continue to screw up.
Clearly, this wasn't his first run in with the Apple HR team.
That is absolutely untrue. I know of very many such events.
In order to hold them to account, you need to be able to give up the severence allowance. They can easily tell from your credit report whether you can, and choose accordingly.
It is very easy to believe this was the first run-in. Furthermore, the HN CoC requires that you presume so.
The number of mentions about Apple providing the service "for free" makes it sound like the author perhaps actually charged their elderly friend, and honestly that would be a huge violation. I don't know exactly what the author's job was (can't find it on the site), but if their job is servicing Macs, it's very normal for their employment contract to forbid making money servicing Macs outside their job -- it's literally having your own employees compete with you.
But if the author didn't charge... then there's got to be a separate "real reason" they were fired.
It still depends. Even if it's in the employment contract, the extent to which anti-moonlighting, non-compete, and other kinds of anti-competitive clauses that attempt to control the employee when they're not at work are enforceable varies drastically from case to case and jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Conflicts of interest and potential IP theft can affect the decision, but even doing the exact same job just outside of your normal working hours is not necessarily grounds for a breach of contract.
I actually had a case recently where someone lost reset to a google account. They ended up (THANKFULLY) somehow getting a password reset through an enterprise account admin who had the pull of a huge contract to help out. But I'm sure it was cleared and on the clock for the employee side to do this because I immediately thought - awesome! and also thought - damn, whoever can do these transfers has a TON of power if they ever went rouge.
Yep, that sounds like it could be more clear cut -- you're using employer resources/tools without permission.
This is a retail outlet afterall, far away from the culture of the mothership.
If I should guess such kind of article pops up around every half a year since I'm following Hacker News (I have an account since 4 years so more than that).
Some even came from people much higher up then this person seems to have been.
My guess is that they have a policy against it, but normally either don't hear about "private support" or don't care about it. But do use it to get ride of anyone who thinks differently in the sense that they don't agree with everything Apple does, like complaining to another employee that it's petty of Apple to sue some small company with a peach logo.
Surely the author must know this isn’t a policy violation though? Why not report the manager, or sue for wrongful termination? It doesn’t make any sense.
You can be pretty much fired for any reason in any company, with or without cause. Apple probably isn't going to say anything. It could be as simple as the manager wanted to hire his best friend's son, and needed an open spot.
This is my understanding. IANAL or an HR person.
That sounds strange.
So the Geniuses at the Genius bar can basically openly tell people that they can go to the other shop they work at across the door and they will do the repair at half the price? And Apple will have no policy against that?
It seems plausible this guy did so for money. Note that the post says the work was done in spare time but doesn’t say it was done for free. That would be a conflict of interest because it’s engaging in commercial activities also engaged with by Apple.
EDIT: What's with the downvotes? it's true.
As the plaintiff in such a case you need to be able to provide evidence that it's "reasonable to believe" that you were fired because of whatever protected class you fall into.
It can be difficult to do, especially if you're blindsided and escorted out of the building and cut off from any sort of evidence (tip: if you think you could be fired because of who you are, start keeping receipts before you're fired).
Previous to winning my own discrimination case, I was a juror in a case where an employer almost got away with blatantly discriminatory firing. They thought they were being sly by sacrificing another non-protected employee at the same time... but then bragged about it to an employee they didn't realize would rat them out. If it wasn't for that email there wouldn't have been enough evidence to know for sure.
That aside, if you're not a protected class (the majority of people aren't)... good luck. You can be fired without cause at any given moment.
Yeah, exceptions are the problem, there are many.
> That aside, if you're not a protected class (the majority of people aren't)
80% of the people I work with are in a protected class.
> Previous to winning my own discrimination case
All the suits filed against my company in the last 35 years (2) were frivolous and we settled both of them. Good for you for winning a non-frivolous one, but in my experience (talking with other COO's) frivolous cases are very common.
It's fear of these frivolous cases that drive LOTS of behavior.
EDIT: there were threats of other suits (3-5). All frivolous.
Manager is a spiteful asshole and found a reason to fire them.
This also happens.
But I agree the official reason sounds like a corporate scapegoat to not get sued.
Personally I can relate to the author because I've experienced a similar sobering up from the marketing of a different corporation that I worked for. (I dreamed of working there growing up and one day I got a chance to work for them almost by accident.)
It was exhilarating for the first 1-2 years but as I came to know how the company actually works from the inside I was more and more disappointed that their outside image couldn't be further away from the truth.
Now the manager is in a tough spot. This is some kind of official internal complaint and it is literally his job and his duty to investigate. He talks to the employee and the employee confirms the report. It's now out of his hands, has to go up a chain to a regional manager. It gets passed around a bit until someone unfamiliar with the employee looks at the policies and facts of the matter and they make a by-the-book call.
I can totally understand the frustration. It reminds me of some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare where justice is run through an algorithm. At some point we'd all hope a compassionate judge would look over the human's involved in the situation and apply some magnanimity.
Each person in a chain had an option to use their judgement to break the chain but nobody did. This isn't an indictment of Apple as some may want to see it. It seems more likely it is a pretty standard outcome of people following a bureaucratic process.
Is it not Apple's bureaucratic process? Then is not the pretty standard outcome of that process Apple's as well?
Also, who else but Apple can empower each person in the chain to actually exercise their judgment?
And this doesn't even consider bad actors trying to socially engineer the system. Must each person in the chain now make the determination that they are actually helping a customer or being fooled by an adversary?
I guess I just think it's naive to expect workers to unilaterally disobey the bureaucratic process because it is demonstrably imperfect. Just fix the broken process instead of punting liability to each individual. What ever happened to leadership?
We can't say that based on this single incident. How often has a manager in a similar position decided to handle it themselves by having a word with the employee and not documenting it? I can't know and I don't think you know either.
> Just fix the broken process
I'm of the opinion no such fix could be perfect. It is the reason we have a common law system with precedents and judges interpreting laws with respect to them. And even then a judge may decide to throw the book at someone and an appeal can be lost.
Same thing happens in almost every single avenue of life. A cop has discretion to let you off a ticket and decides not to. A teacher refuses to accept late work. An employee stands-firm against a customer on a store policy like the wearing of a mask instead of letting it slide. Even if these things are statistically rare, it still stings if you are on the receiving side.
We won't ever know.
> I had just been fired for helping _someone_
> they wouldn’t have fired me for helping a _customer_
This shifting language is suspicious to me; is this a friend or a customer you met at the Apple store and then helped off the clock? It sounds like this person was employed at an Apple retail store, and I can't imagine Apple having a policy that retail store employees are not allowed to help their grandparents set up a new Mac. There is 100% something else going on here.
WAG: this guy told a customer at the store that he could get the data transfer done faster, and was effectively running a Genius Bar out of his garage.
EDIT: I get that he's using different nouns in order to make his case in a few different ways. Ultimately, I think the writer did something shady and got fired for it.
He's obviously talking about the person in different contexts.
The person is a friend to them, but they are also a someone, and for Apple they are a customer.
Instead, an Apple employee undermined the precision-crafted brand experience with this customer. Worse yet, if he would have messed up the transfer, he'd be making Apple look really bad when the customer told their friends about how unreliable getting a new Mac going can be due to their experience.
This is possibly their narrative on this issue. Companies like Apple worry endlessly about this, which is how they have earned their reputation with customers.
I can understand a warning or write-up being an educational opportunity for the employee to understand the problem here, but clearly there was no malicious intent here, firing someone over this is really poor management unless they are a repeat offender after a warning.
An Apple Expert is a ~$20/hr retail job - https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/114438150/us-expert
The "boss" he mentions was probably an Apple Store Manager or Assistant Manager.
I understand the frustration from Ted but this feels a lot more like a conflict between a mid-level retail manager wielding Apple's general HR guidelines to terminate a retail employee vs. a broader story about Apple hammer smashing a little guy.
Most companies (especially post-capitalistic American ones) are structured to provide maximum money for the company and/or the shareholders on either the short term or the long term. That's a monster we all created and fed for decades. That means that HR is your friend until they want to get rid of you. And the rules are made in line with that: plenty of options for 'legally' getting rid of people.
While I personally think that's just bad for humans, I don't think anyone should still be surprised that that is how it was designed to work.
For instance, Apple doesn’t care if customers “showroom” and buy the product somewhere else. Apple makes money either way.
It’s the responsibility of the blogger to communicate clearly. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Apple is 100% responsible for unresolved improper firings that become PR storms, they have a tool they could deploy to solve it, but they don't out of fear of profits.
My point is not that it is less "important or impactful" but that working within a retail environment vs a corporate environment - even at Apple - is an apples / oranges comparison.
Apple has effectively the highest retail employee retention rate full in the USA (1) - they have led the charge in changing the retail paradigm for the better for 10s of thousands of employees.
My first job was retail and I would have killed to work at an Apple store.
Petty bosses wielding a 100 page HR rule-book that some back closet McKinsey intern produced to fire anybody at anytime (even in states w/good protections) is PAR for the course in retail.
Is it because corporate is evil or because managing a largely lower-education(2), transient workforce is incredibly challenging?
Is it nuanced and two sided? of course!
Did this maybe happen at an Apple Store?
It might have!
Could it have been a manager looking for an HR dept defensible excuse to get rid of a difficult employee?
Could just likely have been.
(1) https://www.hrzone.com/community/blogs/mark-mccormack/apple-...
(2) https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/industry-at-a-glan...
- This post is front paged on HN, grabbing your attention, mine, and a demographic that skews largely to Apple's core corporate HR need and customer base.
- It is important that the HN community can rely on the comments section to gain insight or nuance that they would not otherwise have from the source material.
- The author works to harm Apple's reputation as an employer and company suggesting one stops buying their products and opt out of their ecosystem etc.
- This central argument, that Apple is an unfair and malicious employer, is in conflict with Apple's objectively industry leading employee retention numbers that I share above.
- The author never discloses that he is/was a retail employee vs. a corporate employee which I think anybody with an understanding of retail employment in general would appreciate to have as a filter to assess his pov.
- Without taking a position of this termination being right or wrong, the evidence above suggests this is an edge-case and is probably not deserving of my or my fellow HN users taking into deep consideration in our opinion of Apple.
- Instead it feels like a well timed piece of negative content that fits into a narrative that several very large and powerful corporations are working hard to try in the court of public opinion. (1)
- - -
And then back to your comment - what lesson or theme are you drawing from a single retail employees one-sided negative experience working within the Apple employee ecosystem? What am I missing? Why is this relevant?
(1) https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/17/21372480/apple-epic-threa...
Working there, there have been plenty of no-no's that we had to be careful about, and periodic training about conflicts of interest and similar, but helping out family, friends, and acquaintances was certainly not it.
Do I think that's the whole truth? No.
It's a very weird story. What normal co-worker runs tattling to their boss that so-and-so had the nerve to help an elderly neighbor that weekend? And major conflict of interest? Was borrowed equipment perhaps involved or...? Yes, I'm sure even Apple retail is sucky but something that he may genuinely think is unimportant seems to be missing from this story.
> actively hunting down
I realize the article was hugged to death, but once it comes back online you should reread the story, where this is explained as mandatory reporting not active hunting.
I did not, but if you did, I'd love to know more about what it says that I'm not aware of. If this was explicitly listed in your employment contract but not mine, that's a valuable piece of information to know for interpreting the context here.
> explained as mandatory reporting not active hunting
I did not get the sense that this was mandatory reporting, only that his manager had heard about it (potentially off-the-cuff or through unrelated channels), but will gladly re-read the article again when it comes back up.
> About 2 weeks later I was approached by my boss. Someone told him that I had helped a friend with his computer. I told him that yes I had in fact helped a friend with a data transfer (something Apple does for free) and that I had helped him on my own time. He told me that I had just admitted to a major conflict on interest, and that an official investigation in to my actions would now start, two days later I was suspended.
This did not sound to me like mandatory reporting.
Like speaking with another employee that it's kinda petty from apple to sue a small company with a peach logo which doesn't even compete with Apple.
Or agreeing that the Ab store sometimes acts abusive (not because of the 30% cut but because of everything else).
Or honestly speaking about a customer about all kinds of repair related thinks (like telling them that data recovery is sometimes possible after water damage but apple just doesn't provide such service, similar with any proper efficient repair, apple only replaces components, which there aren't that many as everything is soldered on the main board).
Or...
What I want to say is currently there are a lot of things an Apple employee might not like about Apple and I wouldn't be surprised if a petty boss will try to fire you if you speak about them with other employees during your brake.
The part that didn't make sense to me is how a manager even knew to ask the guy if he had helped someone. My guess -- and this is only speculation -- is that the "friend" came into the store to buy the new machine and/or have the data transferred, objected to having to leave his old and new machines there for a couple/few days, and the tech offered to just take care of it for him at home, off the clock, since the tech knew the customer. Again, that hypothesis could have nothing to do with the actual facts but it would explain how the manager would even know there was a potential customer service event that never happened... not to mention the liability to the Apple Store if an unofficial agreement to work on the friend's computer happened in the Apple store: what if the tech had accidentally bricked the computer?
would be something Apple would want to encourage?
I agree something is missing.
TOS are written in a way to give their authors the maximum amount of power and leverage over the person or entity they’re working with, regardless of whether or not the terms exceed the spirit of general defensive legal strategy.
This guy lost a job because helped someone with some basic computer work, something many of us do with our relatives because they see us as “magicians” or whatever and we enjoy tinkering.
It’s hard to imagine what additional context needs to be present in order for Apple to be justified in doing this.
Just curious: does Apple maintain the right to disable my account if I talk bad about them online? It wouldn’t surprise me, but I guess I should read the TOS.
In case of Apple it's neither trivial to switch (you can't move bought apps over) nor is there much choice (in practice it's basically Apple or Google).
I did, however, once know a fellow that did tech support for an ISP, that used his work calls to source his freelance onsite tech support business. Once the main company found out they let him go.
Omitted from the article is whether the OP charged for his time. But I can't help but think that either Apple is ridiculous, or we're not hearing the whole story.
1. don't want to potentially lose revenue
2. don't want to dilute their brand
3. don't want any liability associated with an employee doing work outside of their officially sanctioned capacity
4. don't want to culturally set an acceptable level of noncompliance with procedure even if the above violations aren't egregious.
Insurance is very concerned about claims resulting from off the clock / third party work related to day time work. So if you are a doctor working in a practice group, and then do freelance work, that is going to absolutely freak an insurance carrier out.
Security - people don't realize that a lot of stuff on-premise / on-network is tracked and logged. So if you "help" someone out off-site / off work people get nervous. T-mobile employee doing a sim swap with customer in store on video - sure. T-mobile employee logging in off hours to do a sim swap - maybe sketchier even if they are "helping a friend".
Employee told a potential customer that he will make a home-visit, for free. There is no way that the Apple Store would support making promises like that. But if he made that promise while he was at work, it could be construed that he wasn't doing a personal favor, but acting on behalf of his job.
So if anything went wrong (say, he fried the computer) then Apple could potentially have some liability.
The following is a fiction that is also the same story as above:
In late January an elderly gentleman, whom I'd helped many times during my long tenure at the Apple Store, came in to buy a new iMac. As I was ringing up his purchase, he inquired about how to migrate his data. I informed him that Apple would be happy to do it for free but it would take 3 to 5 business days, I then offered to come by his house and perform the migration for a modest fee. A few weeks later the elderly gentleman came into the Apple Store asking for me because he was having issues locating some of his files, he spoke with my manager and explained the situation. Later my manager approached me about the issue, I confirmed that I had been moonlighting and had solicited my services while on the clock at the Apple Store.
There are now two "articles" that are basically "I don't like Apple anymore" rants. This being one of them.
I have a strong feeling that this is also a "there's more to the story" situation.
http://web.archive.org/web/20200818181006/https://lowendmac....
The author conviently and entirely skips over which steps he took to 'help his friend'.
Apple employees are allowed to help friends, obviously. What you are not allowed to do, is to use Apple's special software tools that is intented only for helping customers during work time. These are sensible rules that protect the privacy or Apple users. I suspect the author had stepped out of line, and neglected those rules.
I honestly can't understand such devotion to a corporate entity. I have a preference for Thinkpads, but I don't worship at the alter of Lenovo. Give me a Mac, Chromebook, Dell, Raspberry Pi... whatever, I'll happily use it.
Apple is a company, not a sodding religion.
Just like a baseball or soccer club is a company. They can still have fans who keep up with rumors, news and products more than the average.
Also, unless you’re the founder, a corporation should never be such a big part of your identity.
Furthermore I have meet with people not employed by Apple which where big Apple fanatics, Apple for them was part of their identity to a non negligible degree.
So yes this is totally possible in my experience.
Sure a founder is probably even more invested, but then the level of (emotional) investment he show is totally realistic.
I think you have to go waaaay back to the garage days to find an Apple that wasn’t the Coca Cola of computers/phones/tablets/iPods.
Not sure where you’re going to find a major company that isn’t kind of rotten. Most of them just have worse PR.
Of course it's very easy to imagine that bad serviceability is encouraged by some managers.
He didn't want anybody to be able to open a Mac and add memory, or a network card, or anything. Macs had Torx screws, back when nobody had Torx screwdrivers, and they needed have an unusually long shaft, or extension.
Apple won't sell you a screen,keyboard or chip to fix your hardware, I am waiting to explain to me how this is very green
With desktop computers we can still replace parts without having to ask approval from someone, we can still install whatever we want and this is because there are more then 2 laptop or desktop suppliers. Also it is not about form factor, yes it is easy to replace parts on a desktop PC but for Apple phones they refuse to give you screens or batteries and they bully people that refurbish parts from broken devices and try to hide repair documentation and software(this is opposite of green)
My definition of premium includes "it's robust so I don't have to worry", their definition of premium excludes robustness.
My definition of premium includes straight forward sustainable repairs theirs includes hampering anyone who tries to provide such (they don't).
From introduction, maybe, from sale, definitely not. Apple sold the iPhone 6 until 53 weeks before iOS 13.
Thy don't.
It's not just that they wouldn't try to sell you a new device every year but they also would either provide or allow sustainable repairs.
Apple mainly replaces whole components, like the whole motherboard. But many of the damages which causes a motherboard repair with Apple can be fixed by "just" replacing some broken capacitors or some simple chip (simple as in not the GPU/CPU/RAM). Which might sound hard but is very doable/learnable e.g. look at some of Louis Rossmanns videos.
There are also frequently problems with Macs one the line of "if this fails this other thinks will fail too and you have to buy a new laptop instead of just living without xxx".
I think all their efforts about sustainable production are PR and trying to avoid/preclude regulations.
Think about this for a second. Is it possible that the 'cult', that by your own words are 'evangelizing', is ever going to turn against you when you make a mistake or do something that they don't agree with?
"I believed ... Apple’s mission (or at least what they said their mission was)" - these seems to be the words of someone finally waking up from a trance.
It seems to me that the person writing this post has always known about the bad behaviors from Apple, and always looked the other way.
Now Apple fired him and he's now complaining because he's not in the "cool kids" club.
To that guy I say: you went with the bully for the last 13 years, you kinda deserve all of this.
I respect that Apple treats customer's data with the utmost care, and that includes minimizing techs running around offering their gray-market professional services.
Disclosure: I have NOTHING to do with Apple other than owning an iPhone; I do hate when people are flippant about data sensitivity.
So I called Apple (this is before 'genius' (hilarious) bars).
Me: I want to fix my mouse. Sell me a switch.
Apple: We don't sell switches.
Me: Why not?
Apple: (After pause) It's only an $80 mouse. Not worth it.
"Only." That's $135 in today's money. (A better mouse now sells for $7.) I should let Apple charge me $135 to replace a microswitch?
You could just watch it going south. It all started when the Mac came out. (The slim II manual had peeks and pokes in it. They actually supported hobbyists and learners.) The Mac dox (think it was 3 huge volumes) had huge lists of names of calls you could make. Just names. Soon the rainbow apple turned to a chrome apple.
My next 'Mac' came from Power Computing. Yeah, Apple slipped up and put a gate in the walled garden for a couple years. It worked great for 7 years. At 160MHz.
Software got SO much better. So, yeah, I slipped up and got an iMac -- cost me twice what a similar PC would. (But all my music software was for PPC and hardware used serial ports.) That iMac burned me in multiple ways.
I thought all that was horrible. Those times were gentle compared to today. RUN AWAY
I do not know for certain, but most companies have some sort of review process where you can mount a defense of some kind. Forgive me for this opinion, but it seems like there must have been something else going on, and this did not occur in a vacuum out of the blue.
Don't burn your bridges, man. References are important. But it sounds like a sh*t job. You can do better. Keep cool. You will get far more sympathy saying nothing rather than going to war. Who wants someone like that working for them.
If he used corporate hardware to do the data transfer, then it doesn't matter if he didn't charge the friend. It would still have been a policy violation.
Just a guess though.
In any case, why ditch Apple? Set up an alternative support lane for people with machines out of warranty and clean up $$$
"After all this time, I cannot wait to see the back of Apple. I ditched iOS a few years back and it was the best decision I ever made, now leaving Apple is going to be the second best decision. I no longer want anything to do with them.
My Mac is up for sale and I will be closing my Apple ID.
After hundreds of articles and over 10 years of writing for LowEndMac, this is my final article. This is me signing off."