Apple refuses to engrave ‘liberate’ protest slogan on HK customer’s Apple Pencil
coconuts.co
coconuts.co
Apple has time and time again chosen to take the side of oppressive regimes (by banning apps in HK that help protesters, forcing Telegram to remove chat groups that help protesters in Belarus, etc).
It is to be expected. In all such cases, the protestors are on the right side of history by fighting oppressive/authoritarian regimes.
But Apple (like most corporations) only really cares about money at the end of the day. If they don't do stuff like this, it'll just lead to them being banned from operating in these countries. Then they won't be able to make money. It is what it is.
Long gone are the days in which Google refused to operate in China because it was asked to censor searches.
The only reason Google search doesn't operate in China today is because leads to massive backlash each time they try to go back on that decision. But if Google's current management had been in place back then, they would have never made that stand in the first place.
Ethical public companies simply cannot exist in this world.
At that point, we should all first be protesting Microsoft Excel and Windows software, Ford Motors, all of our Wyoming coal producing mines, Boeing, and more, for providing products that much more directly enable China to do what it's doing, than someone's inability to write a word on a pencil.
I don't understand why everyone thinks they would boldly oppose Nazis like an action star hero, but when millions are imprisoned in concentration camps in China they're kind of like "meh."
Here's my take on the book:
Capitalism at its best works wonderfully, but the checks and balances that are needed for capitalism to work for the good of society are broken. Most countries across the world do not have a truly free press or even semi-functional democracy. We're hurtling towards a climate disaster, with no signs of slowing down, as well as facing massive global inequality.
Corporations are succeeding at present, but the single-minded focus on pleasing shareholders above all else is not sustainable and _will_ come back to hurt everyone, not least corporations. It's a classic case of the prisoner's dilemma - each corporation individually does better by ignoring societal damage, but if all of them do so, the whole system will eventually collapse - whether due to climate disaster, a collapse of buying power from impoverished masses, or a global pandemic.
Henderson argues that "only the relentless pressure of the free market can drive the kind of transformative innovation at scale [that we require]". The solution is to first fix democracy - get money out of politics, and fix the voting system. A representative government can agree on common goals and implement polices that harness the free market to work towards these agreed goals - eg. a carbon tax. Henderson also puts hope in "collective action" - corporations working together voluntarily, towards common stated goals. I'm a little sceptical of this last part.
Azeem Azhar (Exponential View) did a great interview with Henderson - https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/06/reimagining-capitalism-for-a...
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/nike-id-sweatshop-e-ma...
Peretti later went on to found BuzzFeed.
Just the fact you want to buy their products speaks more than any 8 letters you can choose to engrave / "personalize" your dollars with.
Go work to do real things, change real things. Corporations swing with the wind, and just as soon as they would support what movement you have this month, they might abandon the next. Do something that sticks.
That seems to be precisely what half of SV is looking for.
But you as a customer are buying expensive coffee as well freedom from guilt of buying expensive coffee while a large number of people in world are poor.
The rest of the 9c is just price discrimination of the coffee chain being able to see that you value the idea of supporting organic coffee farming and are willing to pay that much more, even though it doesn't translate into anywhere close to that for the actual people.
Edit: you can check it yourself -- Fairtrade coffee reports to be sold at $1.80 per pound versus $1.40. A typical cup of coffee / shot espresso uses 15 grams. The cost difference is <$0.01.
(I don't know if this is still sold as an option, not a coffee drinker myself)
> Go work to do real things, change real things.
There's little that people outside HK can do, and those HK citizens who can do something are already doing so by protesting, although it appears to (very unfortunately) be futile.
You want the company to say the words along with you and agree with your position.
But you've already lost. It's a bit like falling into the trap of brand advertising that screams, "Be yourself"... by buying one of our products.
I'll just say again, if you put your faith into a corporation reflecting your moral convictions, you will often be disappointed.
I disagree.
When I engrave "I love you" on a watch, as a present for a loved one, I don't want the engraver to agree with me at all. The message isn't from them. It's from me. I couldn't care less if they agree or disagree with the sentiment.
There's a message I want to convey and a person (or company) - the engraver - who is offering to engrave the message for me as a service.
> if you put your faith into a corporation reflecting your moral convictions
I think the trap we're falling into here is assuming that if Apple were to engrave the "liberate" message, that they would somehow be endorsing the message. That's madness. Nobody would expect them to be endorsing my "I love you" message for my wife if they engraved that, so why do we when it's a politialy charged message?
As for why people get Apple to engrave the message rather than "carve/emboss/sharpie/sew" the message themselves; it's neater and looks good. I doubt most people spending hundreds of dollars want that "I sharpied this myself" look.
That's a good approach to showing a company you don't approve of what they're doing, but in the case of tech who should people use instead? Every tech company is involved with China on some level (if not directly then their suppliers are); they all do things that support the Chinese government.
I agree that Apple are wrong here, but I don't see how buying from another company that's also wrong solves anything.
I was also thinking of an iPhone 12, I don't think I'll bother now.
Depends on the company: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881988
And buy what? Google phones? Made in China as well. Plus all the shady stuff they do globally, much worse than Apple. Huawei, Xiaomi and co would probably be no-gos too. Samsung? Is SK is much better? Had been a dictatorship for most post WWII period, and transitioned to a kinda democracy around 2000. And they use Google's OS anyway.
Companies make hardware. Buy them or not. Don't look to Apple or Google for politics.
US companies should also play nice by the rules of the country their are in, -- not what the US thinks they should do based on their plans/thinking for the country. It's not their business to interfere with local politics pro or against.
Makes sense that at some point such devices are not repairable any more.
(a) Please don't assume.
(b) The keyword is "seemingly". Just because they are seemingly replaceable doesn't mean it would be a good idea to replace them with third party repairs in a highly minutarized device.
The items being tied is a red herring. Changing the camera for example has security implications (consider that the camera module is e.g. forced to light a led when on, so that you're not recorded without knowing, and that's a hardware feature tied to the secure enclave. A changed camera module can also have implications for face id. And whose to guarantee that the third party "repaired" iPhone is still waterproof to the rating Apple provides?
Not if you want it to be tamper proof.
Perhaps, but it's still true.
This was followed by 13 months of political instability as South Korea was led by a weak and ineffectual government. This instability was broken by the May 16, 1961, coup led by General Park Chung-hee. As president, Park oversaw a period of rapid export-led economic growth enforced by political repression. Park was heavily criticized as a ruthless military dictator, who in 1972 extended his rule by creating a new constitution, which gave the president sweeping (almost dictatorial) powers and permitted him to run for an unlimited number of six-year terms.
The years after Park's assassination were marked again by political turmoil, as the previously suppressed opposition leaders all campaigned to run for president in the sudden political void. In 1979, General Chun Doo-hwan led the Coup d'état of December Twelfth. Following the Coup d'état, Chun Doo-hwan planned to rise to power through several measures. On May 17, Chun Doo-hwan forced the Cabinet to expand martial law to the whole nation, which had previously not applied to the island of Jejudo. The expanded martial law closed universities, banned political activities, and further curtailed the press.
Chun and his government held South Korea under a despotic rule until 1987, when a Seoul National University student, Park Jong-chul, was tortured to death.[128] On June 10, the Catholic Priests Association for Justice revealed the incident, igniting the June Democracy Movement around the country.
South Korea was formally invited to become a member of the United Nations in 1991. The transition of Korea from autocracy to modern democracy was marked in 1997 by the election of Kim Dae-jung, who was sworn in as the eighth president of South Korea, on February 25, 1998. His election was significant given that he had in earlier years been a political prisoner sentenced to death (later commuted to exile).
That's just Wikipedia, mind you, not some bizarro source.
The citizens fought for democracy, but SK was not exactly a paragon of democracy until well into the late 20th century. And even then it has been problematic:
Putting aside the decades of brutal dictatorship that ended with Chun Doo-hwan stepping down in 1988, every South Korean presidency since has been rocked by corruption scandals. Roh Tae-woo collected $10 million per month in slush funds while in office, Kim Young-sam stunned the nation with his pay-for-play Hanbo scandal, Roh Moo-hyun jumped off a cliff while under investigation for bribery, Lee Myung-bak is serving 15 years for corruption, Park Geun-hye is serving 24 years and then there's President Moon Jae-in.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidvolodzko/2019/02/25/is-sou...
Who we choose to work for and where we spend our money are the two primary powers every individual wields.
Unfortunately, that's just not true. The vast mahority of people on lower income cannot aford to be choosy with who they work for. A great many higher earning software developers (HN's usual market) are in the same position.
I agree that encouraging the few people who can afford the luxury of being choosy to vote with their feet is a good thing, but don't assume everyone has that same "primary power".
Once you start taking family commitments, salary requirements, type of company etc into consideration, the pool of available jobs is certainly reduced.
If there is a positive from Covid, I'd hope is the acceptance of full remote work as an option or at most token office presence (e.g. Once every other week)
FWIW, my question about job switching was very much tongue in cheek as by now I'm not that bothered but the first few weeks were a massive productivity sink, more so than the usual when one starts in a new company with a different stack, etc...
Just use your own device, nobody will be the wiser
Companies need to be held accountable, regardless of who buys their stuff. Stop blaming common people for the crimes of megacorps.
And this is not the first time Apple is kowtowing to Chinese government. See the Apple cloud deal in China which needs to store data in Tencent cloud or how Apple blocked an app in HK letting users know where the police is. Nothing has changed in now Apple is operating here.
You can symbolically decide to boycott the company and not use it's products, but in the case of apple and their systems, this does a lot more damage to the individual than the company.
(tongue in cheek) and have you seen the alternatives?!?!?!
(if you only knew how many corrections I had to make to these couple of sentences I have just written to correct the mistakes introduced by my "excellent" MacBook Pro keyboard)
- 16 Inch Screen - 8 Core i9 (16 Threads) - 4TB SSD Storage - Screen resolution is 4096x2560 @ 60Hz
I write code that uses all 16 cores and is able to search data at 2.5 Gb /s reading from the SSD, which is as far as I can tell close to the hardware limits.
Who's got a laptop that has this much CPU, RAM and fast SSD Storage with the same or greater screen resolution? If it exists, I really wanna know.
I had a windows gaming laptop about a year ago which had close to this specs, but I used it for a month and it started slowing down because it was overheating, and then eventually it just started getting insanely hot and then powering off (Its was one of those "Predator" gaming laptops), it couldn't even handle 2 months of heavy coding abuse from me (and it was super heavy physically too), it was very disappointing.
That said, the Macbook screen is brilliant and others don't always compare.
the real thing that puts me off leaving the Apple world: MacOS. I've tried to go back to WIndows and the experience was dreadful for software engineering.
(a) It was an ad, not a political platform.
(b) Even as an ad, the message was "Give average users the ability to use computers, don't just have them for technical people and businesses" which Apple still abides to this day. It wasn't about the same message as 1984 the book.
Quote back to him his own statements in interviews where he has emphasized that Apple supports human rights. Also quote other areas where Apple has spoken for the people (like “Dreamers”, for example). Ask why Apple is being so hypocritical.
Well written correspondence can get through, and can make a difference down the line.
At least different than the rest of the civilized world, but that's not too surprising either given their history.
Or doesn't do business with the US, a bigger global bully, with active wars and occupations, etc?
...The customer, alias Mr. Chan, told Apple Daily that he got a call from an Apple employee on Wednesday saying that their “higher-ups didn’t approve” of his proposed inscription, “Liberate HKERS.”
As in: somebody wanted to engrave just the word "liberate" and Apple refused.
If true they must be terrified of upsetting the CCP.
“cunt” can’t even be submitted, but “c u n t” could be last time I tried. Didn’t order it, just had a laugh. One could also go with Scunthorpe and add some Tipex.
(Yes, I’m twelve and think that’s funny)
On a related note: a few months ago I read an article about how Disney(?) tried to sensor “bad words” in one of their Habbo-Hotel like apps for kids. Starting with blacklists, moving to whitelists, then trying a scratch-like building blocks. People would start to arrange sofas to talk to each other. You can’t really stop it.
Can’t find it anymore though.
Disgusted really.
That means, it is natural that Apple refused "LIBERATE HKERS" and "Liberate" is not? I can't see the difference.
However, coupled with the context of the HK protest, the point of the article is obvious. It's not misleading title IMO.
Corporations won't support us in the development of civil society, that's our own job. They will abide by the rules of whoever is in power in their respective regions of operation. Their purpose is to make money and if that requires that they engage in slavery, torture, or mass murder, they will do just that. Consult the history books for examples.