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Comment by mikysco | Hacker News Reader

It's difficult to defend Apple in this scenario but Apple's relationship with China is just like every other company's (western or otherwise) - at the end of the day, China holds all the cards. If you don't bow to their authoritarian edict, you are kicked out of the country.

The energy and anger should (as per usual) be directed at China and the Chinese communist party to a much greater degree than Apple.

I'm assuming, of course, that Apple was forced to make this update. Hard for me to believe they proactively made this freedom-violating, protest-suppressing change.

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> If you don't bow to their authoritarian edict, you are kicked out of the country.

Apple, of all companies, can probably afford to do that though.

But they keep on doing business there. That’s a bit depressing.

(Written on my iPhone)

The reason is the same one that most electronics companies (and certainly most cell phone brands) do business in China:

It's cheap.

Cheap labor, few/no penalties for pollution, abundant cheap electricity, inexpensive labor safety, etc.

It's the dream of outsourcing realized.

I don’t know how current it is, but Bunnie Huang wrote a series of posts in the 2000s about what it was like building things in China. It was more than just being cheap, and non-trivial to replicate elsewhere (one memorable quote: “I hadn’t seen blind dedication like this since I worked with the autonomous underwater robotics team at MIT”).

Here’s the first one:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=183

This is a breathtakingly naive take. Like yes sure, get mad at the CCP but Apple have a long history of shit like this.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/20/apple-u...

We need sanctions. You can't expect corporations to wage international campaigns for human rights, nor do we want that corporations to exercise such power.

We need govt action.

There has been a major ten year push inside of government to try and get companies (especially those in tech) to start decoupling from China on national security grounds as a way to get a similar outcome and not leave the US companies massively exposed to sudden action like sanctions.

Those calls have mostly gone unanswered and Apple in particular has repeatedly gone out of its way to double down on its China relationship over that same time period.

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