Hacker News Reader

Comment by dathinab | Hacker News Reader

Maybe due to Apple acts in/wrt. China.

People somehow end up thinking Apple cares deeply about their private but AFIK Apple only cares about privacy because it makes them money. Or more specifically the image it creates helps them in selling phones.But the moment the _long term_ cost outweighs the benefits they also have shown to bail. (I highlighted long terms because there had been case where short term it was more expensive because it e.g. involved legal cases, but especially this legal cases are a grate image profit form them as people will use it like "don't worry see they didn't even brake their security to help the police with <insert arrested very bad person>").

Now that doesn't mean Apple is bad to some degree it's a win win for the user: They get better privacy and Apple gets more users. But it doesn't mean you can fully trust Apple (or IMHO any Company).

View on HN

Google’s approach to China is the same realpolitik as Apple and privacy.

Google was never going to get what it wanted/needed in China, so walking away was a pragmatic stance projected as an act of courage, etc.

Google and Apple are actually more similar than one would thing. They are both leveraging their ownership of powerful segments, and they are both threatened by integrated software stacks. The big difference is that Google does creepy shit as a first party, and Apple outsources that to third parties.

Google’s ad business was hurt by Facebook/Instagram and the dearb of the web. Apple’s existential threat is someone making WeChat for the US.

...and his name is Musk.

> Apple’s existential threat is someone making WeChat for the US.

It's called Signal.

WeChat in China is like early 1990s era AOL or Prodigy for smartphones - it’s a vertical solution.

Signal is an encrypted messenger that have bolted on some crypto bullshit. It’s just a nerd tool.

They are only vaguely similar in the remotest of ways and certainly not with respect to what the OP meant, so not really.

no, if you look at relevance today Signal is not relevant.

The technical excellency is lost on most users.

The demography which cares about that excellency also has a large degree of people which don't want a future with a western variant of WeChat. Because it's basically only working with monopolization.

And the fact that signal pushed some crypto is not helping it either. Firstly to many non technical people have lost too much money by either crypto scams or crashes. Then their crypto currency had some questionable technical details AFIK, but I forgot the details. Then regulatory capture of crypto currencies is guaranteed incoming in the coming years (to many scams, market manipulation, hidden high risk investment and usage for crimes especially money laundering) and as far I can tell their coin will likely not get a pass.

You fundamentally misunderstand what WeChat is.

> Google was never going to get what it wanted/needed <with the CCP>

That is not at all accurate. The CCP attempted to infiltrate Google's internal systems by having spies get jobs inside of Google. The CCP also blocked all google services and then developed identical ones to compete with Google globally.

The CCP is extremely nefarious. Any government that blocks children from reading an encyclopedia should be considered to be committing a crime against humanity.

> The CCP attempted to infiltrate Google's internal systems by having spies get jobs inside of Google.

You think the CCP hasn't done this in the US with all relevant companies?

I personally trust Apple, because for them _I_ am the customer. They get their money from selling devices and software for said devices. Thus they want to keep _me_ happy. Ad income is a rounding error in their yearly revenue.

Google is an ad company with a side business in making hardware, software and web services. Advertisers are their clients, they do everything they can to keep the advertisers happy.

...and the one big thing that keeps ad people happy is knowing as much as possible about their customers, which is completely antithetical to user privacy.

You can't judge Apple's views based on this matter in the short term. Apple has strategic investments in China and can't just tell CPC to go pound sand.

However, if Apple still is critically dependent on China in say 5 years, then it would be fair to look at the corporate response to Chinese demands and reach conclusions. If they truly care about privacy and the rest of it, they should be well into their transition plans to other locations about now. And industry expert would be able to tell if the effort, e.g. to use India instead, failed due to an insincere effort on the part of Apple (for PR), or the unpleasant fact that China is not a commodity resource pool, yet.

People always make this argument, for at least the last 10 years. Since Apple has not yet shown any real action towards reducing their dependency on China, why would it be any different 5 years from now?

Apple has already started moving iPhone production to India/Vietnam with the goal of having 40-45% of their iPhones being produced there. It's far from a trivial move.

For reference, this seems to have started with Airpods which have been (in part) assembled in Vietnam since 2020: https://redd.it/gokl90

Which means it took them over a decade to start moving their assembly lines out of China. The GP comment still stands, Apple clearly had no urgent interest in ending their relationship with China. A cynic might even suggest that they're only doing it now that the geopolitical tensions are favoring the US...

What exactly are you thinking of as the starting point? Apple only started production of iPhones in 07 and things didn’t instantly fail.

I'd suggest that had less to do with potential CCP interference than it did with hedging against the massive tariffs on threatened in 2019 during the height of the US<->China "trade war"

I don't know the specifics of Apple's case. There is no real need, imo. I'll elaborate why I say that.

Apple, an American company, made critical decisions based on what was said, disclosed, or strongly implied publicly and privately regarding both national and international political (leadership) consensus on globalization and China. Disregarding orthogonal ideological e.g. "(American/x) corporations are inherently bad", considerations, -imo- fair minded evaluation of Apple (or any ~Western company) would need to give weight to what political leadership, at both national and international levels, have done and are doing.

Let's say Apple leaves China cold turkey, on principal. The abrupt and unprepared move ultimately ends the golden ride and Apple is out of the handset market. Who are we then buying our smart spyware/assistants from? Some company in Asia, correct?

If the principal is truly that important (and I am -not- saying it isn't) then political leadership has to uniformly decouple from China. Why should Apple shoulder what is ultimately a geopolitical cost? And yes, you and me desiring a world according to our value system where the state can not illegally force private organizations to violate human rights is a geopolitical desire. So Apple should do certain things, but political leadership, and consumers, also need to do their bit as well.

Yes and trusting Google who convinced consumers to install what was suppose to be an internal iOS development certificate so they could track them isn’t a bridge too far?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com