On one hand, yes, it's not ideal. On the other hand it's still probably a better alternative to a Chinese phone that spies on you. What is the alternative? If they take a stance, they will be banned from China completely.
You need to pick your battles instead of being idealist. Look at Russia. There was an opposition back in the day, but they couldn't agree between each other because of smaller differences. And now we have a complete dictatorship.
Getting banned from China shouldn't be looked at as something a business can't consider. If so, it gives tremendous leverage to China to control western corporations.
What we need is govt sanctions against china before this goes any further. Take china off the table so companies don't have to make these hard choices that impact their competitiveness.
> Getting banned from China shouldn't be looked at as something a business can't consider.
It shouldn't but the fact is that if China decided right now that they were done with Apple the company immediatly loses all ability to make every single one of its products.
Even the ones that arent given final assembly in China still rely on chinese produced components.
It would obviously be a very foolish move for the CCP as it would be an instant red flag to the worlds tech companies who would all start the ball rolling on moving out. Meanwhile Apple would be all but dead in the water for a good few years, with no ability to manufacture anything at all for a fairly signficant amount of time.
Well yes, that's the privilege of being a world power and all. If "the west" could just sanction China leaders would have done so already but "we really do need them as a trading partner" makes it infeasible.
”If they take a stance, they will be banned from China completely.”
Unlikely as that kind of a move would have a huge global impact. That might lead to all Chinese companies (Bytedance, Xiaomi etc.) being banned in the west/US etc.
Apple loves to keep up appearances, but they are behind some of the worst behaviors in our industry.
Apple has already soured competition in computing by making the App Store the only way to reach 51+% of Americans with your software. They heavily tax it, artificially limit your ability to update and deploy, force you to devote resources to regularly adhere to Apple standards, let people place ads under your name, kill your customer relationships, force deep Apple product integrations, etc.
"CSAM device scanning" is a Trojan horse that will absolutely be abused in situations like we're seeing in China now.
Apple sells itself on privacy, yet collects more info on you than Facebook to feed their growing ads business. It's hypocrisy.
Other major tech companies looked at China and said no. Why can't Apple?
I think that can true to a point and is probably true of governments. The United States Government may need to hold its nose and work with Saudi Arabia in some cases despite their problems because of other geopolitical tradeoffs, but I'd argue that is not necessary for companies. In the case of companies, it's mostly about rationalizing something they want to do anyway (in this case operate in the Chinese market).
In the case of western companies operating in China it's even worse because this becomes a soft power the CCP can influence on the west creating a form of self-censorship or even capture (see Ray Dalio).
A lot of companies have told themselves that their presence will be a positive influence on problematic policy of a country they want to enter, but what ends up happening is that the policy is a corrupting influence on the principles of the company.
They should have pulled their manufacturing out of China years ago, and forgone the market. It's pretty clear that the compromises Apple makes are worse overall than any supposed benefit of taking market share from Chinese phone manufacturers.
You need to pick your battles instead of being idealist. Look at Russia. There was an opposition back in the day, but they couldn't agree between each other because of smaller differences. And now we have a complete dictatorship.
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