>Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein, more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation.
Judging by tech, apple is right now in deep water due to the failure of delivering apple intelligence and a major drop in software quality.
Judging by political positioning, cook’s donation to trump’s inauguration didn’t sit well with the fanbase.
Now, it seems Cook is going for shady behavior against judges.
Maybe it’s time for a major change of leadership. Financially they might be ok, but one can’t avoid the feeling they’re burning the furniture to heat the house.
I generally like Apple but this is not ok. It wouldn’t bother me at all if they put Tim Cook in prison for this.
If corporations are not bound by laws they don’t like, then why should they be protected by laws they do like? Should the US turn a blind eye to IP infringement against Apple?
It is a smart business decision. Don’t blame Apple for operating within the environment that the US voters voted for. The US knew exactly what it was getting - said as American citizen.
but I do actually believe that corporations taking part in and profiting from corruption/etc are just as much to blame as the governments that let it happen, as are the people/voters
unless you somehow think that corruption is morally neutral and only "bad" because there's laws against it?
Okay, sure. And while I understand and share your frustrations with the outcome of recent US elections, democracy is a bad proxy for morality, or to put it bluntly: If 9 out of 10 people voted for gang rape, it's still wrong for a multi national corporation to take advantage of that.
I’m very well aware of the tyranny of the majority. My still living parents grew up in the Jim Crow south. Everything they are doing now to demonize immigrants and LGBT they did in the 80s with “welfare queens” and “Willy Horton”.
Oh yeah. Don't blame all the German companies that used slave labor in concentration camps either. Unhinged capitalism is a mind disease that only ends up in fascism.
Right, because showing up for a photo opp and kissing up to the person in charge is the same as genocide.
See Godwin’s law.
This is the country that the people wanted and the demographics who voted for it are going to be hurt the most. It’s like if the Jews voted for Hitler if you want to use that analogy.
No, I think it's an appropriate "slippery slope" comparison.
Hacker News has insisted, for years, vehemently, that Apple is not abusing monopoly power. You can search every single DMA/DOJ threads comment history and end up with the same conclusion. They were "the good guys" even when they were explaining away the Butterfly keyboard, CPU throttling, on-device scanning or arbitrarily blocking competition. In the face of absolute madness, Hacker News was unable to admit they bet on the wrong horse.
So here we are, watching Apple execs lie under oath. And Hacker News is still jumping up to "uhm aktually, shareholders really like crony capitalism" to once again defend Apple now that they've become indefensible.
This is the tech industry's volkssturm. An unwinnable fight in hopeless conditions, sabotaged solely by poor leadership.
Absolutely no one gave Apple a pass for the butterfly keyboard. You can look back at Jason Snell’s “Apple report card” where he sends surveys to 40+ people in the Apple punditry ecosystem during those years and Apple was derided by everyone.
No one gave Apple a pass for on device scanning or the piss poor Johnny Ive inspired thin laptops that removed ports and that over heated during the latter x86 days.
Everyone was glad to see Apple walk back some of his bad decisions during the last generation of x86 laptops. People were complaining in real time.
It’s not just shareholders. None of the 70% of iPhone users or 30% of Android users would be happy to see their phones go up in price by hundreds of dollars because of 145% tariffs (not exaggeration).
And it’s an appropriate “slippery slope” that Apple is going to go from kissing up to Trump to mass genocide?
Yet it is. People like you insisted "it's not that bad yet" at every step of the awkward path; but you're still unable to admit Apple fully walked back their bad decisions. They deliberately built a business dependent on anti-competitive abuse and a halo effect solicited through propaganda. They repeatedly manufactured cover for their misdeeds because they knew they were wrong. And now they've been caught in the act of base and cowardly perjury in defense of those exploits.
Tim Cook is not a stupid man. He knows why the world wants his head on a platter, but he exhibits the willpower to exploit injustice anyways. Not because it makes the world a better place, but because it's immensely lucrative. Your supposed logic - that anyone "voted" for this - is pants-on-head moronic, verging on gallows humor. The "vote" justified Reichswerke Hermann Göring, up until the founder was sentenced to execution a decade later. Corruption isn't a democratic process, period. I don't care how apathetic you are as an American, ignorance of the law is a famously invalid defense.
What do you mean I can’t admit they walked backed there bad decision? I explicitly said they walked back their Johnnie Ive designed laptops during the final generation x86 laptops.
Their business is not built on the App Store. People looked at Android at least in the US and 70% of them avoid it like the plague. Before that, people decided they like the iPod even though it had “less space than the Nomad and no wireless”.
And anyone who voted for this knew exactly what they were getting. Trump was in office for four years prior and “rural America” who depends on Medicaid, the Muslims who refused to support Kamala because they thought Trump would be better for Palestine, the poor and working class who are going to be hurt by increased prices and other policies, red states that depend on government support more than blue states, businesses abs farmers who supported him and even the unions that he is now trying to kill all are demographics that voted for him and supported him. Now they are in the “find out” part of FAFO. I have no sympathy for them.
The halo effect wasn’t because of “propaganda”. Poor little Google, Microsoft and Intel couldn’t compete with a company that was almost bankrupt a little over 29 years ago and was still small in 2007.
If non Christian Germans were dumb enough to vote for the Nazi party (they weren’t), I would have said the same thing. This country deserves exactly what’s happening to it because of its own poor choices. I’m not saying this out of pride and happiness.
I’m sad about it. But this is always “who we have been” despite what Michelle Obama says. We’ve been since Columbus, through slavery, through Jim Crow (that my still living parents grew up in) and now.
Trump was fairly elected. I’m not “apathetic”. What is in my control is that my wife and I have been seriously talking about establishing residency in Costa Rica upon retirement. We are going back next year to talk to a real estate agent to see about getting a place there. We might rent or we might buy. If this is the country that Americans want, Americans can have it. I’m not saying I’m leaving tomorrow. But we are investigating, I’m working on getting to be a better Spanish speaker and my wife is learning.
I have a friend who was working on his Italian citizenship and it got shut down. He found another path through his significant other, and the [official I'm exlcuding] literally said to come back after we resolves the trump problem.
The world is not going to absorb the exodus of Americans who just want to walk away.
But I totally get it. So like I said, get moving quickly if you're serious.
Given that the CFO encouraged Cook to violate the court order tells me that they calculated that
1. Any fines for not complying would be less than what they would lose by complying
2. That no individual would suffer any consequences for blatantly disobeying a court order.
In my opinion, the whole concept that a company can break the law but no human can be held responsible is insane.
I really hope that criminal charges are brought against those involved in making a conscious choice to both lie to the court and ignore the court order. Hopefully that will make other executives think twice when put in the same situation.
> I really hope that criminal charges are brought against those involved in making a conscious choice to both lie to the court and ignore the court order.
I do as well, but I have little hope that it will.
Prosecutors don't like prosecuting perjury. It's tricky to prosecute (particularly because of how close it is to the first amendment), takes a lot of time, and often it just ends up with a minor slap on the wrist. I've seen other cases with outrageous perjury that resulted in no criminal prosecution.
This is a broken part of the justice system. Particularly because these apple execs have the money and lawyers to drag out any prosecution until everyone involved is dead. But also because it relies on government prosecutors caring in the first place.
We have a lot of messed up rulings in the past that allow corporations to act like people but skate by when they do things as if they weren't people. I say if a corporation can have free speech like a person then they can get thrown in jail like a person too. When illegal stuff happens it should have real, meaningful, consequences like the board being fired and massive fines or outright closing the company. I am not a fan of the industry right now. Apple is a symptom of a broader problem and we need bigger changes to start correcting the direction corporate america has been heading for the last 50 years.
The judge should really fine apple in the form of a 100% refund of everyones fees for the duration of this behavior. That's the only way the pain is great enough to force forward compliance.
Corps are separate legal entities so individuals are generally protected from personal liability. There can be exceptions in criminal and civil liability instances but even then there things like D&O. Until we stop giving corporations so much legal cover we’re hosed.
>Corps are separate legal entities so individuals are generally protected from personal liability.
not really.
corps have the defining feature that their passive shareholders are protected from personal liability, but not their officers, directors, nor employees.
they are "entities" so they can sign contracts and you can sue them and bring them to court. they are entities so the entire body of preexisting laws about suing and bringing to court would not need to be rewritten from scratch for corporations, it slots them into the rights and responsibilities that individuals have.
> Judging by political positioning, cook’s donation to trump’s inauguration didn’t sit well with the fanbase.
Objectively and ethically, it's reprehensible, but subjectively, we're now living in a blatantly pay-to-play world and everyone else is doing it, and there are clear, easily quantifiable gains of billions to be made from that bribe.
(The best part of all this was learning that inauguration bribes have been happening for decades, generally to little fanfare.)
I think Apple has needed a change of leadership since day one of the Cook era. He may have been brilliant at logistics and putting products on shelves, but I think Apple innovation has flatlined under Cooke and if anything, the holier than thou arrogance of Apple in general has grown exponentially. Maybe it's time to breakup Apple - separate the computer and phone divisions.
That would just open an entire new can of worms to litigate for decades to come. For the near future the best we can hope for is that the courts continue to hit Apple on topics that have already been litigated to death.
The Apple value pack comes mostly from brand value, deep ecosystem interactions, and being pretty much the only big corp ONLY focused on high end personal computing devices. Almost all their revenue is from B2C, their incentives are more aligned than most other big corps.
Any split to not actually harm the customers would be more focused on services such as apple card, icloud, the apple plus services (music,tv,…) etc.
Tbh, even EU mesures i think would be better if apple was instead forced to open the hardware (provide docs and bootloader, and no penalty for an user that takes advantage), rather than opening the OS or store. Not needing such openness on store and OS/core libs, actually allows apple to be more nimble and providing de better service (or bigger margins :( ), buto opnning hardware could actually give other OSs a chance, for once there could be a linux phone, as iphone has few hardware configs, and the device is very wide spread, 2 factors making it very attractive to devs (as example, check asahi linux, how quickly it became usable on a platform without docs)
This would play much more into “i bought this device i run wtv software I want” without restricting software vendors, Apple could keep the benefit of tight integration (that consumers like me like), but would have to provide the docs (and boot) for alternative OS to rise.
easily no question, ios would get apple naming convention. 85 percent of their revenue is from ios and connected services.
Which also means, "it's time to breakup apple" means nothing, not sure why OP suggested that as a method to punish a legally problematic CEO/board. they don't have a multisegment monopoly allowing them complete control over supply chains, or multi region monopoly on smartphones that would be effected by a breakup.
Apple might still appeal to a higher court and lean heavily on that donation to Trump for legal support. They as much as said they would appeal the decision.
Apple will certainly appeal this ruling to the Ninth Circuit and probably to SCOTUS but Apple already appealed the original order which the Ninth denied and SCOTUS denied by declining. That makes an appeal on getting busted for non-compliance of the already appealed ruling unlikely. If the Ninth doesn't issue an emergency stay of the order tomorrow, it'll go into effect while the appeals grind on. This is very likely a done deal except for Apple wasting a little more lawyer money theatrically "exhausting every appeal."
A change of leadership? This is clear, obvious, undenied evidence of Tim Cook committing a criminal act. This is a crime. A coordinated, intentional, well-informed crime made in malice!
The funny thing is they have 2x consumer class actions (US + UK) alleging these 30% fees were always a ripoff, they just became a slam dunk so that’ll be tens of billions they have to pay back!
Genuine question as I'm seeing this sentiment a lot in these threads, and I must be missing something.
What you've just described would be the single greatest punishment to an entity in the (admittently recently established) history of case-law, would upend the tech sector (maybe justly), lay off 10s of thousands and effectively stop work at downstream supply chains.
I get that this is the point of the punishment. However, do you think politicians, investors, lawyers with controlling stake, The DOD with security integrations, would allow that to happen?
Put another way, do you think the rule of law exists for the hyper rich when the current admin put.....Linda McMahon on the presidents cabinet?
Well, theoretically, Apple would have to reimburse the people it stole from, if the fees were found to be illegal. Presumably this would mean every app developer getting reimbursed some of that 30% Apple Tax, or every Apple customer getting refunded some of their Apple purchases, depending on which way the court goes. This could be a very, very large number.
Not so much about punishment, as repayment. However, it's not unusual for courts to also add a punishment element, especially if the offending party knew it was offending (as in this case).
And yes, I think the politicians would let this go through, because "every Apple customer" is a lot of voters.
What does any of this have to do with consumers being ripped off then reimbursed for software?
It would only be “the greatest punishment” because it is a subset of what Apple was able to obtain with their illegal methods. They billed hundreds of billions in fees.
Judging by tech, apple is right now in deep water due to the failure of delivering apple intelligence and a major drop in software quality.
Judging by political positioning, cook’s donation to trump’s inauguration didn’t sit well with the fanbase.
Now, it seems Cook is going for shady behavior against judges.
Maybe it’s time for a major change of leadership. Financially they might be ok, but one can’t avoid the feeling they’re burning the furniture to heat the house.