Apple can't resist helping China repress its citizens

National Post, 29 December 2022

China-only iPhone update makes it more difficult to use a feature that allowed users to evade government surveillance

For millennia a bitten apple was the symbol of a fatal temptation indulged, not resisted; the forbidden fruit of Genesis. So when the tech giant Apple chose one of the few widely recognized symbols of diabolical temptation as its logo, it was at least worthy of note. For a certain apocalyptically-minded sort, the ubiquity of the Apple logo today has a faintly mark-of-the-beast quality to it.

I am not apocalyptically minded, and I don’t consider that Apple is a per se evil company. But the relevant question is: How much evil can a company do before it becomes evil itself? Apple’s profits are the fruit of a lot of evil.

When, 15 years ago, Apple decided to make nearly all of its iPhones in China, there was grumbling on two fronts.

First, why not employ American workers instead of the 200,000 workers at the Apple factory in Zhengzhou? That was easily disposed of. Everyone manufactures in China as labour is cheaper, reducing consumer prices for Americans and others. Why single out Apple? Even Donald Trump made his ties there.

Second, why co-operate with a repressive regime? Apple had the standard answer with which the Desmarais family’s Power Corp. dominated Canada’s China policy for decades: There is a lot of money to be made there, and that money and more foreign contacts will lead to political liberalization and human rights.

No one believes that anymore. China was moving in a more repressive direction before the pandemic, and the variegated mischief in Wuhan only confirmed it. Even the Trudeau-Mulroney-Chrétien-Martin-Trudeau bastion of support for China did not survive the kidnapping of the “Two Michaels.”

Over the past decades, private companies have grown to such a size as to rival the influence of states. Apple is one of them. Big Tech chooses to manufacture in China, and Big Tech covets China’s massive population as customers. And if they must accept the apple of co-operation with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), that seems a small price to pay. It’s just taking one bite out of the apple after all, not the whole thing.

So it was in November 2022 when Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled a China-only update for the iPhone. It made it more difficult for Chinese customers to use the “AirDrop” feature, which permits iPhone users to transfer information between them when close by, thereby avoiding the internet censorship of the Chinese communist regime. That feature is most helpful in arranging protests in authoritarian China. The CCP doesn’t like that, and what the CCP doesn’t like, Cook doesn’t like, and so Apple took action that assisted the communist regime.

In China, iPhone users will now be subject to a 10-minute time limit when receiving information from non contacts, limits not placed on iPhones elsewhere.

Cook has been Apple CEO since 2011, and before that was responsible for “end-to-end management of Apple’s supply chain.” He was the one who took the decision to make Apple dependent on China.

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