Apple is probably the world's best marketing and logistics company. They're a consumer electronics company second. I don't even like the taste of their marketing, but there is no doubt that they have been able to create this cloud around them that makes their proponents completely engrossed in everything Apple does.
In my experience, it is quite striking when you realize the lack of knowledge people in the Apple ecosystem have of other computing environments. And the idea that Apple is probably the most draconian company when it comes to product design, behind the scenes logistics and business dealings, customer feedback and interaction, open source squashing, etc. but yet still maintains this ora of the "just works" (spoiler: it doesn't) and cool vibes company is beyond me. They effectively fleeced their consumer base for hundreds if not thousands selling them overpriced dongles that were intentionally designed in, and not only did people just go with it, they seemed to lap it up.
Government findings and/or fines do not affect the bottom line enough to change behaviors. Only sufficient numbers of consumers willing to change buying decisions will ever stop corporations from doing things that they shouldn't.
I don't know, look at the EU and you see government mandates and fines doing plenty of work. We only got USB-C in iPhones pretty much because the EU mandated it. Similarly on many other fronts, it may take time as the first waves of court cases get worked out, but any company that overlooks the rules there does so at its own peril. There is no reason that the US can't have the same, aside from lack of political will.
That's what companies want you to believe because they don't want government oversight. The only thing that will truly change behavior for companies the size of Apple are actions with billion dollar significance. Consumers can't do that, only governments can.
sure, when I pay illegal immigrants less than minimum wage for dangerous work I've broken the law, but when Apple does unfair labour practices they've "broken the law" with "quote marks" around it.
> when I pay illegal immigrants less than minimum wage for dangerous work I've broken the law
Yes, but you can do it with impunity without getting prosecuted, the same as Apple. If you would, it would fix the illegal immigration problem but nobody actually wants to solve the problem. When white farmers start going to jail is when we'll find out somebody is actually serious about fixing the illegal immigration problem.
This isn't a substantive response to the article. This article isn't reporting on the complainant's allegations, which are a few years old at this point.
Instead, the article is reporting on a five-day-old decision by the US National Labor Relations Board finding her allegations sufficiently justified that the NLRB itself is asking Apple to give her specified remedies in a settlement, and is scheduling an administrative hearing as part of an official enforcement proceeding by the government against Apple.
While you're right that much journalism is just ghost writing for the wealthy, there's no evidence of that in this article. I think The Register would eagerly write about an NLRB decision against Apple regardless of whether anyone wealthy is pushing the story.
It’s not a response to the article, it’s a response to the headline which says “Apple ‘broke law’” when they haven’t been found guilty yet and is clearly utilizing quotes to make clickbait without getting sued, I may choose to read it to get one side of the story but I am not getting real journalism given that headline
my comment probably deserves downvote as it’s not related to the article, but I wanted to condemn a headline obviously meant to lure people who hate Apple and want organized labor to click on it, rather than real journalism
Although The Register isn't the highest quality of journalism, they're far better than the lowest quality, and they do a decent job in this article. The usage of quotation marks to report on allegations without directly asserting them is very common across the entire journalism industry, including the most well-respected publications. Both clickbait and non-clickbait articles use that convention.
Also, headlines are usually written by editors and not by the article authors. Headlines for use online do indeed focus on getting clicks, because they need the ad money to pay the bills, especially when they don't have a paywall. That's true even when the article content is high-quality and not clickbait.
Last thought: The Register actually has two titles for this article at the same time. The HN title is taken from the headline at the top of the page, which is fair enough. But the version of the title in my browser tab is "NLRB claims Apple broke law by terminating labor organizer". Would that make the journalism seem any more real than the shorter, snappier version using quotation marks and short-hand jargon like "dev"? It's the same article either way.
I always find this kind of sentiment weird. Do you think less of yourself for living in the country you’re living in because there are people who do illegal or immoral things? Apple is an organization of 160k employees. Even from a numbers game someone is going to be doing something problematic.
Additionally it’s important to remember that the news report is a one-sided interview basically. It’s hard to know what’s going to be established as fact here until it hits the courts.
> Additionally it’s important to remember that the news report is a one-sided interview basically.
It's an interview of two of the three sides, not a one-sided interview. The motivation for the article is that the US National Labor Relations Board has now joined the initial complainant in making the allegations against Apple and asking them to settle by agreeing to specific remedies.
They did also try to get comment from Apple, and since Apple declined to answer their questions (see the end of the article), they nevertheless quoted Apple's statement to Reuters on this topic from last month. So all three sides are at least represented in the article.
Sure, it's true that no judge, jury, or administrative hearing officer has yet ruled on the allegations; that is still in the future if no settlement occurs, but part of the news report is that such an administrative hearing has now been scheduled.
Are there any sufficiently large organizations (500+ employees seems to be right around the mark) that exist that are NOT doing illegal things? I have a list of 2 from personal experience, 4 from family experience, and several more from friends experience. From this I would be surprised to find if there exists one that is not regularly doing illegal activities. The story is extremely believable and I have no reason to doubt it because it mirrors what I have seen personally.
Absence of proof is not proof of absence. Would you even have known the details for each of the 25k people? I could make a similar argument that when I worked for Apple back in the day I didn't know about anyone doing anything illegal. But Apple is a massive company and I'm sure there was probably all sorts of things going on.
I would suspect that as scale grows, law breaking becomes more likely. However that doesn't mean that all those companies break the law with same severity, ubiquity and ill intent.
I do think if we uad a legal that could actually hold these organizations accountable, and we would see less corporate law breaking. A common stance on HN is that we should be putting more executives in jail for longer instead of just fining companies amounts that are just the cost of doing business.
Pretending that it’s difficult to emigrate somewhere as an American citizen, especially someone with a high mobility job like this, is extremely disingenuous.
I have yet to find a F50 company that has been completely “moral” from the start to now. They have all at some point stepped on the backs of numerous people (slave labor, toxic/unsafe working conditions), governments (tax dodging), and entities (ie, other companies) to get to this point. C-level executives are the worst offenders.
We should not let them get so big, and still be for profit.
When firms get past a certain small size they should be reorginised into non-profit trusts