Apple’s most valuable intangible asset isn’t its patents or copyrights - it’s an army of people who believe that using products from a $2.89 trillion multinational makes them members of an oppressed religious minority whose identity is coterminal with the interests of Apple’s shareholders.
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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones
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If it’s true that “Apple customers don’t want non-Apple app stores,” then Apple wouldn’t need to use technological countermeasures and legal threats to prevent them from coming into existence. These non-Apple app stores would fail on their own terms.
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This is a point I first raised in *The @guardian* in 2015, with a satirical piece called “If Dishwashers Were iPhones” - a letter from a charismatic smart dishwasher CEO called Absterge, explaining that it’s unreasonable for customers to be able to buy their dishes from third-party dish vendors:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/if-dishwashers-were-iphones
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The comments on that article are wild. It’s just a litany of people saying, “If you want to choose where you buy your apps, you shouldn’t buy an iPhone.” That this is exactly the same argument the fictional Absterge CEO makes about his dishwasher (“People who don’t want to go the Absterge way don’t have to”) is lost on them. As far as they’re concerned, any Apple customer who wants have the final say over how their $1,000 pocket computer works isn’t a true Apple customer.
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This is a very weird idea. But weirder still is how it captured lawmakers, like the former Canadian Heritage Minister #JamesMoore. In 2010, Moore and his colleague, the disgraced sex pest #TonyClement, tabled a bill that would make it illegal for Canadians to modify their iPhones (and other gadgets) to work in ways that benefited them at the expense of corporate shareholders.
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They ran a consultation on this measure, and the responses overwhelmingly rejected it (6138 submissions opposed to the measure, 54 in support!). They pressed ahead anyway:
https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2010/04/copycon-final-numbers/
When the public demanded an explanation for this, Moore said that opponents of the measure were “radical extremists”:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/copyright-debate-turns-ugly-1.898216
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This was a bridge too far. I’m a bestselling Canadian author whose copyright-related income is royalties, not industry campaign contributions. The Heritage Minister branding me a “radical extremist” got my goat, so I picked a fight with him on Twitter, where he unwisely took the bait:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130407101911if_/http://eaves.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/Conversations%20between%20@doctorow%20and%20@mpjamesmoore.jpg
Moore’s responses were straight out of the comments from “If iPhones Were Dishwashers.” Quoth the Minister: “Don’t use Mac. There are other options out there.”
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr
it’s so fucking funny how he repeatedly invokes “faith” in market forces. and to top it off later he invokes “faith” in consumers. fuck me, laughable corporate butt-licking scheisterism!
Remember: the only people who could use an alternative iOS store are Apple customers. Moore - a Minister from the Conservative Party - went on record saying that if you want to use your private, personal property in ways that the corporation that manufactured it objects to you, the government should step in to defend the corporation from you.
This is not the property-worshiping, market-based ideology the Conservative Party claims to support.
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The only way to square that circle is if somehow, the people who want to install apps on their phones without the manufacturer’s approval are not really customers. They’re pretenders. Apostates. They’re holding it wrong:
https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/
These religious apologetics for Apple’s business practices are a devastatingly effective defense against the public outcry that would accrue to any other business that abused its customers in similar fashion.
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Every time Apple finds a new way to cheat its customers, the cult is there to insist those aren’t true Apple customers at all!
Think of Apple’s years-long war on repair. When Apple gets a veto over where you fix the small, slippery, glass object you carry everywhere and hence break a lot, they can get up to all kinds of mischief. They can gouge you on parts and service charges, sure. But they can also simply rule out fixing your device at all, declaring it beyond repair.
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@pluralistic@mamot.fr this is the same mistake made when people misconstrue “Property is theft.” An iPhone is a possession, not property. Apple shares are property.