[jjtheblunt]

That's a plainly depraved attitude.

I worked several years within Apple in one core engineering roll, in a sizeable team, and being ethical and moral was a _huge_ part of the engineering culture (at least), both when Steve Jobs was there and after.

[kome]

you were working there, he wasn't

[grishka]

Engineering culture maybe. But I take issue with the management and its goals.

As a long time an app developer (mostly Android, but I've seen my iOS coworkers deal with Apple, and I released one somewhat popular Mac app while refusing to get a developer account), I find it very disrespectful how Apple tries its best to forcibly insert itself between the users and the developers and then acts like they totally played an important role in forming that relationship. Then there's the fact that the app store policies ruin the internet as a whole. Because Apple, in its infinite wisdom, not only reviews apps on their technical merits, but if the app is for an online service, it also reviews service itself. They would totally reject a client app for something that they don't like ToS of.

Speaking of the Mac app I made, Apple is making it harder with every macOS release to run apps from "unidentified" developers. No good technical reason for that. No good technical reason for taking away the "all developers" option from the security settings either (I know that it still can be set with a terminal command). A system can be made reasonably secure without the whole security model being centralized around one self-appointed unquestionably trusted party yet Apple chose the centralized approach.

The whole EU DMA thing... I don't even know where to start. This "core technology fee" is absolutely ridiculous. The fact that every binary that is to be "sideloaded" has to go through Apple is also ridiculous. It's pretty clear what the EU regulators meant with this act, yet Apple keeps trying to work around it to keep as much of its rent-seeking as possible. All while acting like a kicked puppy.

Then there's their stance on adversarial interoperability, see Beeper.

Then there's also this whole parts pairing thing on iOS devices. Again, no good technical reason. Maybe it's to prevent stolen iPhones used for parts, but stolen iPhones are still used for parts. I'm a software guy, but for lots more complaints about artificially created hardware-related problems see Louis Rossmann: https://www.youtube.com/@rossmanngroup

[rpdillon]

This is a completely coherent critique of Apple, and it resonates with me because I have all the same issues with Apple that you describe.

But I don't think it supports acting immorally, just because Apple's involved. I would have shipped back the machine to them as well.