Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized summary. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to read it during lunch or dinner hours as well.
The serious issue of data privacy
When politicians go to war with corporations, you should usually bet on the politician. Not because they are necessarily more powerful, but because they have more to lose if beaten. A politician must be seen as winning public battles in order to impress voters, but corporations can make as many concessions as necessary provided they continue to make money. Businesses are also hampered by having to offend as few potential customers as possible, while politicians often thrive on division.
Apple is a company of well-known principles with a distinct culture and ideological stance, but it is not exempt from this trend. When Donald Trump became President of the United States, for example, Apple’s liberal and sympathetic management must have been appalled and alarmed. But publicly at least, they adopted a policy of respectful conciliation. Tim Cook went to the man’s CEO meeting and performed well for the cameras (even when Trump got his name wrong); he chose not to ridicule his half-baked rants about Apple building “their fucking computers and all” in the United States. A few years later, it emerged that the company had given the 45th president the first Mac Pro built in the Austin factory that they allowed him to claim. was built in response to his feedback.
Likewise, Apple has shown little appetite for publicly opposing China’s dismal human rights record and strict censorship laws. Rather than asking about allegations of forced labor in Xinjiang, Apple lobbied against legislation to protect Chinese Uyghurs. When the state demands that podcast, RSS, or VPN apps be removed from the Chinese App Store, Apple quickly complies.
But there are exceptions to every rule, and every once in a while you’ll see a company fighting a political battle tooth and nail. And the key, without wanting to be too cynical, is to look for battles that aren’t really political, but rather financial.
For Apple, the question of privacy is not an abstract philosophical debate, but a real issue that affects its users – and its own income – on a daily basis. The company chose privacy as the hill it’s ready to die on, not because its CEO really, really believes in privacy (although of course he could), but because privacy underpins its entire business model. Buy an iPhone, Apple says, and your data is safe. Unlike those other tech companies and their business models built around data capture.
This week we covered the story that Apple is so exercised by the UK government’s currently planned ‘Snooper’s Charter’ legislation – which includes the right to secretly order messaging services to remove security features it finds inconvenient – that it will shut down iMessage and FaceTime in the country rather than comply. In the news article, I briefly pondered whether or not this threat was a bluff and concluded that zapping two of the company’s most popular services (iMessage on its own is a powerful driver of the iOS ecosystem) into a major market would be a drastic step, and one it surely wouldn’t want to go ahead with.
But then I remembered the time the FBI asked Apple to create a software backdoor so they could break into a suspected terrorist’s iPhone, and Apple refused. This is exactly the kind of public battle in which most companies, most of the time, would absolutely refuse to get involved. Apple took a huge amount of bad public relations for this position and will have alienated a lot of potential customers at the law and order end of the political spectrum. But he thought that creating a backdoor would weaken the security of all iPhones and giving in would set a dangerous precedent, and decided it was a battle worth fighting.
Disable its two major messaging services in the UK would be be a drastic step, and one Apple won’t take lightly. But it’s not like smiling politely while Donald Trump says a bunch of things you ideologically disagree with. Data privacy is something Apple considers an existential issue, and if I were a member of the UK government, I wouldn’t bet they would back down.
Foundry
The opinion corner
Trending: Top Stories
Let’s face it, Apple never gets rid of the ridiculous 13-inch MacBook Pro.
With new Macs on the way, here’s what to expect Apple’s M3 chip.
Someone bought an iPhone with only 4 GB of storage for over $190,000.
The rumor mill
It’s time for a big roundup of iPhone 15 leaks: we’ve got a new pink colorsuper thin bezels and stacked batteries.
A new Apple Watch Ultra is very very likely to happen this year.
The iPhone 15 might not arrive until October – and be hard to find.
Foldable iPhone, my eye! Patent activity shows that Apple is developing a roll up screen.
THE iPhone 16 Pro Max can finally get a super-zoom camera.
A Next generation iPad Air is in the works but probably won’t arrive until 2024.
Podcast of the week
Rumors are starting to swirl about Apple fall product launches, and it could be a complete slate. We talk about what we might see with the new iPhone, Apple Watch and Mac, in this episode of the igamesnews podcast.
You can watch every igamesnews podcast episode on Spotify, Soundcloud, Podcasts app or our own site.
Software updates, bugs and issues
We explain why everyone should run latest betas on their Apple devices.
Apple released the macOS Ventura 13.5 beta candidate.
And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you want to receive regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Twitter or on Facebook to discuss the latest news from Apple. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.
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