Apple Is the North Korea of Tech Companies
The DOJ's suit of the tech giant confirms many things we've known for a long time about how much you can get away with if you simply make people's lives more convenient.
The first week in March, almost foreshadowing the news of last week that the Department of Justice was suing Apple for violating antitrust laws, Paul Graham tweeted something that really resonated with me about Apple:
This throwaway line says so much:
“We don't want to think about Apple being evil. It would be so inconvenient.”
As I wrote in a Tweet thread inspired by Graham’s post, as someone who studies these companies, the comparative outrage and legal grandstanding over Facebook-TikTok-YouTube-Social Media generally, compared to Apple has always amazed me.
Because compared to all of those places, Apple is the North Korea of tech companies.1 It operates in near secret, both internally within divisions and externally to outside competitors. The Epic v. Apple antitrust litigation exposed the internal side of this to a huge degree— people working next to each other or on parallel projects with no idea for years.
But it’s also true of how the company responds to any external pressure from stakeholders, press, or consumers — anything not legal. You know what must be the easiest job in the world? Apples crisis comms. Why? Because as far as I can tell they largely don’t respond and just stonewall *every* public relations crisis that comes up.
Take the AppleID tag privacy scandal that involved young women being stalked via AppleID tag that Kashmir Hill and Ryan Mac broke in the New York Times a few years ago. Apple gave a milquetoast response and then just pushed a "bug fix" update.
For other companies, this would have been a huge deal: The famously “privacy friendly” Apple having its tech used in a very malicious not privacy invasive way. But it failed to even scratch Apple’s market share or curb purchase of the AppleID tags. Why? Two reasons: 1) Apple effectively glomarred the story, and 2) the AppleID tags (like all of Apple’s products) are so convenient.
The tech that regulators choose to go after, the tech that we're most *upset* about, is generally the tech that we're most *unhappy* with in a very pedantic sense. This is either because the product or service makes us feel bad, it unjustly takes our money, or it doesn’t work well. Simply because of the nature of the product, this is much more likely to happen for social media than for for hardware and software technology — because being connected to everyone you know on a product like Facebook also means you’re connected to people you both like and don’t like, who are expressing ideas that you might or might not agree with. That's a much more complicated social and emotional product than a very shinyprettyglowyglass box.
A few of the social media companies have tried to deal with these complicated bad feelings by engaging in more multi-stakeholderism about their platform policies and product. The Facebook Oversight Board is probably the high-water mark on this (especially because it came with a $300M investment), but lots of other platforms Twitter, Google, Twitch, and others have also generally taken this approach over the years. (Though as I noted here, these voluntary good governance actions might be on their way out. . .)
In contrast, Apple’s approach of not responding or engaging with multi-stakeholders or press or consumers-not-represented-by-lawyers might not be ethical governance — heck, it might even be evil! — but it is good business strategy. But as Graham noted, the blind eye we turn towards Apple is largely premised on them making our lives more convenient.
And it only lasts so long. Eventually monopolists/Supreme Dictators get lazy; products get worse; and the masses eventually revolt. Which is how last week we ended up with the Department of Justice’s massive antitrust suit against Apple — an 88-page complaint, which
brilliantly observes is just a “a very relatable litany of all the annoying things Apple has done to you and me.”Green bubbling my friends and loved ones? Not being able to buy Kindle books in the Amazon app? The way I can’t change NFC tap to do anything but open Apple Wallet? The laggy badness of every non-Apple smartwatch when paired with the iPhone? The DOJ knows. The DOJ cares. I feel seen. . .
Those hundreds of little annoyances, says the DOJ, are Apple’s fault, not yours. It’s an extremely tempting invitation to come rage with them.
In essence: One day you wake up and realize that the Victory Gin just doesn’t taste much like gin anymore, the tobacco ration of Victory Cigarettes has gotten just a little too small, and your fingers have paper cuts from putting all the newspaper clippings down memory holes . . . and you realize 2024 is a little more like 1984 than you realized.
I can’t take credit for this line, it was quipped to me once by Dave Willner, but I think it’s perfect and I’ve never forgotten it.
Monopolies usually only benefit the producer and as you point out, quality slips. And my Fitbit sometimes has fits syncing with my IPhone.
I’m amazed at some of the knockoffs like the Blue phone. I found one that I tried to return to its owner. Apparently it wasn’t worth retrieving.