Hating on Apple is quite fashionable, around here, but it’s an old company, that grew up in a very different fashion from Google and Facebook. It's an old-fashioned SV company.
I’ve been writing software for Apple systems since 1986, and it was already a well-established company, by then.
I have watched people declare it dead, numerous times, since then.
That doesn’t excuse some of its behavior, nowadays, but it’s a very different creature, and lumping it in with them, seems like a cheap grab for Apple-haters.
The article is about the evils of capitalist profit maximization. I don’t see how Apple is any better there. If anything, they are the masters of profit maximization.
I’m not an Apple “hater” (whatever that’s supposed to mean), I use their products more than Google’s or Meta’s. But I don’t like the trajectory they’ve been going down for the past decade or so, and the arguments made by the article fully apply to them.
That doesn’t change the fact that the context was inappropriate.
I completely agree with most of the stuff in the article, and even that I’m quite unhappy about Apple’s trajectory, recently.
But I still believe that looping in irrelevant data, poisons the dataset.
Either the article should expand its scope, or it shouldn’t include older SV companies into its dataset. Salesforce, Qualcomm, Adobe, Intel, Oracle, etc. have many of the same attributes as Apple (even worse, in some cases).
A fairly typical thing that some folks like to do, is attach unpopular people to their targets. It energizes people that might not otherwise care.
One of these, is not like the others.