I'm sure that's true, but your personal experience as [presumably] rank-and-file wouldn't have given you visibility into C-suite machinations. The ruling in the App Store case this year documented that Cook personally overruled Schiller's compliance recommendations, made the decision to violate the judge's court order on fees, and then tried to hide those meetings from the court - resulting in contempt findings and a criminal referral. Those are top-down decisions, on the record, with executives lying about it, which wouldn't have been known outside the inner sanctum but for this case. Not at all consistent with "trust", in a matter that directly harms consumers.
Regarding the basis of Apple's market cap, I would suggest that profitability ranks a bit higher than privacy. Apple's potential tariff burden was $44 billion annually, reduced to $7 billion after Cook plied the mad king with flattery, gold and cash. Apple had lost $300 billion in market value before Trump exempted smartphones, then immediately regained its $3 trillion market cap.
Privacy is nice brand positioning, but the truth behind it was always that Apple wasn't beholden to "surveillance capitalism" like the other tech behemoths as hardware was their primary profit center. This allowed them to take the high ground on this one, while coincidentally kneecapping Meta and others with App Tracking Transparency - which cost Meta an estimated $10 billion in 2022 alone and hit Google as well. But ATT only blocks third-party tracking across apps and websites - it doesn't apply to Apple's own growing advertising business, which uses first-party data from the App Store, Apple News, etc. Apple claims they don't "track users across apps and websites owned by other companies" - but they absolutely track within their own walled garden for their expanding ad business.
And the iOS 26 removal of Pegasus/Predator detection artifacts right as ICE activates Paragon spyware contracts? Maybe a coincidental bug, maybe what happens when keeping Trump happy is worth tens of billions.
Again you’re talking about decisions that C suite will decidedly care about and be their purview to make. First the App Store stuff wasn’t a privacy or security thing - this is Apple deciding how to navigate the EU regulatory environment. A CEO exists precisely to make these kinds of decisions.
I’ll point you to Apple developing the privacy-preserving CSAM scanning feature which got approved at lower levels and then got pulled back when it actually started hurting their brand. They respond to this stuff and I don’t think perfection is a reasonable bar.
> And the iOS 26 removal of Pegasus/Predator detection artifacts right as ICE activates Paragon spyware contracts? Maybe a coincidental bug, maybe what happens when keeping Trump happy is worth tens of billions.
And if iOS 26.1 or 27 restores previous behavior or does that change the narrative you’ve built in your head and you’ll just say “of course - they just got caught”? If you can’t falsify your narrative there’s no point having a constructive argument - I can’t factually argue you out of a position you didn’t argue yourself factually into.
You just moved the goalposts from "I have literally 0 times in my career observed a change like this come from the top" to "well of course the C-suite makes those decisions - that's their purview." Which is it? And calling what happened in the Epic case "navigating the EU regulatory environment" is quite the Orwellian turn of phrase when what actually occurred was violating a court order, lying to the judge about it, and earning a criminal referral. Elsewhere you justified Apple drafting breach notifications for XCodeGhost and not sending them because "it can impact their brand" and you're "not sure I'm seeing the long term negative ramifications" - so leadership decisions that prioritize brand protection over user notification are fine when they don't blow up later?
Your CSAM example perfectly illustrates my point, not yours - Apple pulled back "when it started hurting their brand," meaning they respond to financial and reputational pressure, not pure privacy principles. And you're asking if I'd change my view if iOS 26.1 restores the logging? Sure - that would be evidence it was unintentional [or that pushback raised the costs - see Disney / Kimmel]. But right now I'm looking at documented patterns: $37B in tariff relief, gold gifts to Trump, court findings of deception, and suspicious timing on forensic artifacts. You're arguing from "I knew people there who cared" a decade ago. Which of us is reasoning from evidence that can be falsified?
What I said was that I’ve seen 0 times C suite make technical change decisions. It’s completely natural for them to make directional strategic and tactical decisions for the company. I don’t see that as shifting goalposts so much as muddying the waters about what I said.
I’m not claiming Apple is flawless as a company - no individual is and no group of individual is either.
> You're arguing from "I knew people there who cared" a decade ago. Which of us is reasoning from evidence that can be falsified?
A good chunk of the people I know are still there and constantly being promoted to more and more senior positions.
> Your CSAM example perfectly illustrates my point, not yours - Apple pulled back "when it started hurting their brand," meaning they respond to financial and reputational pressure, not pure privacy principles
I think you’re confusing the situation - both things can be true. It can both be simultaneously true that Apple thought they developed a privacy preserving CSAM solution AND that there was enough public blowback that they decided it wasn’t worth it to continue.
> But right now I'm looking at documented patterns: $37B in tariff relief, gold gifts to Trump, court findings of deception, and suspicious timing on forensic artifacts
None of which really means anything in terms of the privacy stance of the company. You’ve conflated the political moment (and perhaps legit malfeasance in dealing with the EU - I haven’t followed that situation closely) with their policy on privacy.
I’m happy to update my priors when presented with evidence to the contrary but I just haven’t seen any. I don’t see how bending the knee to a fascist government that has significant influence over a good chunk of their revenue and regulatory control of their HQ is evidence of them sacrificing their stance on privacy. I see it as being a concerning step but to me that’s more of an issue of the rapidly deteriorating political situation in the US and within that context Apple’s actions matter negligibly.
I've enjoyed this exchange, but I think we've hit a point where our worldviews lead us to different conclusions about probabilities. You're drawing a distinction between "technical change decisions" and strategic ones, but that's exactly the illusion I'm talking about. Policy and market cap considerations always trump technical ones - they just rarely conflict directly, so you build up what seems like overwhelming evidence that management doesn't interfere with engineering. Until they do, and then it gets rationalized as something else, or the old "for the greater good".
You see your direct personal experience at Apple as giving you insight into how the company operates. I think that experience can actually cloud judgment - when you've invested years in an institution and know people there, and have some of your own identity tied up in that institution and how it's perceived, you're naturally inclined to interpret ambiguous situations charitably. That's not a criticism, it's just human nature.
As for "bending the knee to a fascist government" not being evidence of sacrificing privacy stance - you're describing the mechanism by which principles get compromised while claiming it doesn't count. When you acknowledge that Apple's actions are driven by "significant influence over a good chunk of their revenue and regulatory control" from a government that's deploying zero-click spyware through ICE, the removal of forensic artifacts for detecting that spyware stops being "just a technical decision" that happened to occur at a really convenient moment.
I don't actually know what happened here in this specific instance - whether the iOS 26 change was deliberate, accidental, or something in between. I'm basing my priors on general corporate behavior and the observation that Apple isn't special, just that circumstances have allowed them to take positions that aligned with what you and I both see as right. I don't doubt the people at the top genuinely believed in those positions when they were cost-free or profitable. But we're past that now.
At some point we'll likely know more - this stuff tends to come out eventually through investigative reporting, court filings, or the Trump administration bragging about it. Until then, I guess we have different base assumptions about how much institutional conviction survives when it costs tens of billions.
> your personal experience as [presumably] rank-and-file wouldn't have given you visibility into C-suite machinations
But yours does?
I know some fairly high-up folks in Cupertino. They care about privacy more than the median American, possibly the median techie. They overshot in San Bernardino precisely because they were internally calibrated off the political mark.
Where did I claim my personal experience gave me insight into C-suite decisions? I haven't appealed to personal experience for anything - I've cited court rulings, financial data, and documented executive behavior. But since you've brought it up, now I will.
In my experience, people want to believe they're good, that they're doing good things, and that the institutions they're associated with are good. You say you "know some fairly high-up folks in Cupertino" - taking that at face value, that means either: (a) you're of similar status, in which case they may be personal friends or peers you naturally view charitably, or (b) you're of lesser status and get social capital from knowing high-status people, which creates its own incentives to view them favorably.
But here's the thing: "knowing someone" to some unknown degree doesn't give you access to their innermost thoughts and beliefs. You're inferring their true convictions from their behavior and what they tell you - the very behavior I'm arguing demonstrates something other than absolute commitment to privacy principles. It's easy to believe you'd stand on principle when your financial interests happen to align with it - the real test is when they conflict, and we're seeing that now.
This is actually why having some distance gives _more_ insight, not less. Every white-collar criminal convicted of horrific personal or corporate malfeasance has had plenty of people vouching for them based on "knowing them" - shocked that this person they knew would have done what the evidence clearly showed they did.
The San Bernardino case you cite as evidence of Apple's privacy conviction? That was 2016, when Apple's business interests happened to align with privacy advocacy - their profit center was hardware, not surveillance capitalism like Meta or Google, so taking a stand cost them nothing and disadvantaged competitors. It also came during Obama's administration and Trump's first term, when the costs of corporate pushback against government demands were considerably lower than they are now, for reasons I've outlined elsewhere.
Here's the reality: the theory that corporations act in their financial interest is almost completely predictive. The theory that "good guys at the top" will protect principles when those principles conflict with tens of billions in market cap? Not so much.
Regarding the basis of Apple's market cap, I would suggest that profitability ranks a bit higher than privacy. Apple's potential tariff burden was $44 billion annually, reduced to $7 billion after Cook plied the mad king with flattery, gold and cash. Apple had lost $300 billion in market value before Trump exempted smartphones, then immediately regained its $3 trillion market cap.
Privacy is nice brand positioning, but the truth behind it was always that Apple wasn't beholden to "surveillance capitalism" like the other tech behemoths as hardware was their primary profit center. This allowed them to take the high ground on this one, while coincidentally kneecapping Meta and others with App Tracking Transparency - which cost Meta an estimated $10 billion in 2022 alone and hit Google as well. But ATT only blocks third-party tracking across apps and websites - it doesn't apply to Apple's own growing advertising business, which uses first-party data from the App Store, Apple News, etc. Apple claims they don't "track users across apps and websites owned by other companies" - but they absolutely track within their own walled garden for their expanding ad business.
And the iOS 26 removal of Pegasus/Predator detection artifacts right as ICE activates Paragon spyware contracts? Maybe a coincidental bug, maybe what happens when keeping Trump happy is worth tens of billions.