A year after Apple was caught slowing down older versions of their phones, have things changed at all?
Let’s get it out of the way: Apple generally makes good products. They’re objectively nice to look at, they make a generally decent compromise between form and function and more and more these days, they’re made with sustainable materials.
But that doesn’t mean the people behind them nowadays aren’t snake oil salesmen. Like we’ve come to expect from corporations, the slick and sexy exterior falls to pieces after the briefest backward glance at their financial practices, their deliberately manipulative hardware and software design and their apparent tone-deafness on how much the public believes one should pay for a telephone. They’re throwing money at shrinking sales in increasingly embarrassing fashion.
Everybody loves to hate it and hates to love it. It’ll outlive us all, but here’s Apple’s rotten underside.
Proprietary — and Ever-Changing — Hardware and Standards
Let’s start with the tame stuff.
It’s true that Apple has a habit of, as it were, continually moving the “goal post” in terms of what their products are capable of. It seems like they’ve just delivered a beautiful and polished OS or a blistering fast smartphone when — presto! — some standard changes or they add a feature that hogs processing power or otherwise cripples that once blinding-fast operating system.
Let’s meet in the middle on this issue before moving on to the others.
There are rumors that Apple will finally retire its now iPhone-exclusive Lightning connector in 2019 or soon after, in favor of USB-C. This smarts a bit, especially because many of us might still be retiring our 30-pin power connectors, which were rendered obsolete in 2012.
Here’s the thing — lightning is a really nice connector. It’s sleek and reversible, like USB-C, but it’s more rugged and solid all the way through — unlike USB-C, which is becoming standard throughout the tech landscape.
This is an easier place to see Apple’s side than some others. Connector standards change all the time, and to Apple’s credit, they’re supposedly mulling retiring a proprietary connector in favor of an emerging industry-wide standard: USB-C. It sounds like a potentially acceptable compromise with the future in mind, and it could unite APple’s own ecosystem with a single cable type and connector. But it’s clear there will be some growing pains and frustration. And dongles.
Let’s move on.
“Batterygate” and the Throttling of Older Hardware
This wasn’t good news for Apple — and if you’re still confused by it, or upset about it, you have a right to be. Apple has long been accused of designing their hardware and software in a way that seems to compel users to upgrade at regular intervals. And this writer didn’t really see how that could be the case when she’s used some iPhones for years at a time and MacBooks for seven years at a stretch. But Batterygate made me a believer in some of Apple’s hardware shenanigans.
“Batterygate” refers to public and media pressure on Apple to, once it was uncovered, address a feature in its mobile operating system that apparently “throttled” the processors in Phones and iPads as they aged in order to compel users to upgrade out of frustration.
This sounds like a stupid thing to build into a telephone or tablet, but Apple’s explanation seemed to hold weight — lithium-based batteries can cause older processors to reboot at random, and throttling older devices can keep these random shutdowns to a minimum.
“Batterygate” is shady. If this was an integral feature, Apple should have made it a visible part of the software from the beginning. It was only after this story “became a thing” that Apple incorporated a “battery health” feature, which is still in beta.
Users deserve transparency when it comes to hardware operating in a way we don’t expect. Apple will keep throttling devices after they’ve had their first emergency shutdown due to an older battery. Good news: you can now turn this feature off if you’d rather run the device at its previous speeds.
Strategically Parceled-Out Incremental Upgrades
The slow rollout of USB-C to Apple’s MacBook, then MacBook Pro, then iPad Pro, and soon after, presumably, to iPhone, has been one of the most embarrassingly naked examples of Apple’s cockiness. It didn’t feel completely untrue when some folks started pointed out that Apple had become “a dongle company” because of how frustratingly incompatible their hardware was becoming — even with itself.
Apple is prolonging every step of what could have been a smooth transition. If you want to charge your iPhone with a fast charger equipped with USB-C, you need to wait for next year’s model. If you want to wait for the (still-rumored) end-to-end USB-C ecosystem, instead of Lightning-to-USB-C and the rest of dongle madness, you’ll be waiting even longer.
This company made its name on designing products that were straightforward, elegant, and easy to use. And in a lot of ways, they still accomplish this. Apple also makes a point, every few years, to make sure even older devices can run the latest software updates without serious trade-offs in performance. The venerable iPhone 5 can run the latest iteration of iOS quite well.
So let’s talk about the really bad news.
Tax Dodging, Horrifying Worker Conditions and Excuses for Absolutely Everything
When Tim Cook was caught with his hand in the cookie jar, hiding Apple’s income overseas to dodge taxes (like many companies do), he whined that it would “cost him 40 percent” to bring that money home for proper taxation.
Yes — and so what? It should have been properly taxed this whole time, back here at home. Since then, Apple’s been using that cash as a bargaining chip to have the re-patriation tax lowered.
In 2014, Apple appeared to pay an effective tax rate of point-six percent in the UK.
You could say that the recent changes to the tax plan resulted in Apple bringing a substantial amount of money back into the U.S. You could also say that same tax plan enabled Apple to shave $43 billion off its tax bill. Do we not call this thievery?
Before we close, there is also the matter of the suicide nets.
Conditions are reportedly so wretched in some of the factories overseas Apple relies on to build their devices that the companies operating them have to periodically install “suicide nets” to catch employees on their way down. It’s been a recurring story for years, and Apple is only grudgingly beginning to make noise about bringing factories back to the United States. They’re making even less noise about helping the workers it already “employs” overseas, where they live, instead of remaining complicit in their abuse.
As you can see, Apple’s sins run the gamut from mildly annoying to fairly terrifying. This is, unfortunately, par for the course with large companies. This year, Hewlett-Packard is reportedly on the hook for deliberately crippling their own ink cartridges.
We may just say that this is what has become normal behavior for corporations, but consumers are slowly waking up to the realities around them. And unless companies start shaping up, they might well deserve a spot on the list of industries and companies millennials refuse to — or can’t afford to — allow to exist any longer.
Kate is a health and political journalist. You can subscribe to her blog, So Well, So Woman, to read more of her work and receive a free subscriber gift! https://sowellsowoman.com/about/subscribe/