Apple Inc.

Apple Inc.
Logo of Apple Inc. since 1998
Founded	Apple Computer Company 1 April 1976
Founder	Steve Wozniak Steve Jobs
Industry	Computing, consumer goods
Headquarters	1 Apple Park Way, Cupertino, California, United States
Key people	Tim Cook (CEO)
Number of employees	164,000 (2022)
Revenue	$394.328B (2022)

Apple Inc. is a computer technology and consumer goods mega-corporation based in the United States. Founded in 1976, Apple is one of the entities which constitutes the "big tech" corporate oligopoly. As of 2023, Apple products consume a considerable market share in Western countries.

Apple is infamous for its consistent labor abuses, privacy violations, and generally anti-consumer practices. Apple, similar to other transnational mega-corporations, perpetrates imperialism via exporting their industries to less developed markets. Apple products are often manufactured in inhumane and oppressive conditions with meager wages. Apple also regularly collaborates in mass-surveillance efforts with imperialist governments, which is aided by the mega-corporation's proprietary operating systems and software.

Practices

Privacy violations

Users of Apple's proprietary operating systems (mainly macOS and iOS) are regularly subjected to invasive telemetry and other forms of privacy intrusions from Apple. By default — and particularly with more recent versions of macOS — Apple collects the IP address and location associated with users' computers, the exact applications installed and opened by users, technical information on users' devices, along with other personal data such as financial and health information. Such sensitive data is, at least since the release of macOS Big Sur, impossible to fully block and is transmitted in plain-text. While it is possible to, at least nominally, prevent some of this telemetry via altering the privacy settings on macOS, given the non-open-source nature of Apple's operating systems, it is impossible to fully know if such telemetry is actually disabled.

Apple's operating systems are known to likely contain multiple backdoors within them. This, in combination with the fact that Apple collaborates in the US government's PRISM surveillance program, results in Apple operating systems possessing a lack of user privacy similar to Microsoft's own proprietary operating system Windows.

Planned obsolescence

Apple's practices represent a text-book example of planned obsolescence, particularly in recent times. Apple purposefully designs its products in a way which is hostile to the user, with the batteries contained in their mobile devices (such as iPhones) being made deliberately irreplaceable as well as made in such a way so as to ensure the battery will fail after a certain amount of usage. In doing this, Apple forces its mobile users to either purchase a new, expensive device or have them undergo a tedious, expensive, and week-long process in order to have the battery be replaced on the user's device, during which, Apple erases the device's memory.

Commercial locations

The extravagant corporate headquarters of Apple.

Headquarters

More and more of the world’s wealth is being captured by the giant multinational corporations. This continues to be true even while the long-developing world capitalist overproduction crisis intensifies, which means that many big corporations are awash in huge cash hoards that they don’t know what to do with. This has led a number of them into a trend of creating enormously wasteful monuments to themselves, on a par with the giant pyramids of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs. The picture at the right is of the new enormously expensive Apple Corporation headquarters now under construction in Silicon Valley (California), which is in the shape of a giant space ship.

See also

• Microsoft
• Steve Jobs
• Mass surveillance in the United States
• Planned obsolescence

External links

• Reasons not to use Apple