Will World War 2 games now be banned from Apple’s App Store for having Soviet and Nazi flags given what those regimes did made the Confederacy seem like choir boys? How about game featuring ancient Roman symbols as they had slavery? Apple is clearly run by people I would not invite across my doorstep as they have just refused to sell any game featuring a Confederate flag in any context.
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Apple is clearly run by people I would not invite across my doorstepJune 25th, 2015 |
 24 comments to Apple is clearly run by people I would not invite across my doorstep |
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I know you are an Apple fan Perry. They have feet of clay.
(typed on my Thinkpad).
It has been said for years in Linux circles that Apple is a Freedom-hating company.
Surely this doesn’t come as a surprise to you.
Oh FFS, as if it was only Apple. Walmart, ebay, Amazon – the list is growing by the day. Stop the world, I want to get off.
Che shirts ok, despite sending gays to jail and executing anyone he disliked?
Mao just peachy
Stalin wonderful.
Im not game to look but ill bet a dollar or 2 I can find various ISIS and similar (hezbolah) flags for sale.
Apple. Walmart, ebay, Amazon
Hey, aren’t these all companies that do business “on line”, with assorted electronic transfer options, and are all required to turn over ALL their data to “proper authorities”?
I’d LIKE to say I’ll boycot Apple, but I’ve NEVER (knowingly)done business with them.
E bay wanted “additional documentation” from me before unfreezing my account. No reason given. CLOSED
Amazon was found to have an amusing “book club” review system.
They make a nice source for ISBN info to give my local book monger.
Wal Mart is my only option for console games, without un-needed transfer and retention of electronic information mining.
Well, Xbox One fixed THAT.
Otherwise, I avoid them because of their propensity to sell merchandise with the “MADE IN CHINA” flag on it.
But if shoddy cheep crap that only needs to last through LOOKING real for the duration of a theatrical production set, movie scene set dressing, ad photos, or commercial shoots, before it goes to the land fill as otherwise useless, well then, OK.
Hardly surprising, Apple’s main base is the “techo-savvy college-age” twits and the artists.
Apple was always a hardware company, and made some pretty good hw, if a bit over-priced for my taste. But I never liked their attitude, the proprietary frenzy “walled garden” crap. iOS is a joke for serious computing, MacOS is BSD with a nice GUI.
I would’ve released the GUI as an X server, but no, gotta be proprietary.
In short, meh.
Apple isn’t all bad. They managed to put a compelling GUI on top of Unix, something many others have tried and failed at. So compelling in fact, that they have over a billion consumer grade users who don’t even care that there is Unix under the hood. Not bad for a mere hardware company.
Bluntly, if Apple want to do this, it’s up to them. Seems to be a good way of losing value in a company that does not look to be a long-term bet (the Apple cultists I know seem to be losing their enthusiasm, and Apple’s recent success seems to be about cult as much as anything…). Making knee-jerk decisions based on ‘popular’ ‘liberal’ ‘accepted truths’ seems to be a bad idea considering that most people are not of that mindset, but who am I to tell Apple’s management and owners that they cannot do this sort of thing if they fancy it.
And if Perry doesn’t want to let Apple’s management into his house, that’s up to him. It may indicate that investing in Perry is a better bet than investing in Apple anyway – is there a Perrywatch available? It could have an app that flashed up everytime someone did something silly because of the right-on campaigns of a few people.
More seriously, it does make me wonder whether Apple can spot the difference between a historial representation and the fact that the Sourth Carolinan use of that representation was a deliberate statement against equality from within living memory. One of these things is a good thing to get rid of. And one of these things is also something Apple cannot do anything about…
I joked with a work colleague the other day about the General Lee having to be repainted now. It turns out we laughed too early.
Who controls the past controls the future? Time marches backwards.
Indeed, just as it is up to me if I want to ridicule them for it. In any case over the years I gradually went from a hard core Mac user to someone who is now mostly PC based and when my laptop finally dies, I will be 100% PC/Android based. Moments like this just confirm my delight to be be leaving the walled garden.
As Alisa has pointed out – it is not just Apple.
The big companies are all terrified of not being thought P.C.
And their executives absorbed a lot of P.C. stuff when they were at college anyway.
When companies are driven by fear (fear of the “Occupy” mob and fear of the government – which has much the same ideology as the “Occupy” mob) and by ideology – there is no freedom of choice
“Apple has gone nuts – just buy the game on Amazon” only works if Amazon (and the others) do not go the same way.
This is nothing to do with the owner of a company having a personal dislike of the Confederate Battle Flag – and showing his dislike in an extreme way.
This is actually a herd mentality – driven by the education system and driven by fear of the mob (and fear of government).
Apple isn’t all bad. They managed to put a compelling GUI on top of Unix, something many others have tried and failed at.
Apart from Google, you mean? It’s quite easy to have a super GUI when you ban all the software apart from the ones you certify running on it, e.g. like Apple and Google do. At least you can legally jailbreak Android.
For what it’s worth I was sniffing around for a tablet friendly Linux GUI the other day and some of the standard distro desktops are actually quite amazing, you don’t need anywhere near a piece of overpriced Intel based junk to run it (mine run smoothly even as a remote connection to a virtual machine), and they run all my crap as is no questions asked.
Paul,
I work in a university, and whilst there are the clique of students around who are unbearably PC, I know of almost no lecturers (one or two exist, but universities should have some of these I suppose – ideally university lecturers will relect all viewpoints that allow learning) and certainly no management like that (one senior manager I saw the day after the election was happily proclaiming how this would upset the unbearable types).
What corporations fear is not being judged non-PC, but bluntly negative press. So actually the answer is to hold the companies up to ridicule as much as possible, so bowing to the mob gets negative press as well. It is a probably limited moment where the major media are controlled by a mentality (mostly – this is one of those times when one can say thank god for the Sun or the Mirror, which are hardly of the same mentality) which is hardly that of most people. Fortunately, despite this particular mentality’s dislike of free markets, all this does is doom the media run this way in the long term.
So I suppose what I am saying is that your root cause (college) is wrong, and that the herd mentality is limited to an echo chamber. Beyond that people probably genuinely don’t care.
Hey, UCLA was ahead of the curve a few weeks ago when students complained about having to read Ovid because of graphic imagery, violence, etc. The Romans were just trouble and to be shunned by all right-thinking people.
That’s what I meant about the X server – it is nice, fast and pretty but it’s packed with non-standard apis. If they work, why not release them? Get them into the standards? Maybe I don’t care for BSD and want to run a different flavor unix? Give us some choice here, you can sell the thing packaged.
I checked, you can still buy Nazi flags on there, and North Korea flags, and Stalin T Shirts. I also checked, you can also buy ISIS flags on there too, but most of them are mock flags that take the piss. Which seems to me to be a much better approach than banning things. As is always the case, I hear the sales of confederate flag merchandise is way up as a result of this.
I’m sure Barbra Streisand would be confused by this, but probably the readers here aren’t.
There was a time I could easily see, as a long time Apple user myself, that Apple represented a kick against the dark denizens of Microshaft and their inane, clumsily implemented ideas. I mean, c’mon, Arial because they wouldn’t pay the licence fee for a decent typeface? (And don’t get me started on Comic Sans!)
But while Microshaft continued to shaft (and yes, I buy Steve Jobs’ argument that the Android was largely stolen software) I have to say Apple has become less and less what it once was. They no longer represent a push against the big corporation ethos because they greedily became what they opposed; Apple could cheerfully buy up several third world debts with their petty cash. They also, and I have seen this close up, acted at times in a bizarre, grasping and altogether unfriendly way on a number of issues. Putting that aside, whatever Jobs brought to the party — and heaven knows, Apple were in danger of falling apart before he came back to the fold — has long been gone.
My feeling is Apple are running out of ideas. The iPod saved them, the iPhone lifted them and the iPad kept them afloat but it is hard to see what lies ahead. Another ‘revamp’ of iTunes to make it even more unfriendly and clumsy? Now there’s thought. Another watch-like device? Not gonna buy, sorry. I do think however that once Apple does flounder then the people who used them as unpaid R&D will struggle too, but that’s no reason to keep Apple bobbing along.
If Apple wish to withdraw some products from their store then that’s up to them. people, when denied what they want, will go elsewhere. After all, it’s only a f*cking computer and it’s only f*cking commerce. I might like them, or did once, but I am not married to them.
On the other hand, thinking about it… I do get a cold, sinking feeling thinking I may one day be looking at a PC and its ludicrous systems…
Indeed Greytop, indeed.
My opinion is that Apple has become much worse that Microsoft ever was. They have deliberately locked down their ecosystem in a way that requires their approval for everything, and then have been using that power in really ugly ways. Were it not for Google giving an alternative they would own the whole mobile world with a level of power and control that Microsoft never had. Microsoft never took revenue from every application, nor decided which applications were allowed, not using their power to undermine their enemies.
One of the most worrying developments here is the recent announcement that they intend to build an ad blocker directly into Safari. This is a tool that the can use to kill large amounts of revenue from the mobile web and from the mobile app feed companies such as Google, of course their ads, and especially their in app adds will continue to be allowed and not blockable. This is a type of explotation that I find very worrisome.
Similarly their use of proprietary connectors for the sole purpose of controlling hardware vendors is very disturbing (See the recent cases against Monster cables as an example of this.)
They are plainly out of ideas since Jobs passed away, and so their current plan seems to be to farm their customer base, which I suspect will continue to drive their profits for a while (and frankly I’d say AAPL is a buy right now.)
Of course I’m not suggesting that the government should get involved any more than I think the governments actions against Microsoft were an outrage. However, what I do think is that it is necessary for those of us who work in software to call out to the rest of us how worrying and scary Apple is. They have this reputation of a bunch of good guys, raging against the machine. Truth is they are the machine, and a much worse machine that Microsoft ever was. Decent people need to make Apple not cool, because they are a bunch of scary bullies, and also, the biggest patent troll out there.
Apple Map, surely rhyming slang for ‘crap’. The rest will be history.
I thought you all might like this story — a guy asks WalMart to make a cake with the confederate flag, which they decline, he later asks them to make one with an ISIS flag, which they are happy to do.
I mean you can’t make this stuff up….
https://gma.yahoo.com/walmart-apologizes-making-isis-cake-man-denied-confederate-180928235–abc-news-topstories.html
Fraser, that’s amazing. You’re right: you can’t make this stuff up.