ON THE ONE HAND, IT WENT VIRAL, SO THAT HAS TO BE GOOD NEWS* FOR APPLE. ON THE OTHER HAND: Apple apologizes for its controversial iPad Pro ad.

Apple has apologized and admitted it “missed the mark” with its latest iPad Pro advertisement.

The ad, posted on social media Tuesday by Apple CEO Tim Cook, was met with backlash from internet users who felt that the ad celebrated technology’s destruction of human creativity and art.

In a statement to AdAge, Apple’s vice president of marketing communications, Tor Myhren, apologized.

“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it’s incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world. Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad,” Myhren said. “We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry.”

Apple confirmed the statement it provided to AdAge but declined to provide further comment.

The ad shows symbols of human creativity, like musical instruments, paint cans, an ’80s arcade video game and a bust of a human head crushed by a giant hydraulic press. As the metal slabs of the hydraulic press lift, Apple’s new iPad Pro is revealed.

While everyone appreciates the amount of legacy technology that is now accessible — often for free — within an iPad or iPhone, people like owning physically tactile devices such as guitars and pianos. For example, the whole history of recording music via PC has been increasing the software’s ability to integrate with hardware devices that musicians and recording engineers have decades and decades of experience working with. On both an aural level and an ability to hands-on tweak the physical controls level, hardware devices are often much more fun than diving down into multiple levels of GUIs and onscreen menus.

Which is why Apple’s new ad is infinitely more appealing when run in reverse:

Hey @Apple, I fixed it for you (sound on) pic.twitter.com/OwVnYNgXhT

— Reza Sixo Safai (@rezawrecktion) May 8, 2024

* Even articles like the CNN/Yahoo piece above and this post are, of course, serving as more free advertising for Apple.

Earlier: Apple downplays the value of human achievement.

DECOUPLING: Apple doubles India iPhone production to $14 billion as it shifts from China.

As relations between the U.S. and China have soured, Apple has worked to diversify its supply chain by expanding production in countries like Vietnam and India. It’s a big shift for the iPhone maker, which has historically relied on China for manufacturing.

Apple now makes around 1 in 7, or 14%, of its iPhones in India, twice the amount it produced there last year, the report said. The manufacturer Pegatron assembled around 17% of those iPhones, while Foxconn produced around 67%, according to the report. Wistron built the rest.

In June 2023, Apple CEO Tim Cook and other tech executives met with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, at the White House. Cook told CNBC after the meeting that India represents a “huge opportunity.” Apple opened its first retail stores in the country last year.

China remains a crucial market for Apple, but sales have been off to a rocky start this year. A Counterpoint Research report from March found that iPhone sales in China dropped 24% in the first six weeks of 2024. The firm said Apple faces significant competition from other smartphone vendors like Huawei.

It could also be that Chinese consumers are choosing to buy Chinese as Western firms ditch China.

HANGOVER KICKS IN: Apple fans are starting to return their Vision Pros.

For some Apple Vision Pro buyers, the honeymoon is already over.

It’s no coincidence that there’s been an uptick on social media of Vision Pro owners saying they’re returning their $3,500 headsets in the past few days. Apple allows you to return any product within 14 days of purchase — and for the first wave of Vision Pro buyers, we’re right about at that point.

Comfort is among the most cited reasons for returns. People have said the headset gives them headaches and triggers motion sickness. The weight of the device, and the fact that most of it is front-loaded, has been another complaint. Parker Ortolani, The Verge’s product manager, told me that he thought using the device led to a burst blood vessel in his eye. At least one other person noted they had a similar experience with redness. (To be fair, VR headset users have anecdotally reported dry eyes and redness for years.)

“Despite being as magical to use as I’d hoped, it was simply way too uncomfortable to wear even for short periods of time both due to the weight and the strap designs. I wanted to use it, but dreaded putting it on,” says Ortolani, who also posted about returning the device.

“It’s just too expensive and unwieldy to even try to get used to the constant headaches and eye strain I was experiencing. I’ll be back for the next one.”

As Bloomberg warned last year: “Apple hasn’t really found a killer app that will make the roughly $3,000 headset a must-have item:”

When Apple Inc. set out to develop a headset about seven years ago, it hired a former NASA engineer who had used augmented and virtual reality to explore Mars. The big question at the time: Why would an ordinary consumer need such a device?

As the company gets ready to unveil the product in June, that question is still hanging in the air. Apple hasn’t really found a killer app that will make the roughly $3,000 headset a must-have item. Instead, it’s trying another tactic: throwing everything but the kitchen sink at consumers.

Apple plans to pack the headset with a variety of features — games, fitness services, even an app for reading books in virtual reality — and hope that buyers find something they like.

It’s not such a wild approach. After all, Apple did the same thing when it unveiled its watch. In 2014, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook pitched the original Apple Watch as a highly accurate timepiece, a fitness tracker, a way to send personal messages to other wearers — and much more. In his presentation, he talked about using it as an Apple TV remote, an iPhone camera view finder and a walkie-talkie.

“The list of features is a mile long and I’m certain when developers get their hands on the developer kit, the list will get even longer,” Cook said at the announcement.

It soon became clear, though, that some features weren’t winners. Apple initially promoted the capability to send your heartbeat to contacts — something that didn’t catch on. It also had a Glances option for swiping through widgets; that system is now gone. And even telling the time isn’t really a core feature anymore, despite the product’s name.

The fact is, Apple had little idea which options would resonate. In the end, it focused on health tracking, notifications and complication-rich watch faces — but only after customers zeroed in on those features as their favorites.

“Nine years later, we’re about to see something similar play out with the Apple headset,” Bloomberg predicted. In Soviet America, beta testers pay you!

THE APPLE ADVERT THAT BRAINWASHED AMERICA:

Four decades on from Ridley Scott’s Apple Mac ad, its message of human liberation seems, in hindsight, risible. We do not live in the utopia promised by the Super Bowl ad, nor in the liberating world the Think Different campaign foretold, but in a conformist dystopia more nightmarish than those of Ridley Scott ‘s best movies.

True, the fall of the Berlin Wall five years after the Apple Mac was launched did herald the end of rule by the real-life Big Brothers of the Soviet bloc, but in our current world of digital surveillance and data mining, in which your every key stroke exists in the cloud, you’d be forgiven for thinking that we live in something if not quite as totalitarian as Orwell’s dystopian nightmare, then something similar. We are ruled not by Big Brother but tech bros such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and current Apple CEO Tim Cook.

But here’s the twist. Big Brother needed electroshock, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, drugs, rats in cages and hectoring propaganda broadcasts to keep power, while his Ministry of Plenty ensured shortages of consumer goods so that subjects were in an artificial state of need. Today’s tech giants have more effective tactics to ensure we do their bidding. They have ingeniously made us desire our own domination, glutting us with must-have goods. So, at least, argues Korean German philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his book Psychopolitics, in which he distinguishes between 20th century totalitarian control and its 21st century successor.

“Confession obtained by force has been replaced by voluntary disclosure,” Han argues. “Smartphones have been substituted for torture chambers.” Well, not quite. Torture chambers still exist. But the point remains: control of the masses beyond the wildest imaginings of real-life wannabe Big Brothers including Hitler, Mao, and Stalin has been achieved largely by more subtle means.

That’s quite a take from an author born in South Korea. Whatever the (many) excesses and pitfalls of today’s hyper-online era, they pale in comparison to the methods of the neighboring hermit kingdom, which can be summed up in one forgotten name: Otto Warmbier.

DARK MONEY, DARK GOALS: New Group Attacking iPhone Encryption Backed by U.S. Political Dark-Money Network.

The Heat Initiative, a nonprofit child safety advocacy group, was formed earlier this year to campaign against some of the strong privacy protections Apple provides customers. The group says these protections help enable child exploitation, objecting to the fact that pedophiles can encrypt their personal data just like everyone else.

When Apple launched its new iPhone this September, the Heat Initiative seized on the occasion, taking out a full-page New York Times ad, using digital billboard trucks, and even hiring a plane to fly over Apple headquarters with a banner message. The message on the banner appeared simple: “Dear Apple, Detect Child Sexual Abuse in iCloud” — Apple’s cloud storage system, which today employs a range of powerful encryption technologies aimed at preventing hackers, spies, and Tim Cook from knowing anything about your private files.

Something the Heat Initiative has not placed on giant airborne banners is who’s behind it: a controversial billionaire philanthropy network whose influence and tactics have drawn unfavorable comparisons to the right-wing Koch network. Though it does not publicize this fact, the Heat Initiative is a project of the Hopewell Fund, an organization that helps privately and often secretly direct the largesse — and political will — of billionaires. Hopewell is part of a giant, tightly connected web of largely anonymous, Democratic Party-aligned dark-money groups, in an ironic turn, campaigning to undermine the privacy of ordinary people.

Ironic? No. Expected.

Democrats have been opposed to digital privacy at least since Bill Clinton was pushing the Clipper Chip 30 years ago.

JOHN ROBB DISSECTS ELON MUSK’S TWITTER STRATEGY:

The battle for Twitter keeps rolling on. Here’s a round-up of the online war and how Musk uses Twitter’s interior lines to a significant effect:

Apple

Assumption or rumor: Apple was considering banning Twitter from their AppStore due to pressure from the networked #swarm.

Data point: Apple, Twitter’s largest advertiser, had already paused its advertising.

Opportunity: Apple came under fire for supporting China’s suppression of COVID protests (they limited airdrop).

Maneuver: Elon leaks the rumor that Apple is considering a ban.

Maneuver 2: Elon points out Apple’s abuse of its platform’s dominance.

Effect: Apple gets more negative coverage in one day than in a year.

Hidden maneuver: Twitter offers Apple significant incentives to resume advertising (Apple spent $180m in 2022).

Result: Elon meets with Tim Cook (Apple’s CEO), and the threat of a ban is dismissed. Apple resumes advertising on Twitter. An anchor participant in the war against Twitter is removed.

The Twitter Files

Musk makes a strategic play to prove Twitter is restoring free speech.

Maneuver 1: He does this by releasing internal Twitter e-mails showing government requests to suppress people and ideas on the platform.

Maneuver 2: He provides these documents to the allies (substack personalities like Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss) he generated by unbanning accounts instead of the establishment press (he can’t open source them because they aren’t anonymized).

Effect: The stories generated show cooperation between the political parties and Twitter on censorship.

Result: While the files generate little national coverage in the traditional press, they have a strategic impact.

They provide Musk with legitimacy (“defender of free speech”) for his actions.
They protect against government action in the future (requests or investigations). Assumption: he will quickly make government pressure public.
Directing the distribution builds up the value of the online press (on Twitter, substack, etc.) at the expense of traditional media.

Sounds about right.

DECOUPLING: Apple’s Chinese dream is over.

Apple’s relationship with China was one of the biggest bets in the history of the technology business, and it turned Apple into one of the largest and most-admired companies in the world. Its end will threaten Apple’s decade-plus dominance.

Under the leadership of Tim Cook, Apple has added nearly $2 trillion to its revenues by taking advantage of China’s invitation. Credit for Apple’s growth also goes to Terry Gou, founder of its most important contract manufacturer, the Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision Industry, better known as Foxconn. And there are countless other Taiwanese firms that have helped build out the supply chain for Apple and other companies in China.

The consumer products that Apple made in China it changed the way we all live. But both Chinese and American tech figures have been thinking for years about what to do when the party’s over.

Apple’s biggest problems might lie right here at home. The company has managed to alienate developers, free speech enthusiasts, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Getting out of that mess might make getting out of China look comparatively simple.

ROGER SIMON: Trapped by Apple—a Tale of the ‘Great Reset.’

Apparently, they are more upset with Elon Musk for trying to bring a modicum of transparency to Twitter, pulling their ads from his newly purchased platform and, according to Musk, threatening to remove the Twitter app from their app store.

Yet worse, in China, Apple has restricted AirDrop file sharing, the very method the demonstrators have been using to communicate privately out of earshot of their totalitarian masters. Was this on advice from the communist regime or did Apple just figure out for themselves what was in their best interest to do? It wouldn’t have been hard.

Meanwhile, Apple stock has lost some ground because these protests may be interfering with their iPhone production. Poor things. Further, according to Bloomberg, violent protests have erupted at Apple’s main iPhone plant in China. (Wasn’t Apple supposed to be leaving China for production? I guess not.)

Sadly, what’s going on isn’t surprising. Apple is acting in tandem with our administration, which also, not surprisingly, has stayed mostly mum about what’s going on in China and Iran. Freedom is of no interest to them.

Behind the Iran silence is, obviously, the three-letter word oil, for which President Joe Biden has only himself to blame for having seriously restricted our domestic supply for the most dubious of reasons.

As for China, Biden, we recall, is the man who insisted the Chinese—meaning the regime—were our friends, before he recanted that for electoral purposes. The true story of the Biden family and the Chinese communists, some of which must reside on Hunter’s laptop, is yet to be fully exposed.

What all this adds up to is Apple and the rest of Big Tech cooperating with the administration in the big lie that domestic terrorists (Trump, et al.) are the threat to democracy when they themselves are.

True democracy, whether manifest as a democratic republic or otherwise, has become an inconvenience for them in the march to globalism and the “Great Reset.”

When its guru Klaus Schwab said, “You will have nothing and you will be happy,” it’s not hard to imagine that he would exclude the iPhone or its equivalent implanted under our skin—“the better to track you with, my dear,” they might say in a modern version of a Disney classic.

Whatever their disagreements with Musk, “Elon Musk meets Tim Cook, says Apple never considered removing Twitter app,” according to CNBC.

HMM: Apple was a key reason Google and Snap had a terrible quarter, and it suggests Facebook’s troubles are far from over.

Google-owner Alphabet and Snapchat-parent Snap posted lackluster first-quarter results as the effect of a privacy change from Apple continues to squeeze big tech — signs that Meta is set to suffer a similar fate.

Analysts also expect the privacy change to have dragged down on Facebook and Instagram-owner Meta’s first-quarter ad sales. Meta is due to post its earnings after markets close on Wednesday. Twitter, also affected by the update, is set to report earnings on April 28.

By one count, Apple’s privacy changes are expected to dent Meta, Google’s YouTube, Snap, and Twitter’s revenue by almost $16 billion in total this year, according to analysis from data management company Lotame, which was shared exclusively with Insider earlier this month.

Introduced in April 2021 and known as App Tracking Transparency, Apple’s update forced app developers to ask permission from users before being able to track them across other apps and websites. With the majority of users opting not to be tracked, tech platforms and advertisers have less visibility over the exact audiences they are targeting and whether their ad campaigns are working.

I don’t care much for Tim Cook, but App Tracking Transparency is putting the screws to all the right data hoovers.

THIS MORNING: New report sheds light on Apple’s supply chain issues, highlights pre-pandemic problems.

Nikkei Asia has released a new report showing how ongoing supply chain bottlenecks and power restrictions in China have forced Foxconn, Pegatron, and other Apple suppliers to produce less, not more.

“Due to limited components and chips, it made no sense to work overtime on holidays and give extra pay for front-line workers,” a supply chain manager told Nikkei Asia.

“That has never happened before. The Chinese golden holiday in the past was always the most hustling time when all of the assemblers were gearing up for production.”

Nikkei Asia interviewed nearly two dozen industry executives in hopes of piecing together the story. As it turns out, the pandemic was only one part of the story.

Last Night: Apple CEO Tim Cook engineered a secret $275 billion deal with China. “Citing both interviews and direct access to internal Apple documents about repeated visits by Cook to China in the mid-2010s, the report describes a $275 billion deal whereby Apple committed to investing heavily in technology infrastructure and training in the country.”

Apple shareholders should have some very pointed questions for Cook about what he got for their $275 billion.

GOOD: Apple photo-scanning plan faces global backlash from 90 rights groups.

“The undersigned organizations committed to civil rights, human rights, and digital rights around the world are writing to urge Apple to abandon the plans it announced on 5 August 2021 to build surveillance capabilities into iPhones, iPads, and other Apple products,” the letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook said today. “Though these capabilities are intended to protect children and to reduce the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), we are concerned that they will be used to censor protected speech, threaten the privacy and security of people around the world, and have disastrous consequences for many children.”

The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) announced the letter, with CDT Security & Surveillance Project Co-Director Sharon Bradford Franklin saying, “We can expect governments will take advantage of the surveillance capability Apple is building into iPhones, iPads, and computers. They will demand that Apple scan for and block images of human rights abuses, political protests, and other content that should be protected as free expression, which forms the backbone of a free and democratic society.”

Background here: Apple Will Soon Begin Scanning Your iPhone for Child Porn.

ROGER SIMON: For Many of America’s Elites, China and Communism Have Already Won.

So many parts of our society are guilty of this it’s almost impossible to enumerate.

But we could start with the corporate world that is turning toward “wokeness” in droves—not that their CEOs are giving up a penny of their $15m plus salaries or have stopped profiting as much as possible from the despotic CCP.

In reality, that hypocrisy is the point for these globalists.

Globalism, as I wrote in an earlier piece, is in reality China-ism. That’s how it works.

A perfect example is giant Apple whose most recent quarterly China revenue came in at a record-breaking $21 billion+. At the same time we got all sorts of “social justicey” talk from CEO Tim Cook.

What Cook is doing, cashing in big on one side while mouthing “liberal” pieties on the other, suits the Chinese communists perfectly well, essentially enabling them. Apple then becomes a linchpin of American communism much in the way Huawei is a linchpin of Chinese communism. (Not inconsequentially, Apple’s top five executives, including Cook, earned a total of almost exactly $120 million in 2020, up 13 percent during the pandemic.)

Almost our entire corporate world is trotting eagerly behind, the majority acting in the same manner. And now, scariest of all, the military has gone “woke.” Who benefits from that?

The Bill of Rights, “liberty and justice for all,” what we knew to be America or, for that matter, any truths “we h[e]ld to be self-evident” are being left in the dust in this alacrity to exploit the Chinese market.

At least when Nixon and Kissinger went to meet with Mao and Chou, they had excuses—that they could triangulate with the USSR and that, possibly, opening up Communist China might induce them to be like us. That was proven wrong, and then some, when China joined the World Trade Association.

With what we now know about concentration camps holding a million or Uighurs, not to mention the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Robert Harris’s thinly disguised version of detente with the Soviet Union and China in Fatherland was more spot-on than he could have possibly imagined in 1992.

HE’S NOT WRONG: The Moronic Firing of Will Wilkinson Illustrates Why Fear and Bad Faith Mob Demands Reign Supreme. “All of this is especially ironic given that the president of this colorless, sleepy think tank — last seen hiring the colorless, sleepy Matt Yglesias — himself has a history of earnestly and non-ironically advocating actual violence against people.”

My days of disrespecting the Niskanen Center are coming to a middle.

Plus: “The recent extraordinary removal of the social media platform Parler from the internet was clearly driven by these dynamics. It is inconceivable that Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos and Google executives believe that Parler is some neo-Nazi site that played anywhere near the role in planning and advocating for the Capitol riot as Facebook and YouTube did. But they know that significant chunks of liberal elite culture believe this (or at least claim to), and they thus calculate — not irrationally, even if cowardly — that they will have to endure a large social and reputational hit for refusing mob demands to destroy Parler. Like the Niskanen and Times bosses with Wilkinson, they had to decide how much pain they were willing to accept to defend Parler, and — as is usually the case — it turned out the answer was not much. Thus was Parler destroyed, with nowhere near the number of important liberal friends that Wilkinson has.”

Also: “Social media is one of the most powerful generators of group-think ever invented in human history, enabling a small number of people to make decision-makers feel besieged with scorn and threatened with ostracization if they do not obey mob demands. The other is that the liberal-left has gained cultural hegemony in the most significant institutions — from academia and journalism to entertainment, sports, music and art.”

Related: Is It Time to Boycott Niskanen? Why Jerry Taylor Must Resign.

ROGER SIMON: Do We Really Need Congressional Hearings?

Nevertheless, I had higher hopes for these hearings because the role of Big Tech is one of the most serious questions facing our country, and indeed the world, now. And it would be interesting to see the likes of Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, and the more anonymous but equally potent CEO of Alphabet and therefore Google, Sundar Pichai.

Unfortunately, other than glimpses of these Masters of the Universe, we got little more than we did during the risible Barr hearings.

The major reason: The Democrats want to posture over antitrust and then do nothing. The Republicans want to posture over bias and then do nothing.

It’s not Grand Guignol but it’s a dumb show nevertheless.

Read the whole thing.

CORONAVIRUS UPDATE: A second case of coronavirus found through spread in California.

Coronavirus outbreak: Additional COVID-19 cases confirmed in Solano Co and Santa Clara County, officials say.

‘I think it’s going to go everywhere’ | Galveston health officials preparing for coronavirus.

Working coronavirus test kits promised soon in all US states after faults found.

How Walk-In Clinics Are Preparing For The Coronavirus.

Coronavirus reappears in discharged patients, raising questions in containment fight.

Coronavirus risk upgraded to “very high” by World Health Organization as death toll mounts.

BTS Have Canceled Their South Korea Tour Dates Over The Coronavirus Outbreak.

SXSW organizers: We have no plans to cancel at this time.

Here are all the major tech conferences canceled so far because of Coronavirus.

Coronavirus travel: most travel insurance policies won’t cover cancellations.

Tim Cook says he’s ‘optimistic’ that China has the coronavirus situation under control. “He also said that factories in China that make iPhone parts are reopening.”

Coronavirus impact on activity is main issue for investors, says Krishna Memani.

Coronavirus fear creates the worst week on Wall Street since 2008.

FALLOUT: Apple Scraps Q2 Revenue Guidance; Says Coronavirus Will Hit iPhone Supplies, China Demand.

As an operations guy, maybe now Tim Cook sees the need for decoupling.

SEEMS WISE: U.S. reroutes coronavirus evacuees to California military base.

Also: Global Corporate Giants Limit China Travel in Response to Coronavirus.

Multinational companies such as JPMorgan Chase JPM +0.70% & Co., Apple Inc. AAPL +3.15% and Kraft Heinz Co. KHC -0.30% are suspending business trips to China amid concerns about an outbreak of the fast-spreading coronavirus.

JPMorgan JPM 0.68% banned travel into and out of mainland China and imposed a two-week, work-from-home quarantine on anyone who had been there in recent weeks.

Accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP cancelled employee and partner travel to mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan for its workers in the U.S. and Mexico. U.S. and Mexico workers who have returned from China within the past two weeks are being asked to work remotely for three weeks as a precaution. Globally, workers have been advised to defer travel to China’s Hubei province and non essential travel to other areas in China, Hong Kong and Macau until further notice, a spokesman said.

Kraft Heinz, the consumer-goods giant, has introduced a global employee travel ban to and from China, according to spokesman Michael Mullen. “This will help reduce the unnecessary risk of virus exposure or transmission and is the most prudent measure to take while we continue to closely monitor the situation in China,” he said.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said Tuesday the company was limiting travel to China in the wake of the viral outbreak and has reduced store operating hours in the country. Apple, which has suppliers for the manufacture of its products in the affected region, has alternative sources, Mr. Cook said. Factories outside of Wuhan—the epicenter of the outbreak—have pushed back plans to reopen after the Lunar New Year to Feb. 10 from the end of January.

Also seems wise.

SOME LADY IN GYM CLOTHES NEEDS TO TOSS A HAMMER AT THEM: Controversy as Apple removes Hong Kong protest app, saying it is ‘illegal.’ A friend on Facebook comments: “Remember back when Apple and Tim Cook made a big show of refusing to help the FBI unlock a terrorist’s iPhone? Remember what a friend of liberty it was then? Remember how willing it was to defy the state? Remember Apple, the principled defender of rights? Well.”

Flashback: Silicon Valley has gone from liberating to creepy.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “Students aren’t showing up. And it’s only going to get worse. …” Plus: “Consider this comment from May 2019 by Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive: ‘I don’t think a four-year degree is necessary to be proficient in coding. I think that is an old, traditional view.'”

If only there had been some sort of warning.

THERE’S “WOKE” THEN THERE’S “FAKE WOKE.” The mark of the crybully is when a corporation’s CEO postures and preens, but it’s all a PR front. Take Apple, the “wokest” of the “woke”, whose CEO is the openly gay Tim Cook. Spent millions of shareholder money on LGBTQWTF marketing and virtue signalling this month, yet there are still plenty of Apple stores in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where this is a not uncommon occurrence:

Photo: Amnesty International

What I want to know is, where are the shareholder activists?

2020 PREVIEW? How climate change decided Australia’s election:

Labor’s vote collapsed in working class areas, particularly in the state of Queensland, despite the party’s redistributive and populist economic agenda. This demonstrates a backlash from the continuing culture war that has waged for the past two decades in the country, which has helped hollow out Labor’s traditional base.

The best example of this is on the issue of climate change and the environment. Labor promised a marked increase in renewable energy usage over the next decade, which Queensland voters translated into fewer jobs for the state’s large coal industry – and higher power prices. The idea of a party of inner-city elites taking away their communities’ jobs was too much to bear for many.

[Scott] Morrison’s election victory will set the course for the nation’s politics for years to come. It will be a long time before a political party takes an ambitious policy agenda to the electorate for fear it will be punished like Labor was on Saturday.

Tim Blair spots “Morrison’s Election Weapon: The Quiet Australians.”

Climate change as an issue may excite many in Canberra, but ordinary Australians take rather more seriously continuing four-figure power bills.

Those ordinary Australians now have a champion in Scott Morrison, whose victory speech celebrated mainstream values.

“To start a family, to buy a home, to work hard and provide the best you can for your kids,” the PM said.

“To save your retirement. And to ensure that when you’re in your retirement, that you can enjoy it because you’ve worked hard for it.

Contrast that with the eco-doomsday commencement speech that Apple CEO Tim Cook gave to the graduates of Tulane on Saturday:

In some important ways, my generation has failed you,” Cook said. “We spent too much time debating, too focused on the fight and not enough on progress.”

“You don’t need to look far to find an example of that failure,” he continued, pointing to an example that no one understands better than those living in the natural disaster-dogged New Orleans: climate change.

Curiously though, Cook likely isn’t cutting back on producing devices encased in plastics, and powered by electricity, or his private jet.

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: US Islamic Scholar Praises Brunei’s Death Penalty For Homosexuality.

“If you have had a rough week or are feeling down in the dumps, I have just the news to cheer you up. The Muslim country of Brunei is implementing hudud to crack down on sodomites and fornicators!” Haqiqatjou wrote on his website MuslimSkeptic, using the Arabic word meaning “punishments mandated by God.”

“The Sharia protects all of our rights, individually and communally. When rectum-sex enthusiasts are allowed to promote their gender-bending degeneracy openly, that deeply harms all of us,” he added.

Haqiqatjou also mocked politicians and celebrities proposing boycotts of Brunei-owned hotels and businesses, and suggested that Muslims should counteract boycotts by frequenting Brunei. He also suggested that Muslims from western nations go to Brunei to witness public canings so that they could learn what is, in his view, the proper way to implement Sharia.

Charming.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Has anybody asked Tim Cook about this? How many Apple Stores are there in Brunei?

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Facebook’s business model exploits YOU and Mark Zuckerberg could care less.

No rhetorical sleight of hand, such as Zuckerberg’s disingenuous claim that “we don’t sell your data,” can obfuscate that fact. His claim makes a technical distinction. Obviously, Facebook does not part ways with the data we give it in exchange for money from advertisers. They hold onto this precious commodity and sell insights into who we are and what we do to advertisers, treating it as a renewable and recyclable resource.

Indeed, Facebook’s business model relies on amassing as much personal information as possible. Zuckerberg admits this in his piece, saying Facebook aims to collect “what pages people like, what they click on, and other signals.” The latest illustration of this intent appeared in a recent New York Times report that Facebook plans to integrate Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp into a unified platform, which will dramatically increase their holistic knowledge and insights of users and their behavior.

All of this is emblematic of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s stark warning that we have allowed companies to create a “data industrial complex” in which “companies know you better than you may know yourself.”

Let’s not be fooled or distracted by semantic debate. We are being monetized and sold.

Yes, but… it’s working: Facebook’s Stock Surges 7 Percent on Huge Q4 Sales, Massive User Growth.

APPLE HAS A MESSAGE FOR AMAZON AND GOOGLE AND IT’S PLASTERED ON THE SIDE OF A HOTEL AT THE BIGGEST TECH CONFERENCE OF THE YEAR: “The message, which takes up about 13 floors of building, says : ‘What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone’ with the URL to Apple’s privacy website. While Apple’s ad focuses specifically on phones, it’s really a broader message about the companies it competes with in multiple industries.”

Sadly though, what happens in your real life doesn’t stay there, as far as Apple CEO Tim Cook is concerned.

PRIVACY: Apple Reportedly Blocked Police iPhone Hacking Tool and Nobody Knows How. Say what you will about Apple and Tim Cook — no, really, go ahead — but they’re much better on privacy than Google/Android.