Apple, traditionally, has been known for great message discipline. We might not have always liked its message, and its message was sometimes pretty glad-handed, but it was usually consistent.
What happened with that?
One event that occurred over the weekend really puts how Apple is at odds with itself into stark contrast.
Based on who he likes to hang out with on a Saturday night, one wishes Apple CEO Tim Cook were a bit more of a homebody. The day that ICE agents killed another U.S. citizen in Minneapolis, Cook went to the White House that sent those agents to Minnesota so he could attend the viewing of a weapons-grade hagiography about the First Lady.
This would be the hagiography directed by accused sexual predator Brett Ratner. You have to be a pretty bad person to have X-Men: The Last Stand be low on the list of your offenses. Cook, who many gushed over for courteously and rightly not putting his hands on the hips of Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon when photographed with them at the premiere of “The Morning Show”, even posed for a picture with Ratner. Fun!
Or as Terrance O’Brien wrote in The Verge, “When you’re cool with doing a fascism (sic), what’s a few sexual misconduct accusations?” Well, “a few” would be six. At least six sexual misconduct accusations.
It’s too bad for Cook that there are pictures because Ratner is famous for claiming through his lawyer to “have no recollection of the incident” when women detail incidents involving him, so maybe he might have afforded Cook the same… hmm, “courtesy” is really the wrong word here. “Callous dismissal”! That’s more like it.
You will excuse some of us for feeling a bit of whiplash here. Does Cook’s attendance and chumminess with the President (no slouch in the sexual misconduct allegations count himself) seem in line with Apple’s historical level of prudence? It’s especially bad considering the App Store still hosts apps that create CSAM and non-consensual sexual images.
Grok Floods X With Sexualize Images of Women and Children
That headline is not from before “Grok apologized” (the most sarcastic of quotes imaginable, as AI is not sentient, no matter what terminally online edgelords or AI executives tell you). It is not from before xAI promised it would fix the situation. Twice. First by monetizing it and then by saying it stopped it when it hadn’t at all stopped it. No, this is from five days ago, and literally nothing has happened since. X and Grok both remain on the App Store as of this writing.
The Macalope is old enough to remember when Apple said “stopping inappropriate content is a top priority” of the App Store.
Oh, wait, it still says that. Weird. They must not have updated the App Store’s web page to indicate it happily hosts apps that make non-consensual porn there now. Very strange. How odd.
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Cook’s apparent lack of regard for even the optics of attending these events, let alone the morality, leads the Macalope to believe that he will resign as Apple CEO sooner rather than later (probably within the next year). Cook will move into the position of chairman of the board and continue to hang out with and butter up the president, giving him participation trophies and million-dollar donations, providing cover for incoming CEO John Ternus. Cook will no longer be Apple CEO, so it’ll all be cool.
Except he is the Apple CEO right now.
Seven days ago, Apple’s homepage, as it does every year, honored Martin Luther King Jr. Cook, meanwhile, honors a president who faces a defamation suit from five wrongly convicted black men he said should be executed and has never apologized for, and had to be browbeaten into recognizing the national holiday.
Apple needs to decide which things it wants to do here. Does it want to continue to suck up to the president, or does it want to get points for dedicating its home page to King? And does it want to keep saying stopping inappropriate content on the App Store is a priority, or does it want to continue to host X and Grok?
Continuing to try to do all these things is becoming an increasingly obvious farce.
