> Long way from the "Think Different" era Apple. Been thinking about that campaign this week. Posters of people like MLK, which Jobs had to get permission for from each and every estate for the campaign. When Apple was solidly, unambiguously positioned as the computer for the rebels, the misfits, the crazy ones.

"Think Different" was an advertising slogan that Apple Computers, a publicly-traded corporation with thousands of employees, paid an advertising company to create in the late 90s in order to promote a certain image of the company, because the leadership at the time thought it would help them sell more computers. And it clearly worked (or at least didn't abjectly fail) because Apple Computers is still around today and is an even larger corporate entity with a much larger market cap.

Whether a marketing campaign succeeds in appealing to you emotionally has nothing to do with whether rebels, misfits, crazy people, or any other category of person would be better off buying and using computer products made by Apple. I've personally never liked Apple products, I've always felt like they took a lot of practical control away from the end user in order to facilitate what Apple leadership thinks the end user _ought_ to want. So I avoid using their products, and I think other people should to, although I respect that the walled garden Apple provides is a computing product some people do find it useful to pay for.

Leadership at Apple computer was probably engaging in political activities some people at the time objected to when those ads were made, just as they are today.

I dunno. I also think about how Jobs swindled and mistreated Woz time after time, many of the nerds who cut their teeth on the Apple IIc were appalled by the road he took. By the time the Macintosh released, Apple had cemented themselves as a capricious OEM with no interest in serving every minority niche.

Actions like this feel fully contiguous with Jobs' personality, to me. He wasn't afraid to mistreat large swathes of customers, fans or employees if it meant that Apple could cosmetically pull ahead of it's competitors. He didn't feel obligated to fight fair or defend his moral righteousness, and neither does Cook. This is the exact same Apple you always knew, they've just quit virtue signalling.

It's kind of wild that the founder of this venerable company shared the same stage with Khashoggi's fiance pre-Covid.

It's like attending a memorial of an assasinated Belarus activist and then following it up by attending the premiere of a propaganda movie about Putin's wife.

Someone inside Amazon should keep tabs on the actual non-inflated viewing numbers of this amazing blockbuster for posterity's sake.

Edit: Bezos is not listed as attending (elsewhere Tony Robbins and Mike Tyson are)

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Would be easier if half of HN didn't work for them. There's a reason why these posts get maybe 20 comments on here whereas ones showing similar allegiance to the Party by companies half of HN doesn't work at get 600.

But hey, vests too juicy.

and she’s an immigrant.

Yea, Apple's decision to have its CEO embrace fascism has really destroyed a ton of my goodwill towards the company and I'm actively looking for alternatives, delaying further purchases, and encouraging others to do the same.

Doesn't help that they appear to have shot all of their UX designers into the sun judging by the most recent iOS and MacOS upgrades.

Very true. This is why Hitler was surrounded by so many people. They went where the power was. Even if it’s not “who he is”, it is who he became.

The nazis were prosecuted decades later. Tim Cook’s actions shouldn’t be magically forgotten once Trump is out of office.

This pattern has historical precedent. Adolf Hitler’s inner circle included people like Albert Speer, a trained architect who was not an early ideologue but aligned himself with power as the regime consolidated control. Speer benefited professionally, became Minister of Armaments, and later claimed political detachment. These claims were rejected at Nuremberg, where he was convicted for his role in the Nazi state.

The fact that alignment can be opportunistic rather than ideological did not absolve responsibility then, and it should not automatically do so now. Accountability is not erased simply because a political era ends.

Capitalists only care about capital. Witness how fast the DEI stuff was jettisoned once it was determined to be unprofitable under the current administration.

Here’s to the crazy ones

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Forced means something else when you’re among the most rich and powerful people on earth - they chose to do this. It’s far more demeaning and should haunt them to their graves.

> being forced to

Choosing to.

I'm honestly pretty tired of the 80s-movie-derived cultural memeplex of nerds getting oppressed by jocks with girlfriends in a high school context. This never accurately characterized any social environment I've been in, and I'm definitely a nerd by disposition. I'm not sure this ever really existed outside the imaginations of hollywood screenwriters. The Breakfast Club is mid, Weird Science is an actively terrible movie, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off is entertaining enough but looms way too large in the American pop culture imagination.

Tim Cook was the salutatorian of his Alabama public high school, majored in industrial engineering in college, and later got an MBA. He sold IBM computers for years and joined Apple in its late 90s doldrums because he was won over by Steve Jobs' charisma within several minutes of his first interview with Jobs. He's an openly-gay fitness nut - meaning he's had a lot of opportunity to have sex in his life (and being famously private, he's not talking about it one way or the other, as is his right).

I frankly don't think Tim Cook is much of a nerd. He's a smart, driven, ambitious business guy who's done a good job at making the gigantic electronics company he's the CEO of sell more products and navigate the political environment it operates in. He's not some underdog hero, and people who actually care about technology for its own sake or who care about computational sovereignty shouldn't attach their sense of identity to anything Apple does.

Wow. That’s a breakdown I will remember for a long time.