It’s not though. Only under capitalism would be literally throw away an item and replace it with the exact same item in the same condition. The only reason for this behavior is capitalism and profit incentives. It’s a waste of labor and resources and only benefits the profits of capital.
He’s given up running it. He did his part. He was the charismatic con man. Dude is enjoying signing his name on shit he has no clue about. Seriously, it’s almost like a child like joy I see on his face just being like “me important man with big marker”.
Shits being run by the billionaire Oligarchs. He just enjoys being the public face at this point. He enjoys trying to sell whatever bull shit is being done. He fucking loves it. But he’s absolutely not running shit.
I’ll give you a personal story. I’m not saying anything about apple but this is my personal experience with a tech hardware company I use to be an engineer at in Silicon Valley.
We had a product we sold to other companies. Something not consumer grade at all. Think major data center products. This product we’ll call it, Product X, was sold in different levels of speed. So you had the baseline product at speed 1x and another at speed 2x.
Now, due to hardware delays and hardware issues the 1x (which was meant to rollout first) actually got its production schedule pushed back to the point that the hardware testing had been fully verified on the 2x model as well as the 1x. So mass production had not started yet but both models were verified through beta testing and development.
So, it actually ended up being cheaper for manufacturing to only produce all 2x hardware and have me (the software engineer) just reduce the throughput on the same hardware. They would simply just stick a different 1x sticker on the models running the purposely speed limiting software.
The company released 1x the next quarter. Again, with hardware identical to the 2x. And then waited two quarters to release the 2x. Now technically the 1x models could literally be upgraded by a software update. But that would expose this scam. So companies we sold 1x models to that wanted to upgrade would literally throw away the same exact hardware to buy the 2x model.
This is just my personal story. You don’t even have to believe it. But, having worked in the industry now for 10 years, this is not uncommon practice. I would not put it past Apple to do what the above post suggests.
Protests, strikes, or boycotts with a planned end date are next to useless. You can do that if it makes you feel good. But don’t do it in place of real organizing. The best thing you can do now is organizing locally. Join your local PSL and support what they are doing.
Ok. You bring up an important point. And I hope I can take a minute to convince you of something.
What you’re saying is correct. But it relies on fundamental falacy of the way people try to view economics. When we say “capitalism” we’re obviously talking about the entire economic structure; the “rules” for which an economy is organized and the government that enforcess those rules.
The issue with your comparison is that is is not at all comparable to the economic insensitives of massive companies. There is absolutely no valid way to compare a small business or individual hiring a contractor to what I was previously discussing.
I think our economic education suffers in this country because people tend to think of massive economies of scale as just a “bigger” small business. This is not at all comparable. And the waste that this produces is absolutely non trivial.
The “run the country like a business” people have this same flawed logic. They image that any business is just a “coffee shop” but with more employees and customers. But these things are just not comparable. It would be like everyone deciding about how to build an airplane but they assume that the physics are in a frictionless vacuum.