I think the core issue uniting all of these recent concerns about Apple and China (or any other country) is how critical structural incentives and capabilities are when it comes to individual free, privacy, and security, and in turn the fundamental danger of centralization. I've seen a lot of criticism towards companies for "folding" to oppressive regimes or orders, comparisons to people or organizations being party to atrocities in the past, etc., but I think those often miss the point. It is generally unreasonable to expect companies to directly oppose powerful governments. By design they are not in fact governments themselves, mostly for better (though maybe rarely for worse). Conflicting laws and norms between sovereign polities can be directly opposed, and there is rarely a bright line for "worth giving up everything for." In general, I don't think it's that fruitful to expect humans not to be humans.
So it's a lot better if they just plain don't have the power (or at least not total power) in the first place. It's just like in infosec in general: the most secure information is the information that you don't ever have, you cannot be hacked for it or leak it. That's the only surefire way to avoid not merely abuse but even pressure for abuse, and it's here that I think Apple has made a big blunder even vs the rest of the tech industry. Yes the cloud is a big deal nowadays, but Apple's business model is uniquely well suited to supporting full non-cloud distributed usage models in addition as a differentiator from where so many other offerings have gone. It's fine if Apple has their own iCloud and App Store as the core principle source, but if they simply gave individual users and organizations the full and ungated ability to replicate that (in features if not breadth) locally then Apple could simply wash their hands of some of this without hassle (it could even let them get pickier elsewhere since there'd be a separate release valve).
Apple used to be great at this too, back in OS X 10.5/10.6 at least Mac OS X Server had a lot of interesting potential. Easy full mirrors of Software Update, Network Homes and NetBoot/NetInstall were awesome, etc. It's not hard to imagine them having gone further that route, and it's too bad they've kind of half-assed gone the other way despite being weaker at network services then their competitors anyway.
Legislatively from an American perspective this would also be the right way to try to fight back against authoritarian regimes: require American tech companies by law to offer decentralized options for owners of devices, like side-loading. If that's available then it would make the job of authoritarians significantly more challenging.
So it's a lot better if they just plain don't have the power (or at least not total power) in the first place. It's just like in infosec in general: the most secure information is the information that you don't ever have, you cannot be hacked for it or leak it. That's the only surefire way to avoid not merely abuse but even pressure for abuse, and it's here that I think Apple has made a big blunder even vs the rest of the tech industry. Yes the cloud is a big deal nowadays, but Apple's business model is uniquely well suited to supporting full non-cloud distributed usage models in addition as a differentiator from where so many other offerings have gone. It's fine if Apple has their own iCloud and App Store as the core principle source, but if they simply gave individual users and organizations the full and ungated ability to replicate that (in features if not breadth) locally then Apple could simply wash their hands of some of this without hassle (it could even let them get pickier elsewhere since there'd be a separate release valve).
Apple used to be great at this too, back in OS X 10.5/10.6 at least Mac OS X Server had a lot of interesting potential. Easy full mirrors of Software Update, Network Homes and NetBoot/NetInstall were awesome, etc. It's not hard to imagine them having gone further that route, and it's too bad they've kind of half-assed gone the other way despite being weaker at network services then their competitors anyway.
Legislatively from an American perspective this would also be the right way to try to fight back against authoritarian regimes: require American tech companies by law to offer decentralized options for owners of devices, like side-loading. If that's available then it would make the job of authoritarians significantly more challenging.