Comment by perihelions

With respect, this topic is of immense interest and significance to a large number of us on HN. The many engaged and enthusiastic responses attest to that.

Is it off-topic to talk about the adversarial role of tech companies in a potential war, one that would be devastating to many of us? About the entanglements of their supply chains? Have I truly, in your judgement, derailed this thread away from curious discussion? Because, this subthread looks to me comparatively thoughtful (if mildly heated), while the more narrowly-construed topic of discussion is a polyester fashion accessory.

To paraphrase Anakin Skywalker: "from my point of view, it's the iPhone Pocket that's generic and uncurious".

It's a large step up from "it's used for job postings in (or closely working with) mainland China", to "it's featured in Apple product announcements targeting a global audience of millions".

Has it been used in an Apple product announcement before? My search is imperfect, but I actually can't find an example (on their /newsroom subdomain).

As recently as two months ago, with the Airphone announcement, they weren't doing this:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/09/introducing-iphone-ai... ("Introducing iPhone Air, a powerful new iPhone with a breakthrough design")

> "The 40W Dynamic Power Adapter with 60W Max will be available in Canada, China mainland, Japan, Mexico, Taiwan, the Philippines, and the U.S."

It's not a "loose geographical region". It's usually denotes precisely the PRC (People's Republic of China, including mainland China and the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao) together with the ROC (Republic of China, usually known as Taiwan).

Greater China is never used to describe a region. It means China, Tibet, Macao, Hong Kong and Taiwan according to Apple.

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> Just like how they removed all the gay dating apps in China yesterday (by request of the government of course).

Those apps have always been illegal in China. Of course, one could say Apple should not operate in China (and this is perhaps true), but they cannot both operate there and break the law.

You can’t fight City Hall.

The iPhone is a Chinese product. China ultimately controls whether or not the iPhone exists. No place else on earth can manufacture 20,000 iPhones an hour, 24/7/365.

Making two hundred million devices of the iPhone’s complexity and quality is not a trivial matter, and takes tens of thousands of skilled (and experienced) workers. Almost all of those people are Chinese, in China, subject to Chinese law. Apple cannot meaningfully fight Chinese law.

“sit comfortably” is a big stretch here. I imagine it must upset him as much or perhaps more than it does you and I. We, after all, can speak publicly about how upsetting it is. He cannot.

He did give a tour of Apple HQ to MBS. But maybe they think they can do more good than harm by selling products in Saudi.

This is why, as a gay man, I give people a look when they ask why I still rant about gay rights "even though you guys have marriage and stuff now".

It's 2025, almost 2026 and we're still doing this shit. I don't care if you think I'm icky, I think other people are icky sometimes but I don't try to stop them from existing for it. People are entitled to be who they are.

I didn't know that tim cook was gay and here is one message from wikipedia I want to quote

> In June 2014, Cook attended San Francisco's gay pride parade along with a delegation of Apple staff.[85] On October 30, Cook publicly came out as gay in an editorial for Bloomberg Business, saying, "I'm proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me."[86] While it had been reported in early 2011 that Cook was gay,[87][88] at the time, Cook tried to keep his personal life private

I feel like Tim Cook should be a man of his words and try to actually help the community he is proud to be in but I am sure that investors might not be happy but that just goes on to show that maybe even some CEO's could be puppets of shareholders and can be forced to do things solely for profit where their heart might not lie.

I think that another point is that shareholders can also be puppets of CEO's in the case of Elon musk 1 Trillion $ deal shows that imo

I feel like we live in the times where morality can be side-lined for profit and be celebrated. The whole idea why even people can be puppets of each other could be because they get profits and power and influence because of it (basically money most of the times)

But what power do those CEO's have if they can't stand for what they think is right or educate themselves on these matters.

Food for thought.

> virtue was not convenient at the time

Maybe we live just in such times.

> So sad to watch a gay CEO just sit comfortably and allow his company quietly destroy his own “community”

His community are elites and money.

There is no middle ground. Mentioning "Greater China" isn't neutral. It's precisely the idea of considering "Greater China" as neutral that is de facto siding with the PRC.

No, this is Apple being confident that the USA will drop Taiwan and that this and that siding with China is the "responsible" thing to do.

"Good for business" is not the highest goal a human can achieve. Not even close.

Start with "do the right thing" and progress from there.

Apple is the third most valuable company in the world. Not a mom and pop grocery store.

Apple CEO meets with the US president.

>It isn’t unlike Benelux, or Scandinavia, or Iberian, or Balkan, or Gulf countries.

Greater Israel, Greater Italy, Greater Germanic Reich oh wait I lost the point, I guess any connections to irredentism are purely coincidental.

US government has FAR more control over Apple as a company. China only has control of the Chinese operations. The president is personally beefing with companies and buying stakes in them. The tariffs alone could have severely hurt Apple, but Apple bent over backwards to appease the president. The US government can simply request an app be removed and Apple and Google will do it worldwide.

China does not have that power over Apple. China can threaten Apple but they have already diversified their manufacturing to other countries so China does not have a strangle hold on the supply line.

The recognition of any "status quo" is political.

Push back, as in this thread, can change which hierarchies are accepted and which aren't.

In particular, the use of "Greater China" normalizes corporate acquiescence to Beijing's explicitly revisionist policy preferences.

Taiwan is an independent nation. It isn't lost. And all free nations should intervene whenever the right to self-determination of another is threatened.

Say hi to the chairman for me.

I don't really see how "Greater China" is more neutral than "Mainland China and Taiwan" which is the phrasing they previously used.

Taiwan claimed Mongolia until 2002!

Why is UN recognition the metric here and not, like, idk the fact that Taiwan is a liberal democracy with the rule of law and freedom of speech and not a hypercapitalist dictatorship that disappears dissidents?

The population of Taiwan is 23 million. The population of Florida Keys is 82000. Not the same.

Me too. I've always just heard that kind of thing called "imperialist". But "irredentist" seems more precise.

I feel like in geo-politics. No country can be good.

Personally, I feel like america still has (had) hope with zohran mamdani but after the recent american shutdown, I would consider democratic party to be an extension of republican party or not doing anything radical except bernie,aoc, zohran and some other people.

I feel like America could have a hope to swing whereas china doesn't imo.

although, I feel like what is happening is that people made (short term?) decisions earlier generations earlier which lead us to where we are today where any country over-all needs a radical change as both europe and america and a lot of other countries need to radicalize what they are doing to give hope to the youngsters

Personally I feel like we shouldn't care much about US or chinese products but rather the ideologies of the product creators if we are worried about things and I think this is one of the reasons I love open source so much.

>The US is worse than China in many aspects, from forever wars to climate over colonialism to fascism and support for an ongoing extremely violent genocide on over a hundred thousand civilians.

My man, the US and China are more or less the exact same here with the exception of forever wars.

Climate? China pollutes like crazy, and so does the US. Colonialism? Maybe not in the same vein but China does engage in actions to other nations, such as Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan that could be classified as colonialism. Fascism? Well yeah both countries are pretty much openly fascist right now. Support for an ongoing extremely violent genocide of over a hundred thousand people? Yeah the US and China are both complicit there. In fact, in China, you're speaking about the regime itself, with context to the ongoing genocide of Uyghur people.

>where is China geonociding hundreds a week right now?

Xinjiang. They put people in camps and take extensive efforts to prevent births, to eliminate the Uighur population over time.

Looks like you almost have this habit of explaining/talking about things 'as a European', particularly when bringing up USA in the context of international relations like now...

I guess it's OK — I'm European too, for example — but it does seem like you're doing it to imply that your views are somehow (at least relatively more) popular among, or representative of, well, Europeans. But now that we're making such massive generalisations, I'd claim that well-educated English-speaking Europeans are often likelier to be more familiar with the views and internal debates among Americans than those of many of their fellow Europeans, and that you're probably no exception.

As for your comment, had you not addressed it to 'you Americans', I'd be hard-pressed to tell it apart from a pretty standard-issue American Left (or 'Progressive') rant, perhaps somewhere from the younger and more identitarian part of that crowd, for example (despite some of the quasi-tankie undertones). While I'll admit that scoffing at things like pro-life policies and/or American poverty is certainly easier and more common throughout the political spectra in (Western) Europe, I'd say your cringe-inducing bothsidesism with USA and China falls closer to the crackpot left camp in Europe as well.

Europe contains multitudes, and undoubtedly for some but not all, up until now at least, it has been a bit too easy to comfortably observe and judge things for so long as a world-political bystander from under the US nuclear umbrella, typically further from the Russian border too — whether you were an insular French with casual contempt for all things 'Yankee', a German atomic-phobic pacifist (or worse, a far-right, Pro-Putin knuckle dragger) from that 'European powerhouse' heated with Russian non-renewables, or even a Swede from the world's leading moral superpower, or something like that, anyway... ;)

I sometimes wonder what the comments will look like here when China invades/blockades Taiwan, and I suspect they will look a lot like this. Lots of US whataboutism. Note that the OP doesn’t mention the US at all.