The Apple engineers' unwillingness to back down but even pushing things further with their insulting second code name shows a degree of arrogance that's astonishing.
The industry was interesting (bizarre) at the time in that the engineers were more or less left to run their domain. Upper management might give the overall direction of what to work on but beyond that there was not a lot of middle or lower management that could tell engineers how to do that.
This left a lot of the responsibility (and authority if you will) in the hands of engineering to accomplish what the company wanted. And so engineers chose code names. To be sure too they were not meant for (sanitized by) the PR department — they were strictly at the whim of engineering.
Engineers don't want to have to put on a "marketing hat", or get marketing to sign off on a codename (for chrissakes).
That one of those code names leaked somehow and caused bad publicity for the company — that was management's/marketing's problem, not the engineer's.
We're in a more modern era now where the balance has shifted to a much more top-down model — diminishing the broader role engineers used to have.
To think otherwise is a much stronger arrogance
GP asserts that what the engineers did is wrong. They didn't say that the public should get to decide what codenames to use or anything like that. They simply pointed out the arrogance of the engineers, and they are right.
It's like a straw man, but specific to issues of morality.
"X is wrong".
"Oh, so you want to jail every offender of X? You want to completely regulate Y in case it leads to X?"
You just don't know what a fallacy is.
> Oh, so you want to jail every offender of X?
This is not what I'm saying. I'm disagreeing, and putting forward a stronger, opposite claim.