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Comment by sdoering | Hacker News Reader

A posting like this is (for me) absolutely a reason not to use any of the 37sig-products.

Seldom I have seen such a quasi-religious, non-critical hailing of an international cooperation.

Working-conditions in china? Who cares? Steve jobs takes over and kills the till then legitimately produced Mac-Clones, because they were technically superior (killing companies is not so good for US-jobs)? Who cares? Ripping of ideas from developers of Apps? Who cares? Well maybe fellow-developers should care.

It seems, that as long, as apple is able to whitewash itself in front of its fanboys the will sing in tune as one big choir and hail their spiritual leader Steve, come what may.

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"...kills the till then legitimately produced Mac-Clones, because they were technically superior"

Given the alternative was being driven out of business by the Mac clone manufacturers, and the fact that Apple employs A LOT of people in the United States (far more than a few niche hardware companies ever did), it seems like they made the correct choice for US jobs.

So because Apple staying in business is good for US jobs, they get a free pass?

Well, had they gone out of business, all of those jobs would have evaporated. It's not a free pass - it's an organizational restructuring. No business would be crucified for killing an unprofitable division; this happened to be an interesting circumstance where said division was an external vendor. Is it a good business decision to EOL an extremely unprofitable (and potentially game-ending) product line, and refocus on your core business? Yes. For every company ever.

"Working-conditions in china? Who cares?" Let's start with you. I assume, you wrote that comment on the computer. There's 100% probability that this computer was manufactured in China. So its you. You do not fucking care.

Are you not using a computer made in China? The problem is not where it was made, the problem is the conditions under which it was manufactured. Unfortunately we as consumers don't have much power or insight into where or how our electronic products are made. One thing we can do is pressure companies to change their suppliers, something Apple has shown they're willing to try at least to some extent.

I'm not the one that made 13 billion dollars in a single quarter while the 13-year-olds who assembled my product are driven to suicide and are praised in the New York Times for getting up at midnight with a bun and coffee to make up for the poor planning of my design team.

Apple sucks. So does every other electronics manufacturer in the world, but Apple sucks more because they're sitting on huge mountains of cash that could reduce the suffering of their workers if they could manage to give a shit about human concerns.

100% probability... okay. So according to the fact you've provided, if one wishes to communicate online, there is no choice. Did the person you're responding to create this situation? I don't think that choosing not to own a computer because you disapprove of working conditions in China is a smart tactic.

Please read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

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