What about ripping off their staff?

https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti...

Or ripping off countries?

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/ireland-takin...

Or being a member of PRISM? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...

Or the crappy conditions of the places it manufactures its devices?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-l...

- Ireland granting tax benefits to Apple that turned out to be illegal (when both parties thought they were legal at the time) is not Apple's fault.

- PRISM, as I understand it, is a way for large companies that may be the subject of large quantities of (legal) NSLs/warrants to upload that data.

Per Wiki:

PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google Inc. under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms.

I don't fault them for taking steps to reduce their compliance burden, nor do I have a belief that a company doing these by hand is more virtuous than one that does not.

- Offshore tech manufacturing in general sucks. Seriously. I can't think of a large vendor that doesn't use Chinese parts created under shitty-by-first-world-standards working conditions.

The no poach agreements on the other hand are completely evil and completely on them.

I don't even think that the no poach agreements are that bad. It would be one thing if the companies just didn't hire former employees but that's not the case, as some articles seem to mention or even imply. The issue was that Google's recruiters were proactively looking for entire teams of Apple's employees and simply offering them more money to come work for Google. That sounds really great for employees except that there's a very fine line for companies. There was never a formal anti-poaching agreement between these companies. It was more of an informal agreement that said "We don't want to take these to court because hiring entire teams of people out from under us falls under laws that prohibit tortious interference with business (contractual) relations so let's just agree to not actively go after our employees."

The issue was not that these companies were trying to keep people from moving up in their careers, they were trying to avoid the gray area that results from them having business relationships and using those to cripple each other. It's a bigger pain in the rear to go to court over these than it is to just not proactively do it.

As far as working conditions at factories go, Apple has at least put pressure on them to make improvements. What other major electronics company has done that?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/business/signs-of-changes-...

No one. This is why I'll never understand the criticism and why it annoys the crap out of me when articles about working conditions call it "Apple's manufacturing plant". It's not Apple's plant in any sense of the word except that they contract them out. Apple is under no obligation or responsibility to tell manufacturers how to run their businesses and I think they deserve kudos for constantly forcing these companies to improve working conditions and pay and for doing it contractually. They're blatantly putting their money where their mouth is.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a few years and can recommend it. Try it. There is no reason to wait. If you are not happy with a search result, prepend !g to your search query and DDG redirects you to Google search.

I wanted to switch but DDG is noticeably slow in South America compared to Google. Meanwhile I've been using private windows for all searches for over 3 years already. Hopefully it helps a bit with the bubble issue.

Noticeably slow for me in southeast Asia as well. Other issue is I ended up using !g on half my searches anyway.

Switched to DDG a few weeks ago and can count on one hand the amount of times I've needed to !g

I switched to DDG a while ago and while I do occasionally add !g to my query, I can count on one hand the number of times that it's actually helped. Usually if DDG doesn't give me good results, Google doesn't either.

FYI you can append the bangs (!g) to the query line as well as prepend.

  > seriously considering DuckDuckGo

that is a really anticlimactic conclusion.

what about Apple's willingness to create a labor monopoly by creating a cartel which agreed not to poach tech talent. Certainly that's as evil as anything amazon has done, no?

> Apple has time and time again demonstrated to be reasonably ethical

Along with the things others have mentioned, their campaigning against right to repair seems pretty unethical to me.

> I'm seriously considering DuckDuckGo

There's also Startpage since DuckDuckGo can be somewhat inaccurate at times.

I still trust Google over anybody, including the federal government.

You shouldn't. Google is selling your info and your data every second of every day. That's not to say you shouldn't use their services. You just shouldn't trust your personal or private data to them.

The difference is that I get a choice with Google. The government, not really.

This is why i never understood the willingness of people to shove all their data into the cloud, nor will i ever condone the use of or use the "cloud". Stop being lazy. Own your data.

And I do to for now, but the problem is that we don't know who will be running the company 5 or 10 years from now. Or how their privacy standards or security standards may change if the markets change and put pressure on revenues. Or if they just get greedier.

I find that incredibly naive.

You mean like the time they colluded with publishers to fix prices of ebooks?

Corporations aren't people and shouls not be judged for their 'characters'.

I don't care much for Apple but I agree they're the best of the lot when the lot consists of companies like Facebook, and Google.

My beef with Apple is their holier-than-thou attitude when it comes to Apps on their store. They didn't allow Gab.

In the past they've kicked out political parody apps. Finally they allow hate speech masquerading as religion while banning criticism of the same.

I have no moral string attached as to which companies and their services to choose from, because it will eventually backfire and virtue signaling is not my thing.

> Out of all the internet giants, at least to me, Apple has time and time again demonstrated to be reasonably ethical

Their use of chinese slave labor, exporting environmental destruction to dictatorships with lax environmental laws, their use of offshore tax havens to elude paying taxes, etc.

Apple is as evil as any other corporation.

>Their use of chinese slave labor

at least comes with the occasional nudge to the slave-driver

>exporting environmental destruction to dictatorships with lax environmental laws

Can you explain what this means?

>their use of offshore tax havens to elude paying taxes

This doesn't strike me as particularly evil

>etc.

I don't know, there's a pretty damn big list of things corporations do that are evil and you didn't seem to elucidate the comparison well enough to end it on 'etc., therefore they are evil'.

They seem to genuinely care about privacy and encryption, actively fighting the American government on backdoors. That's not something I can think of another company doing. Your move.