I'm pretty sure they're referencing Apple saying it took "courage" to remove the iPhone's headphone jack.

And for my generation: the courage to ditch CD-ROM drives!

If anything, Apple's environmental impact and their advertising around it is a staggeringly courageous amount of bullshit considering how hard they make it to service, upgrade, and repurpose old devices.

I use my Apple devices for a substantially longer time than the alternative, so I would say I’ve probably consumed less.

They generally have a much better resale value compared to other brands too. People are still buying old macs on ebay.

I just listed my old mac on eBay yesterday. It's from 2015. Absolutely would not bother with any other laptop.

"Courage", as well as "A sense of pride and accomplishment" means different things now, because some presentations have given those words new life.

In the case of "Courage", Apple branded their decision to remove the headphone jack as "courageous".

"A sense of pride and accomplishment" is from the Battlefront video games, when marketers were talking about some features that either cost hundreds-of-dollars, or literally hundreds of hours of gameplay to unlock.

What is the new meaning of the word "courage" then? I presume it just means a decision other than the "safe" option. It's a bit melodramatic, perhaps, but not really a new definition. From an individual perspective, someone may have felt they were sticking their necks out and were in danger of hurting their career if the decision led to backlash and a reversal.

(Talking about the audio jack change, no idea how making easy-to-maintenance parts is not the safe choice).

For one, courage is the mean between cowardice and recklessness. I.e., the pursuit of a good where the risk is rationally justifiable in proportion to the good.

Can't comment on whether the decision makers were being courageous or not in any way. Not sure any of us could.

AFAIK, companies "having courage" has been a meme for a few years after Apple said it took great courage (or similar) to remove the headphone jack.

I was actually considering it a lack of courage: that Apple is so insecure and concerned with its own lack of or zero innovation in last decade or so that it forces its customers to keep buying costly new devices and keep getting costly repairs by means like making devices unrepairable (e.g. literally using a new pin configuration in every other MacBook SSD which are non standard to start with), making devices breakable (glass backs?) etc.