Nope.

It’s and education issue not technology.

People need to be taught that no every single thing will represent their identity and that’s ok, it’s not racism.

We need to teach the racism out of the people who claim to be anti-racist.

That would be an incredibly short-sighted own goal from the point of view of diversity. You need people to feel accepted, but you also need them to be in contact with others, otherwise you favour insular or tribal tendencies. You need mixing across communities, not pandering to insecurity. You need people to realise that it’s ok to identify with someone with different physical characteristics, or to empathise with them.

In this case, it's good to emphasize (to everyone) that software engineers are all sorts of people.

I think it's helpful to distinguish between "not whitewashing" (i.e., representing the actual demographics) and actively showing the demographics some wish the industry had (which is also what whitewashing is, although whitewashing only applies when the desired demographics are white). Your comment seems to appeal to "not whitewashing", but Apple here appears to be promoting its own desired demographics or else they would probably use characters who are either racially ambiguous (e.g., the yellow emojis) or else representative of the larger industry.

Of course, there's the possibility that I'm reading too much into Apple's intent based on this one sample. If we wanted to be more certain we would have to do a more robust analysis.

I don’t know about this one, but last time the people were random. I have no doubt that their faces were closer to an “ideal” demographic makeup (according to some marketing people) than the reality, but it is not obvious looking just at one picture.

Fair enough. I could be over-extrapolating.

FWIW I think a random selection among a list of representative faces is a good way of solving the problem.

Agreed. I also like the yellow-emoji option--use something that clearly has no race.

Except yellow skin has been historically used to describe Asians. Maybe purple or neon green could have been used to steer definitely clear of that.

If someone is tenuously making the "yellow emojis are actually asians" argument, they're certainly acting in bad faith, but I guess bad faith is what got us here in the first place. I find myself pretty unwilling to accommodate bad faith, especially because by definition bad faith will always make increasingly ridiculous demands.