Apple employs over 160,000 people, and like any enormous collection of humans, the group embodies a lot of variation. Even though they’re a group in the sense that they share an employer, they are not at all a group in other senses. They don’t all live in the same area. They don’t all agree on much of anything. Apple as a corporation takes actions (particularly recently) that might be reasonable, laudable, immoral, unfair, detestable, smart, or stupid.
Tim Cook, the human who happens to be the CEO of the corporation, is sometimes the singular actor who performs some of these actions. There isn’t anybody else in the corporation who could have substituted for Cook sitting next to the orange baby or presenting it with that ridiculous gold award, or whatever it was. In a typical commercial corporate organization, which Apple is, the CEO is in a unique, privileged position.
So when Apple removes apps like DeICEr from the App Store and makes obviously invented excuses for it, we can’t claim that Apple employees as a group are in favor of authoritarian, fascist regimes, whether in the US, China, or elsewhere. But it’s perfectly legitimate to observe that Apple as a corporation does seem to be acting in favor of authoritarian, fascist regimes, and to point out that Tim Cook should take the blame and the shame for it.
