cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/6745228
TLDR: Apple wants to keep china happy, Stewart was going after china in some way, Apple said don’t, Stewart walked, the show is dead.
Not surprising at all, but sad and shitty and definitely reduces my loyalty to the platform. Hosting Stewart seemed like a real power play from Apple, where conflict like this was inevitable, but they were basically saying, yes we know, but we believe in things and, as a big company with deep pockets that can therefore take risks, to prove it we’re hosting this show.
Changing their minds like this is worse than ever hosting the show in the first place as it shows they probably don’t know what they’re doing or believe in at all, like any big company, and just going for what seems cool, and undermining the very idea of a company like Apple running a streaming platform. I wonder if the Morning Show/Wars people are paying close attention.
Jon Stewart is a national treasure.
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Fucking cowards.
Changing their minds…shows they probably don’t know what they’re doing or believe in at all
undermining the very idea of a company like Apple running a streaming platform
I’m not sure in what way it was suggested that Apple was “different”, but to clarify, companies don’t do things for “ideas” they do things for profit. If it increases that profit, they “believe” in it, and if it doesn’t, they’ll kick it to the curb.
And not only is Apple no different than any other company in that respect, they are pretty much the top-tier example of it. They’re a $2 trillion company, the biggest in the world. They didn’t get to that point focusing on the greater good. Nothing is more important to them than their profit.
another reminder that apple’s “privacy, that’s iPhone” is a marketing gimmick. they profit from surveillance and censorship in China1. elsewhere, this catchphrase has allowed them to suck Facebook’s as revenue into their growing ad business, surpassing even tiktok in terms of ad revenue2.
they’ll happily do pink washing, but will try everything do dilute labour rights3.
so, apple is just your average big tech. nothing exceptional about them(except for them suing regular people to oblivion4).
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1: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-censorship-data.html
2: https://finshots.in/archive/apple-is-an-advertising-giant-almost/
3: a simple search result would lead you to many such cases: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=apple+labour+rights&ia=web
4: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/technology/apple-trademarks.htmlThey were so close to implementing on-device scanning last year it’s scary. The number of people who supported it because Apple promised to only use it for child sexual exploitation material really shocked me. “Think of the children” really does have a way of making people’s brains short circuit.
It was a lot longer ago, like 2.5 to 3 years ago, but that’s pedantic.
My own father was shocked that they’d do that (his death is how I know the timeline; no sympathy required, I’ve dealt with it, it happens). He really respected them, primarily through my respect of them and excitedness about their tech. He was blown away that they’d even consider such a thing. He just couldn’t calculate how such a misstep could happen. I can, but what a mistake that was.
I’ve seen an argument that this could have been a calculated risk to prevent attacks when they enabled increased encryption. I don’t think it was that, even if that was the resulting effect. They are too protective of their brand to deliberately take a hit.
Bummer. That’s some weak and feckless megacorp bullshit. Just like something Stewart would cover, which is why this show was such a great power move. And yet? Infinite profit over all else, so never mind.
Look at John Oliver, he talks shit about HBO constantly. Do they care? Nope, because he has more Emmys than anyone could know what to do with. Respect your talent and reap the rewards. Pretty basic stuff, Apple.
The difference is HBO is a media company that largely operates in the US, and Jon Oliver making fun of them isn’t going to hurt their business at all. Apple is a hardware company that also makes media. And selling hardware in China is critical to their business. Since the CCP owns China, they can get their panties in a twist and just ban Apple. Like they did with government devices.
As a publicly owned company they have a legal responsibility to maximize profit for shareholders. It’s the same reason why Twitter had to agree to the sale to Elon Musk and why they had to force it. It was a terrible move overall but since Elon was buying all outstanding shares and taking it private, the board literally had no legal choice but to take it since he was offering well over market value.
Public companies don’t get to take moral stands when there’s money on the line. They legally have to put shareholders first.
Where’d did this “legal responsibility to maximize profit” bullshit come form?
There is no such law, an no entity to enforce the responsibility.
The entity is the civil court system, and while there is no law written “no company can work in a way that doesn’t maximize profit”, upon taking investment, it’s typical that companies, the fiduciary, come under the expectation that they’ll be working for the sake of their beneficiary’s interests. In public companies, this interest is clear-cut. Investors want dividends and to see the value of the company increase. This is typically done through maximizing of profits.
So while it’s not explicit that they must forever maximize profits, companies can be successfully sued for not doing so.
Learn more:
Then stop calling it a law.
Nobody called it a law. It’s a legal responsibility, and it is law, but it is not “a” law.
Companies have also been sued for not maximizing profits and won the case. “Best interests” can mean a lot of things. It can mean short term profit for one shareholder, long term profit for another, and stable, guaranteed profit for a third.
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That’s actually not the case.
“courts have consistently refused to hold directors liable for failing to maximise shareholder value”
"In 2014, the United States Supreme Court voiced its position in no uncertain terms. In Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., the Supreme Court stated that “Modern corporate law does not require for profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else”. "
Just more corporate propaganda, that’s all.
https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-companies-to-maximise-shareholder-value
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It’s frustrating but very much a real thing. You might google “fiduciary duty to shareholders.” Basically, once a company is public, the board has to act in the best interests of the shareholders (which means maximizing returns and/or shareprice.)
This is terrible for the world but pretending it doesn’t exist doesn’t help.
Duty ≠ law
Duty is a legal concept, silly Billy.
You can commit a crime by violating a duty. A common one of which you’ve probably heard is “duty of care” I.e., a doctor can be charged with a crime by not fulfilling their duty of care to a patient.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/personal-injury/breach-of-duty/
I almost want to look up confidently incorrect. Just maybe learn from this and try googling when you are unfamiliar with a term, you look less silly!
Show me what law enforcers a company to profit.
You’re getting confused or you might not actually understand how companies work, so I’ll break it down.
There is no law forcing a company to profit. (Though Companies are generally formed for that purpose.) A private organization could do whatever it wants within legal bounds. (This is how non profits, charitable foundations etc exist.)
But, what happens next is many companies go “public” by selling shares. In essence, they put a percentage of themselves on the market and people by shares in that company, such that they, legally speaking, own a tiny percentage of that company. Part of that purchase is that the company now has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. As noted before, a duty is a legal concept like assault, negligence etc. And I explained fiduciary duty earlier, you can look through.
Here is kind of a classic example of a company losing a case because its directors breached their fiduciary duty to minority shareholders:
That’s not true. Courts have specifically ruled that maximizing returns is NOT required. The companies do have to consider the best interests of the shareholders, but that does not strictly mean maximizing profits:
I would re-read that article a bit more closely. The point they’re making is that recently there have been developments such that maximizing profits is not seen as the SOLE principle behind decision making above all else.
For example, they cite Hobby Lobby which has Christian practices that doubtless cut into profits but are allowed as part of the company’s mission.
But my apologies, a more accurate phrasing would’ve been duty to shareholders and the company.
Still, unless Apple has a really interesting company charter, annoying a capricious manufacturer of almost everything the company needs that is ALSO one of the world’s largest markets, well, not that tough a multi billion dollar decision.
It’s the same reason why Twitter had to agree to the sale to Elon Musk and why they had to force it. It was a terrible move overall but since Elon was buying all outstanding shares and taking it private, the board literally had no legal choice but to take it since he was offering well over market value.
It was put to an actual shareholder vote. The individual shareholders voted yes because he was overpaying. The board was fundamentally irrelevant.
“Public companies…legally have to put shareholders first.”
I thought this too, but it is apparently a myth.
"There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” — even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is utterly false.
To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
Rare supreme Court w I guess? I dunno
It’s a good line in what is otherwise a very, very bad SCOTUS decision that a for-profit corporation can ignore laws protecting female employees because of the corporation’s religious beliefs.
So bizarre that companies are capable of believing in gods.
And to piggyback on this, the decision that’s often pointed to by sociopaths to justify that horseshit is Dodge Brothers vs Ford, wherein the Brothers Dodge invested in Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford was more interested in paying his employees and providing them with things like housing and antisemitic literature than he was in giving the Dodge boys massive ROI.
They sued and the STATE OF MICHIGAN Supreme Court, not the US Supreme Court, found that Ford had a responsibility to his investors before he had a responsibility to his employees. This does NOT mean that he had to “maximize profit”, it simply meant that Ford had to put the well-being of the business and investors ahead of the well-being of his employees.
It’s worth noting that Ford wasn’t just paying people well. He almost ran FMC like a charity, he was so focused on worker satisfaction. That’s where the issue came in. The idea that you have to underpay people because “MUXIMUSS PROOFIZ” is a Harvard Business sociopath lie.
well-being of the business…ahead of well-being of his employees.
Hey, I mean, like, corporations are people too, man.
Brb gonna go incorporate myself real quick
It’s called incarnation in humans.
So corporations too should have to go to jail if they break the law. Or in this case close down the building and not perform any commercial activity for a certain time
Still a sticky problem from labor’s perspective, unless the corporate time-out includes salary and healthcare payments. Maybe except the C suite?
But then you might as well keep the company open (Unless it is currently doing harm), and throw the directors in jail.
I always understood stock investing as assuming the risk something like that could happen (I’d a director fucks up, you lose, or vote him out of the job). But now that all of our retirement is tied to the fucking thing it can’t work that way.
Funny how that worked out huh? All the benefits of personhood, but none of the downsides, like mortality, having to pay fair taxes, incarceration for crimes, possible death penalty for killing citizens …
That is literally the whole point of corporations, they’re designed to allow people to take more risk. Business law 101.
(If you grossly abuse it, they will “pierce the corporate veil” and arrest those responsible, but again, that’s only if you’re grossly abusing it)
Lol try being a CEO and answering to your shareholders about how you’re not trying to maximize profits and growth. Like it may not be legally required but you’re kind of required to just by the nature of the role itself.
Specifically, the thing that is wrong is the idea that the only way to uphold their fiduciary duty to shareholders is to maximize profit. They have a legal obligation to put their shareholders’ interest first, and maximizing short term profit is not the only way to do this. Benefit corps give some of their revenue to a cause, sometimes companies invest in long-term stability or profitability.
Nah, Apple is an ad aggregation company same as Google. They use hardware and software to lock users into their products so they can show them ads and collect their data to make the ads more targeted. In return ad companies pay them to serve ads to their users. That’s how they make money.
The fuck you smoking. 80% of sales are hardware and 20% is services, ie music, tv, and their cut of App Store sales
Ad revenue from running ads on the app store, their news app , podcast app, etc.
I didn’t claim they were making most of their money that way, but that’s absolutely the business model they’ve been shifting to for the last decade as their hardware sales decrease pretty much quarterly, especially their phone sales.
It was clarified that Apple devices are fine in government. Teslas ban would be a better example
Apple is a hardware company that also makes media.
Apple is a lifestyle company. The hardware is just the base layer.
They make some of the best CPUs in the industry nowadays, though.
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Performance per watt, my dude. But sure, x86s can still heat your house better than Apple silicon.
Performance per watt is a CPU metric I’ve never seen anyone use before lol
It’s wild what Apple marketing comes up with
It’s wild what Apple marketing comes up with
Performance per watt has always been a major concern of chip manufacturers. Sure, they have increased the amount of watts you can throw at a chip without melting it (8086 used 1-2W) , but the most significant improvements have been towards making less watts give more power.
I can appreciate not liking Apple, there are plenty of valid reasons. This is not one of them. Their CPUs are state of the art and took both Intel and AMD with their pants down.
Yes, measuring the consumption of electricity for a given performance benchmark is totally irrelevant to datacenter providers, who get their electricity for free from the electricity fairy, and thus can harvest pure profit without operational costs.
It is also totally irrelevant for portable devices, because batteries last forever, and every smart phone has a huge fan inside to dump all the heat waste via dual XTREME exhausts.
Meanwhile every major cloud provider is investing in designing and deploying their own ARM silicon. I’ve benchmarked graviton and T2A, the cost per performance is great and only going to get better.
Apple is pretty reliant on China for other aspects of their business though. HBO doesn’t make phones.
Sorry, Jon. This country is owned.
He knows. He’s the one who’s been trying to teach that to the rest of us for decades now.
I didn’t think my opinion of Apple could go any lower but I guess I was wrong.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But ahead of production kicking off on the show’s third season, Stewart and Apple have reportedly parted ways over “creative differences,” and The Problem is coming to an end.
Though new episodes of the show were scheduled to begin shooting in just a few weeks, staffers learned today that production had been halted.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, ahead of its decision to end The Problem, Apple approached Stewart directly and expressed its need for the host and his team to be “aligned” with the company’s views on topics discussed.
Rather than falling in line when Apple threatened to cancel the show, Stewart reportedly decided to walk.
The Times’ report doesn’t detail what about the show’s planned coverage of artificial intelligence and China prompted Apple’s executive leadership to butt heads with Stewart.
But considering how pointed criticality is a big part of what ultimately made The Problem With Jon Stewart a hit for Apple TV Plus and how maintaining a cordial relationship with China is crucial to Apple’s future plans for growth, it doesn’t come as a shock to see the show hit the chopping block this way.
The original article contains 283 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 34%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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Well, I guess we’ve now unofficially confirmed that, despite the fact that Siri is still terrible, Apple is also investing a shitload of money in large language models behind the scenes.
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I would subscribe to him if he moved to patreon.
Same here unironically
Many of us would do it too
Unfortunately patreon is getting worse
It’s just embracing the enshitification of everything.
He might now.
He’d be a great leading subscription for that new Grayjay app Louis Rossmann has launched https://grayjay.app
stop making off topic promotions of that flawed product
You’re implying I have made a series of promotions spamming the fediverse – I have not. Twice max, I think. I am merely a rando who found out about by accident around the same time as this story, and it looked kinda cool. Honestly haven’t launched it since taking one or two peeks since.
Is there some reason for the antipathy I am not aware of? I admit to liking Louis’ channel and his fight for right-to-repair…
I’m seeing a lot of anonymous quotes and assumptions but not a lot of verifiable facts. Sure, creative differences may have existed, but did any meaningful number of people watch the show? Even in online communities dedicated to Apple TV specifically I can’t recall seeing anything other than perfunctory mentions. Nobody ever actually talked about this show. I feel like the show was probably already on thin ice with a questionable ROI, and some likely not terribly sensational disagreement pushed it over the edge. Makes more sense than Apple caring what he says about AI, since they’ve pointedly avoided the embarrassing hype train, and clearly aren’t going to engage in the sort of exploitative “all of your documents are now our training corpus” nonsense that he’s likely to actually criticize.
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I’ve seen plenty of talk about the show and some of the interviews being widely celebrated. Doesn’t mean that there was good ROI, but I’d also wager that plenty of people watch apple TV+ stuff without being vocal about it that much just because so many people have apple stuff and just watch whatever is “good”.
John “walking” means he quit the show, not that he was let go.
Viewership on Apple TV will never be high, as it is a low-performing streaming service in general. It’s a bad idea to lose flagship content on a struggling streaming service.
This is a far more significant loss for Apple than it is for John Stewart.
If anything most peoples experience with it was the sister podcast.
Interesting how you skip over the China part entirely while you cook up an imagined narrative to hand wave away the show based on your personal feelings that has nothing to do with Jon walking.
Freedom of the press comes to an end when Apple is in the house 😧
Even taken at its face value, this allegation is literally an example of freedom of the press in action. Freedom means the ability for a publisher to choose what they publish. That includes telling staff no.
To appease whom?
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