Pluralistic: 10 Nov 2022 Amazon and Apple have an illegal price-fixing conspiracy


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Pluralistic: 17 Jun 2022


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Pluralistic: 30 May 2022


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Apple’s Cement Overshoes

80 pounds’ worth of malicious compliance in two Pelican cases.

A polluted, plastic-strewn ocean-bottom; prominent in the foreground is a smashed iPhone; overhead is Apple’s Think Different wordmark.
Conall/CC BY 2.0, modified

A Feature, Not a Bug

Apple CEO Tim Cook rang in 2019 with his annual shareholder letter, fulfilling his legal requirement to warn his investors about the risks the company saw on its horizon. One of Apple’s leading risks for 2019? Repair.

Apple makes a lot of money from the absence of repair. The transition from desktop PCs to laptops and then tablets and phones was a fantastic opportunity for hardware companies. A desktop PC might go obsolete, but it’s rare for your iMac to suffer a broken screen, fall into the toilet, get run over by a city bus, or fall down a sewer-grate.

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Pluralistic: 15 Feb 2022


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Apple’s Right-to-Repair U-Turn

Celebrate, but keep your eye on the prize

A picture of a disassembled Iphone from Ifixit’s “IPhone 12 Pro Max Teardown,” it is surmounted with the Apple “Think Different” wordmark; in the bottom corner, behind the Ifixit logo, is Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars with a speech bubble that reads “It’s a trap?”
Image: Ifixit, Apple, Lucasfilm

It’s been a pretty great week. Ever since Apple announced that it would sell its customers spare parts and tools to affect their own repairs, and supply them with the documentation to do so, I’ve been thrilled to do my comrades’ online victory laps. For a decade, I’ve fought alongside my pals in the Right to Repair movement against a coalition of the best-capitalized, most powerful multinational companies in the world, who used their incredible might to trample all other considerations: fairness, climate justice, safety, and security.

We introduced dozens of state right to repair bills — bills that set out the principle that when you buy a product, you should get to decide who fixes it — and watched as, time and again, a coalition of big business, led by Apple, used lies and scare-talk to convince lawmakers to vote the bills down.

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Pluralistic: 29 Oct 2021


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  • LaserWriter II: Tamara Shopsin's celebration of the heroic era of the Mac.
  • This day in history: 2001, 2006, 2011, 2016, 2020
  • Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading

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Pluralistic: 08 Jun 2021


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Pluralistic: 26 May 2021


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Pluralistic: 03 May 2021


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