Showing their true colors. "Going mask off" as the kids would say. There's an observation that computer programs tend to reflect the organizational structures

Showing their true colors. "Going mask off" as the kids would say. There's an observation that computer programs tend to reflect the organizational structures of the company that developed them. I would go further and argue that company cultures are a reflection of the founders that built them. In the case of Apple, Steve Jobs was an emotionally manipulative psychopath that was very good at conning people, making anyone he talked to buy into his bullshit. When he didn't get his way, he'd cry like a child and throw tantrums. Everyone at Apple absolutely lionized the shit out of Jobs, even during the interregnum period where the company was being torn apart by idiots. All of the upper management was his own hand-picked successors, who have largely continued doing exactly what Jobs was doing, just with higher scale. The world largely did not notice this because the actual product (at least, when Jobs was actually in the driver's seat) was good. Part of the capitalist social contract is that we don't care about how the sausage was made so long as we aren't assuming the risk[0]. But this is still very much a religious cult that just so happens to be shaped like a for-profit corporation, run by people who were hand-picked by its dogmatic, emotionally unstable founder[1]. It just so happens to also employ actual geniuses. In the Apple religion, there are commandments, and one of them is "thou shalt not install unauthorized third party software, for it is the malware of the beast". Like other religions, the commandments are based in some kind of plausible system of rules, we can absolutely Chesterton's Fence them, but that rationale has been forgotten by true believers who take them to axiomatic extremes. Apple is not exactly going to die on this hill[2], but they are going to try to make the system as restrictive as possible within the DMA's constraints, because they've RDF'd[3] themselves into thinking their greed is protecting users. [0] Also, most of the people Jobs really fucked over were the kinds of people society did not care so much about in the 1980s. [1] This also applies to the FSF, except it's rules are "thou shalt not bind the user to your tech cult". It's an anti-cult cult. [2] Though I've had the urge to make fake sales pages for an Apple Nuclear weapons program and photoshop the words "POOR IMPULSE CONTROL" on Tim Apple's head. [3] Reality Distortion Field, not Resource Description Framework