And yet the prevailing narrative about Apple in China is remarkably narrow. Much of the coverage over the past two decades has focused on the tedium of assembling Apple products — a tale of low wages, underage employees, 16-hour working days, a spate of suicides at an assembly plant in 2010 and accusations of using forced Uighur labour. This narrative wasn’t entirely wrong — Apple set up a supplier responsibility programme in response, vowing to improve conditions — but it missed the biggest piece of the puzzle: that Beijing allowed Apple’s activities so that China could exploit Apple and become a tech powerhouse in its own right.
Indeed, China wouldn’t be China today without Apple. The California tech giant’s investments in the country have been spectacular, exceeding even that of the Marshall Plan — America’s four-year effort to revive Europe after the Second World War — in cost, man-hours and impact. Apple estimates that since 2008 it has trained at least 28 million workers, the vast bulk of whom were in China — that’s more than the entire labour force of California.
This is the other story — of how Apple, in feeding its own global ambition, helped fuel China’s technological and economic rise.
PowerPhotos 3 provides tools for metadata, searching, and multiple Photos library management that dramatically upgrade how you can work with your organized media.
SoundSource gives you a level of control over your Mac’s audio that Apple could only dream of. And it does this all while stowing away neatly in your menu bar, where it’s both out of the way and just a click away when you need it.
It took me a while, but I've realized one does not need to just use one podcast app to listen to all the podcasts (that I want to listen to). Rather than searching for one podcast app that work for all my contexts, I now have two different podcast apps for different time of the day: one for regular listening, and one for bedtime listening.
On the other hand, I yet have a good reason why I want both the Apple Music and Apple Music Classical apps yet.
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Thanks for reading.