Another Bite Out of Apple

What would Steve Jobs think of his company’s serial capitulation to Beijing?

Beijing’s recent demand that Apple drop the encrypted messaging service WhatsApp from its app store in China was met without so much as a peep about “thinking different” from Apple’s typically compliant executives. The official statement out of Cupertino: “We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree.”

That’s a far cry from Apple founder Steve Jobs’s immortal words, spoken before Stanford’s 2005 graduating class, just two years after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer that would eventually end his life in 2011 at the age of 56:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

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