Why Apple’s threat to kill iMessage and FaceTime isn’t a bluff

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

The serious matter of data privacy

When politicians go to war with corporations, you should generally bet on the politician. Not because they are necessarily more powerful, but because they have more to lose if beaten. A politician needs to be seen to win public battles in order to impress voters, but corporations can make as many concessions as necessary provided they continue to make money. Companies are hampered, too, by the fact that they need to offend as few potential customers as possible, while politicians often thrive on division.

Apple is a famously principled company with a distinct culture and ideological position, but it isn’t exempt from this trend. When Donald Trump became U.S. president, for instance, Apple’s liberal-sympathetic management must have been dismayed and alarmed. But publicly at least, they adopted a policy of respectful conciliation. Tim Cook went along to the man’s CEO meeting and played nice for the cameras (even when Trump got his name wrong); he chose not to ridicule his half-baked rants about Apple building “their damn computers and things” in the U.S. Some years later it emerged that the company gifted the 45th president the first Mac Pro built at the Austin facility they allowed him to pretend was built in response to his comments.

Similarly, Apple has shown little appetite for publicly opposing China’s dismal human rights record and strict censorship laws. Rather than asking questions about forced labor allegations in Xinjiang, Apple lobbied against legislation designed to protect Chinese Uyghurs. When the state demands that podcast, RSS, or VPN apps are removed from the Chinese App Store, Apple is quick to comply.

But there are exceptions to every rule, and every now and then you’ll see a corporation fighting a political battle tooth and nail. And the key, without wishing to be overly cynical, is to look for battles that aren’t really about politics, but about money.

For Apple, the question of privacy isn’t an abstract philosophical debate, but a real issue that affects its users–and its own revenue–on a daily basis. The company has chosen privacy as the hill it’s prepared to die on, not because its CEO really, really believes in privacy (although of course, he might), but because privacy underpins its entire business model. Buy an iPhone, says Apple, and your data is secure. Unlike those other tech companies and their business models built around data capture.

This week we covered the story that Apple is so exercised by “snooper’s charter” legislation currently planned by the U.K. government—which includes the right to secretly instruct messaging services to remove security features it finds inconvenient—that it will close iMessage and FaceTime in the country rather than comply with it. In the news article, I mused briefly on whether or not this threat is a bluff and concluded that zapping two of the company’s most popular services (iMessage alone is a powerful driver to the iOS ecosystem) in a major market would be a drastic step, and one it surely wouldn’t want to go ahead with.

But then I remembered that time the FBI told Apple to create a software back door so it could get into the iPhone of a suspected terrorist, and Apple refused. That’s exactly the sort of public battle that most corporations, most of the time, would absolutely decline to get involved in. Apple took a huge amount of bad PR for that stance and will have alienated a huge number of potential customers at the law-and-order end of the political spectrum. But it figured that creating a back door would weaken the security of all iPhones and that giving in would create a dangerous precedent, and decided this was a battle worth fighting.

Switching off its two big messaging services in the U.K. would be a drastic step, and one Apple won’t take lightly. But this isn’t like smiling politely while Donald Trump says a bunch of stuff you disagree with on an ideological level. Data privacy is something Apple regards as an existential question, and if I was a member of the U.K. government, I wouldn’t bet on it backing down.

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Trending: Top stories

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The rumor mill

It’s time for a big iPhone 15 leaks roundup: we’ve got a new pink color, super skinny bezels, and stacked batteries.

A new Apple Watch Ultra is very very likely to arrive this year.

The iPhone 15 might not arrive until October–and be hard to find.

Foldable iPhone, my eye! Patent activity shows Apple is developing a rollable screen.

The iPhone 16 Pro Max may finally get a super-zoom camera.

A next-gen iPad Air is in the works but probably isn’t coming till 2024.

Podcast of the week

Rumors are starting to pick up about Apple’s fall product releases, and it could be a full slate. We talk about what we could see with the new iPhone, Apple Watch, and Macs, in this episode of the Macworld Podcast.

You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.

Software updates, bugs, and problems

We explain why everyone should be running the latest betas on their Apple devices.

Apple has released the macOS Ventura 13.5 beta release candidate.

And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Twitter or on Facebook for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.