4 Times When We Saw the Dark Side of Steve Jobs & Apple.

Everything was not perfect or worth-idolizing.

No company is perfect and same holds true for apple.

The company had flaws — and several of them. Let’s dig into the details of the company where it several times gave proof of an ugly, dark side.

1. Job’s Verbal Abuse

Steve Jobs himself, he could be a tyrant. He would publicly humiliate a team upon disappointment.

Fortune reports one such incident when in 2008, he, with dissatisfaction, launched MobileMe — an email system designed to offer smooth synchronisation features.

The magazine reports how he stormed on the team responsible. Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?”

Upon getting the expected answer, he continued, “So why the f*** doesn’t it do that? You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation. You should hate each other for having let each other down.”

That public verbal abuse ended when Jobs then and there replaced the head of the group on the spot.

This brings another of Jobs’s attitude of being a jerk: not only he would replace but fire people prior notice.

As a chairman of the Board of Directors at Pixar, Job’s lost profits in all the domains, be it hardware software or animated content. Solution?

A deep layoff. He insisted on letting go of employees without severance pay and prior warning.

2. Breaking the code: China’s child labor reports

Is it legal to employ labor aged below 16? The law does not say so, but Apple, on various domains, broke the code anyway.

One such law violation was reported in 2010 when Apple’s operational factories in China regularly employed labor aged below 16.

Later reports stated how the practices of recruiting underage labor rose since 2009. As the years progressed, the child labor practices only worsened — not going much far, hinting at just a year later.

Since 2011, apple started employment overseas, making them working in gruelling 34-hour shifts. The overseas factories operated 24/7 — yes, all day, all night and every day.

Apple had to meet growing global demands for apple products; thus, they deployed such a ‘productive’ and ‘fruitful’ mechanism of awful child labor.

Sadly, even overseas factories were not compliant with health and safety codes — the company might have thought of making a colourful record of breaking more codes apart from breaking just the regulations of working hours and employees’ age.

3. Intimidation to silence the press and bloggers

Apple does not use fear only upon employees but more intensely on the press — mainly to silence them. There have been several cases where Apple’s legal team had intimidated journalists during Job’s rule.

For instance, in 2005, a 19-year blogger Nick Ciarelli reported the existence of the Mac Mini before its launch. The result? Ciarelli, after several legal skirmishes, shut down his blog “think secrets” forever.

In the name of law enforcement, Apple staff had raided the houses of journalists like Jason Chen.

4. Being Against Giving Money To Charity

Jobs in a 1985 Playboy interview stated,

In order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes…the problem with most philanthropy-there’s no measurement system.. you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded…So…it’s really hard to get better.

But there came a time in the life of Jobs when he actually thought about being philanthropic.

In 1986, after having left apple, he initiated Steven P. Jobs Foundation, but the foundation couldn’t stand for over a year.

The angelic reflection soon drifted away from Jobs, as he returned to Apple in 1997 and did worst — shut down all its philanthropic programs without ever reinstating them.

Failing to find a proper rationale behind his anti-philanthropic perception, many could not simply advocate his actions.

Mark Vermillion, who shortly ran Steven P. Jobs Foundation, once stated in his interview of Jobs not having enough time for such endeavours and simply no one could excite him about the cause.

Interestingly, history testifies how American billionaires gave back to communities. Contrary to this, considering Jobs’ net worth, the guy didn’t own any public record of even giving a penny to charity.