Jacob Hall, Editor-in-Chief of TapSauce | APPS | 01.30.2012 @ 9:00 am
Let’s start by stating the obvious: Apple is rich. Very rich. So rich, that it’s easy to imagine their corporate headquarters installing a Scrooge McDuck-esque swimming pool filled with gold doubloons and jewel encrusted crowns from a distant land that every employee is allowed to swim in at least once a day. Take a look at this chart that lists the all-time biggest quarterly earnings from companies of any kind. Of the 19 listed, 18 of them are oil and gas companies (14 of which are ExxonMobil). One of them, comfortably situated in the number four slot and not too far behind its competition, is Apple, with a quarterly profit of $13.06 billion. That’s billion with a “b.” Apple’s total revenue was $46.33 billion.
Apple, a company that sells expensive, non-essential items to first world nations, is on the same list as companies that supply a product that is a requirement for every nation in the world to function. That is astounding. Granted, these are the earnings from the months when the iPhone 4S went on sale for the first time, but they moved 37 million units. A year earlier, in the same quarter, Apple sold 16 million iPhones. All of this before we even take a look at the iPad, which continues to be everyone’s dream tablet, even after the introduction of the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet.
Heck, Apple even managed to briefly overtake ExxonMobil as the most valuable traded company in the world on the 25th (only to dip behind it again by the time the day was over). Still, think about that: a technology company is actively challenging the richest company in the world when it comes to stock prices. Wow is the only applicable word here.
With that out of the way…let’s get a little philosophical, shall we? If you came here to just see those massive numbers and fist pump because you really love your Apple products, you can click away right now. This is the part of the article where I’m going to ponder why Apple’s earnings slightly terrify me on a bizarre moral level.
We live in a capitalist society, so we’re trained to be impressed with anyone who has managed to make a ton of money. It’s nothing to be ashamed of…every time I see a rich person going about doing rich person things, I always think “Look at that rich person! I wish I was rich so I could do rich person things!” Like every American, I dream of making a cool million, waving goodbye to the plebes and buying a fortress in the countryside where I can live out my days shooting shotguns at propane tanks and watching HBO whenever I please, thank you very much.
Still, we, as Americans, don’t like to think about the source of that money. I’m not talking about the credit cards of millions of people. I’m talking about — insert broken record…NOW! — the conditions under which Apple products are manufactured. This is a subject that has been trotted out, debated to death, revived and debated to death hundreds of times over, but a recent (and spectacular) episode of This American Life reminded me this is the kind of thing we really can’t forget about. If we’re going to enjoy our iPods and iPads, we should at least have the nerve to acknowledge that they’re being manufactured by hand in Chinese sweatshops (and it’s not just Apple, but just about every major electronic brand, so let’s spread the blame around evenly, if we can).
So, here’s where it all ties together: if Apple is making profits that rival that of major oil companies, should it have a personal responsibility to be more active in how its products are manufactured? If the government classifies a corporation as a person, shouldn’t that “person” have a moral obligation to use those insane and excessive funds to do more to improve the factories that have seen suicides and crippling injuries on an alarming basis? I know the manufacturers aren’t part of Apple itself, but it remains troubling that Apple has never gone further than a few strongly worded announcements and letters. If Apple took a stand against this, would other companies take notice and follow suit? Probably not, but I’m an optimist.
Apple has never been a particularly charitable organization. Bill Gates just donated $750 million to fight AIDs and malaria, just another step in a war that he’s been waging for as long as he’s been a billionaire. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, never used his money in any charitable ways (at least not publicly, but when you’re rich, you don’t do this kind of thing behind closed doors). I can’t help but wonder what would happen if a corporation/person as rich as Apple decided to use its money to actually, you know, do good things. Like improve those factory conditions. Heck, why not move those factories stateside, open one in Detroit and actively help kickstart the American economy?
Of course, that’ll never happen, so pardon the silly fantasy of it all. Still, if Apple is a person and that person has $13 billion in profit, that person is pretty cold-hearted to do nothing with it.