Today in twitter drama, people are up in arms about the Apple Card offering a tech entrepreneur's wife significantly less credit than her husband. Recently, other tech entrepreneurs like the Woz have noticed similar limit discrepancies. However, I think this is all missing the forest for the trees. It is likely that GS is in fact offering less credit to women. However, in both cases, higher credit was offered to male tech entrepreneurs (while their spouses got much less credit). And, given that Only 1/5th of VC money goes to startups with even a single women on the founding board, I don't think it's super far fetched that the statistics will show women, on average, are given notably less credit than men, especially when those men are tech entrepreneurs.

Ultimately, I have no idea why twitter is so surprised by this. People seem to think this is a unique case of bank discrimination, yet it's really just a reflection of a society which pays women less than men, and values their work as less than men. And I worry we might "fix" the algorithm, but never correct the larger societal issues surrounding this problem.

_{Sidenote: Currently, most cards circumvent this issue by linking spouses accounts, so they are one and the same. The Apple card, for privacy(?) reasons, does not allow this.}

As we've seen, Apple has shown it's willingness to agree with the Chinese government's wishes several times. First by not allowing users of it's Chinese app store to download VPNs, then taking Skype off the Mainland China app store, as well as handing over control of Chinese iCloud operations to a Chinese firm, and also by removing apps with call kit in them from the Chinese app store.

Now, we should also note that Apple makes quite a bit of money from China. According to Apple's latest earnings call [PDF] for Q1 2018, they made $17.956 billion from China. So, this strategy seems to be working.

Discussion Questions

In what ways are Apple accommodating the Chinese government a necessity?

In this case, or others, when should Apple take into consideration the desires of their customers over their investors?

What problems can be had from accommodating China, but not being so accommodating to other governments?

What can other companies learn from Apple's dealing with the Chinese government?