It's no accident Apple is the most profitable company on the planet...

Easy to do...

Step 1.  Don't pay taxes....

Step 2.  Exploit cheap workforce....

Step 3. Install catch nets for suicides....cheaper than cleaning blood of concrete...

Step 4. ....

While I agree on the rest, which is not hard to do, given its blotted record with regard to 'profit above ALL else' and effectively sweeping employee suicides under the carpet, Apple does make good products and is a tech leader when it comes to quality and innovation.  However, it doesn't matter how good the products are if owning them leaves a sour taste in your mouth because the company's practices are distasteful... at best.

I have an interest in Apple's new Mac Pro, which is wholly designed and built in the US, but as for the iPad, iPhone and other Apple stuff made in China while exploiting 'near' slave labour... won't touch it with a very elongated pole.  However, while my distaste for Apple's employee 'abuse' rates high up there, my other reason for boycotting those products is that Apple, at no time, considered passing the savings it made from exploiting 'slave labour' on to its customers.  Now I'm not suggesting that anyone should benefit from ill-gotten gain and the 'abuse' of workers, no, far from it. 

No, my point is more that Apple's greed sees no bounds to how its profit is derived: from essentially ignoring worker suicides and their obvious causes [extremely poor working conditions] so as not to have to pay to fix it; to robbing its customers blind with over-inflated prices.  Yes, companies need to make a profit in order to survive, but Apple, being the most profitable company on the planet, has gone to great extremes to turn a fast AND slow buck regardless of how it comes... from exploitation, over-inflated prices and tax evasion.

Oh, and before anyone says other companies do it - and I see someone already has - it don't make it right.  More to the point, Apple does it on such a grand scale - hiding its Australian; US; European and UK earnings in offshore tax havens - that it is more than just criminal. 

No, this is theft of Biblical proportions and requires divine intervention, a wrath from upon high, which hopefully is delivered when Bill Gates comes out of retirement, retakes the reins at Microsoft, and plucks Apple from its tree.

Apple can't raise it's prices infinitely.  They are constrained by the market place.  But not to worry there will always be people who stand in line for several days in inclement weather for the latest model of iPhone.

Sigh.  

We are living in a period of time reminiscent of the robber barons.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)

In social criticism and economic literature, Robber barons became a derogatory term applied to wealthy and powerful 19th-century American businessmen that appeared in North American periodical literature as early as the August 1870 issue of The Atlantic Monthly^[1] magazine. By the late 1800s, the term was typically applied to businessmen who used what were considered to be exploitative practices to amass their wealth.^[2] These practices included exerting control over national resources, accruing high levels of government influence, paying extremely low wages, squashing competition by acquiring competitors in order to create monopolies and eventually raise prices, and schemes to sell stock at inflated prices^[2] to unsuspecting investors in a manner which would eventually destroy the company for which the stock was issued and impoverish investors.^[2] The term combines the sense of criminal ("robber") and illegitimate aristocracy (a baron is an illegitimate role in a republic).^[3]

We hear now on all sides the term "Robber Barons" applied to some of the great capitalists. ... The old robber barons of the Middle Ages who plundered sword in hand and lance in rest were more honest than this new aristocracy of swindling millionaires.^[1]
—Lida F. Baldwin, quoting the August 1870 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, writing in 1907 about how little business had changed in 35 years.

It's okay to win, but the way we win matters.

backs out of the room slowly...  

Actually Phoon, I started with Apple products back with the Apple IIe (yeah, I'm 63). I have had iPhone's that are overpriced with no storage expansion capabilities (what a waste). I had an iPad for all of 3 days and I took it back as I didn't like it overall.

Basically though any company that abuses their workers is trash to me, and that makes Apple's products trash also. I have no use for any company that takes jobs out of this country and puts them overseas just to save a few bucks, and I try to avoid their products when I can. They are assisting in ruining our economy here in the US, and that's very sad. 

I appreciate your views Tom and while I agree on several aspects of them we will just have to agree to disagree on the "trash" aspect.

Truth is, Apple assists in the ruination of any economy where it sets up shop, by taking the money and running... to any tax haven where it can't be touched by authorities trying to recover unpaid dues, etc.  In other words, Apple does not contribute anything of worthy of mention to the economies gracious enough to host it. 

As for my interest in the new Mac pro, while it is an impressive piece of equipment that would look good on my desk, I very much doubt that I'll ever be able to afford one at the over-inflated price being asked, so it's not likely that I will be contributing to Apple's ever growing coffers/exponential greed.

If Apple is evil, why do millions of people voluntarily give Apple money?

Clever marketing.

You stick an 'i' infront of a bucket of shit and 'I' MUST have it....

....and I ain't one of those 'millions' ....

Apple had about two hundred million customers in 2011 according to TechCrunch. 200 million people voluntarily giving Apple money.

Marketing is all it takes?

Some would venture to say Microsoft is just as evil. Recall back when they would buy out their competitors just to force IE on the masses?

When would a company not buy out their competitors given the opportunity?

Yes.

It's a consumer society...

I have personally successfully avoided their products.  Not a penny of mine has contributed to their tax-free society, nor will it.

Meanwhile...if you took a minute to read each of the comments in this thread Rinehart has made onemillionandseventyseventhousand dollars in that time....

Aahhhh!  Now I know what i gotta do while I try selling my body to raise the money to be able to afford the new Mac Pro... put a fechin' i in front of it.

Same trouble as me, eh?  Can't afford Apple crap cos you can't feching give it ^ away, much less sell it.

It's like the time I was downtown trying to sell my body to raise the money to buy an iPad, and I figured I'd start low so as not to price myself out of work.

Anyway, this sour old biddy comes up to me - well you didn't think I was gonna attract any young uns, did ya - and she asks: "Well... how much is it, then?"

Feeling a little hesitant I replies: "Um, how's five bucks sound?"

"You gotta be kidding, old boy..." as she she snorts heartily: "I just wanna borrow it for half an hour, not take a feching 6 month lease on it."

Orright, so now everybody knows why I don't got an iPad, but at least I'm not supporting the 'Evil Empire' from ill-gotten gain.

As for the aforementioned bucket of shit... reckon I'd get a refund if i took one into an Apple store and complained the 'i' was defective?

Look, Paul, I get it that you hate Gina Rinehart with a deep-seated and dedicated passion, I really do, but do you have to keep mentioning her name so often here in the forums?  It's not that I mind you expressing your absolute contempt/total disgust for the woman [term very loosely used for the want of a something better to describe it]... but every time you use its name, my lunch, dinner, breakfast, whatever, wants to regurgitate itself with the force of a projectile fired from a canon.  Now I wouldn't mind so much if I weren't trying to really hard to economise on the food bill, but I'm never going to afford that Mac Pro at this rate of mention

Now I don't wanna deprive you of your daily bitch, cos everyone needs one to relieve tension, so I've come up with a few variations that may delay the realisation of who you're speaking of long enough for me to settle enough to keep my breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever.... so here goes:

Gina Swineherdt

Gina Lollipiggida

Gina Blackheart

Gina Heartless

or Temporary Gina [and that hopefully she kicks the proverbial sometime soon]

Close....

MS did it on purpose just to make sure IE was the only browser out there. And they got in trouble for it as well.

Ah yes.  Microsoft sued over using their own browser in their own operating system.  

Yes, that was inherently wrong.  There 'should' have been no issue with MS providing a web browser with their OS.  Afterall it's pivotal to an OS's functionality...

People like Nutscrape simply got their knickers in a twist and the faction-mad EU jumped on the bandwagon...

Because in general people are naive and uneducated on these type things, and even if they do know and it doesn't directly affect them in any way, they could care less. Another sickness of our society... and there are soooooooooo many.

AND... when the press does not give ample coverage to this type of thing..

Seems it is more important to make a big deal out of something someone said on a reality show than to address REAL issues.