By Dan Moren

February 28, 2025 10:00 AM PT

The Back Page: Sacrifices Must Be Made

At Apple, we understand that sacrifices must be made in the name of progress. Over the last few weeks, we’ve proved this time and time again. But we also know that maybe you just see us as a faceless corporation, so we want to take this opportunity to share with you some of those sacrifices.

Take for example, the new iPhone 16e. We agonized over how to make the best possible iPhone for our price-conscious customers while still maintaining our meager 47 percent profit margins. Did we want to remove MagSafe? Of course not! Would we love to include ProMotion? Absolutely. But we all need to make sacrifices. Just, mostly for you. Not so much us.

Even then, it hurt us—physically hurt us—to price the 16e at just $599, but those are the kinds of sacrifices that we make for our customers, who we love and appreciate more than anything in this world, except for money.

Of course, our sacrifices don’t stop there. You may have recently heard of our decision to stop offering Advanced Data Protection in the United Kingdom, for…reasons. This is, naturally, a sacrifice of the highest orders…for our customers in the UK who rely upon the security of end-to-end encryption. Was there any alternative? We can’t say. Could we have done more? We can’t say. Will we continue to bow to the whim of governments who want to invade the privacy of our users? Again, we would love to say no, but we just cannot. We’ve already shown a history of sacrifices like this, such as ceding the operation of iCloud in China to a local company, just to make sure users could have the ability for their documents to get perennially stuck while syncing and also have those said-same documents monitored by an authoritarian government.

Then there’s our biggest sacrifice to date, made personally by our vaunted CEO Tim Cook, who always looks out for the good of the company (and its assets) above all else: his dignity. You may wonder if Tim could have instead just sacrificed some of his hard-earned money and, well, he did try. Sometimes it just doesn’t cut it, and you need to promise $500 billion in investments that you were kind of making anyways, just to appease a petty tyrant. You’ve been there, you get it.

But at Apple we’re not done yet. There are sacrifices left to be made, none so important as our offerings to the dread god Glog-Raggopth (all praise his name), who hungers for blood as most mortals hunger for Cheetos. However, we are a little short on sustainably sourced and conflict-free blood these days, so we’ve had to make some substitutions. Sacrifices on sacrifices! Instead of the traditional hemoglobin, we will instead be offering up the souls of our customers. Now, in line with our differential privacy and data minimization policies, we’ve developed a new system we’re calling SoulKit, wherein each of our customers will only have to sacrifice a very small percentage of their soul, and because we protect your personal data, nobody will know exactly whose soul is where.¹

How do you take advantage of this exciting new feature? Simple, just buy any Apple product, and a small portion of your soul goes with it. Remember: it’s just a small sacrifice to make so that we can stay in business. And we want you to know that we appreciate it. Especially Tim, who could use all the soul he can get.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]