> people always say stuff like that, but do they mean it?

no of course not. it's a pointless thing to say, equivalent to "if you don't like the laws in America, move somewhere else." Easier said than done, for starters.

But also, if developers and power users aren't allowed to criticize or give feedback than who is? Apple needs us more than we need it, so of course you should have a voice

> Because the stories have been on all the news sites, it's common knowledge, and thus it would be superfluous to submit detailed documentation every time it's mentioned?

Those are the claims, yet every time I dig deeper I see how from “actively collaborating with authoritarian governments to shut down pro-democracy activism” they are reduced to “complying with local laws” within a single brief conversation.

Sure, in some countries the latter is a superset of the former. In such countries, violation of ethical norms could be required in some situations to comply with local law. However, it doesn’t mean that any instance of the latter always requires the former, nor that Apple had ever faced this choice, nor that if put in this situation Apple would agree to actually do the former as opposed to exiting the market (which, exiting, I suspect is a scenario CCP would very much prefer to avoid).

I will roughly delineate the difference based on two concrete example situations:

1) Complying with the requirement to store encryption keys for Chinese user data on Chinese servers = complying with local laws.

2) Providing personally identifiable information about individual Apple users at request of CCP, or helping CCP representatives hack into Apple devices = collaborating to shut down activism.

If you have any evidence of anything along the lines of (2), I’m all ears (as I’m sure is any tech journalist worth their salt).

> Are you seriously saying I should pack my bags and leave the Apple ecosystem forever and no longer write software for the Mac or write blog posts about it?

I’ll level with you here. I’m not a professional Apple developer making a living from selling my software to end-users, but I dabble, and I am very deep in Apple’s hardware and software, preferring them to any other alternative in the market. It would be an extreme lifestyle change, but if I had reasons to believe that Apple had indeed collaborated with CCP to shut down activism, due to my personal views I would have to exit Apple’s ecosystem and start hacking on a PinePhone or something.

That said, if a country like China doesn’t want its citizens’ data encryption keys to live on servers in a country like the USA, I don’t believe that’s outrageous; if you’re an activist, you’ll be aware of that and make arrangements. There’s a line, but this does not cross that line as far as I’m concerned.