iPhone 16: Worldwide protests outside Apple stores, several arrested

Protests against the release of the Apple iPhone 16 were staged outside Apple stores in more than a dozen locations across ten countries, including Manhattan, London, Tokyo, Brussels, Cape Town, Amsterdam, Mexico City, and Cape Town. Both past and present Apple workers organized the protests.

They demanded, among other things, that no cobalt be sourced from regions such as the Congo, where human rights abuses are taking place. Other minerals from the region used to make iPhones include gold, tantalum, tin and tungsten.

The protesters also criticised Apple’s silence on the Gaza war and its involvement in Israel, including the country’s second largest research and development centre. The demonstrators also called for people to boycott Apple products and to unsubscribe from services such as iCloud, Apple TV+ and Apple Music.

Banners reading “Apple profits from genocide” and “A child died in Congo for your iPhone” were held aloft, and shouts of “From Congo to Palestine, apartheid is a crime” could be heard. Apple says it does not source minerals from such critical areas and intends to use only recycled cobalt in its products by 2025:

This is a big idea of not having to mine anything, is to use all recycled material, and today we’re using 100% recycled cobalt in the watch and 100% recycled gold, tin, tungsten, and other rare-earth materials in the watch. So we’re really, we’re really proud of this. But for those products that we still do mine, for some of our other products, we have an intense level of tracing in our supply chain all the way back to the mine and the smelter to make sure that the labor used is not child labor.

– Apple CEO Tim Cook

The company has excluded some suppliers in the past due to difficulties with some mines. The protests were mainly organised by a group called “Apple Against Apartheid”, made up of current and former Apple employees, although the majority of protesters were not Apple employees.

The number of people taking part in the protests was relatively small, as shown in a video from the Oinat YouTube channel, taken outside an Apple store in London. Most of the protesters were in Berlin, where a few dozen people gathered. Five protesters were arrested in the capital, according to Tariq Ra’Ouf, one of the main organisers.

In March, the group published a letter signed by around 300 former and current Apple employees, claiming that Apple would reprimand or fire its employees if they supported the Palestinian people by wearing pins or similar items.

In the past, Google employees have protested against Project Nimbus, a contract between Google and Amazon with the Israeli government to provide cloud computing infrastructure and artificial intelligence (AI) to the Israeli military, among other things. Amazon and Meta workers have also clashed with their employers over war-related issues.

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