If you look on the lower left corner of Apple.com today, you’ll find something extraordinary: a link not to any Apple product, or even to a page within Apple.com, but to 2015quilt.com, a virtual memorial for AIDS victims that raises money to fight the disease by offering users a chance to add their own panel and download an exclusive song from The Killers. Apple will also mark World AIDS Day today with specially outfitted greeters in its stores, who will be showing off (RED) iPod nanos and iPad covers, some of the proceeds from which go to fight AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.
To be sure, Apple has promoted (RED) before, giving the prime slot on Apple.com to its (RED) iPod nano back in 2006 and promoting the device at keynotes and in press statements. And the company used a special iTunes page to raise money for the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. But it’s exceptional for the company to put, right on its home page, a link directly to a charitable site, with no tie-in to an Apple product.
It’s not the first step Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook has taken toward making Apple a kinder company. He launched a $US10,000-per-employee charitable matching program just after taking over in September.
The elephant in the room is Apple and Jobs’s historic lack of public giving; Jobs shut down Apple’s philanthropic program after he returned to the company in 1997, and never brought it back, even after monster profits helped make the company the largest in America by market capitalisation.
Jobs, his biographer Walter Isaacson wrote, was “generally dismissive of philanthropic endeavours”, and “contemptuous of people who made a display of philanthropy or thinking they could reinvent it”. His successors, though, wasted no time in making multiple “display[s] of philanthropy”. Sometimes the right sort of charitable “display” is more tasteful than none at all.
Image: Getty
Republished from Gawker.
Ozoneocean
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 2:40 PMFrom what I’ve read Jobs wasn’t just against displays of philanthropy, he was against the entire concept. And he sort of had a point in that- In the US charities have had to step into the void and perform the function that public money does in many other countries, by contributing to that you’re supporting a very dysfunctional system.
Although, the money has to get to the needy somehow, and if charity is the only way then so be it.
DW
Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 2:03 PMThat’s crap. Jobs was just greedy.
If he truly believed in the well-being of the people, perhaps he would have ensured that the Chinese Foxconn workers that make an iPhone for 90 cents, actually were paid a reasonable amount to improve their lives. Apple is happy to exploit the people that make their products for a profit and Jobs expected that ‘the public’ purse in that relevant country should then pick up the pieces.
Polymath
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 3:02 PMWhat a nonsense article.
Apple doesn’t do charity, except the {RED} Charity iPod and the Haiti thing, and you forgot the Sudanese thing a few years back too.
So yeah, Apple don’t do charity… except when they do.
Ozoneocean
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 3:27 PMI think the main thing is that compared to other similar firms, it’s extremely merger and this is the first time it’s been linked directly from the front page.
Steve
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 6:05 PMApple is one of (if not the) most moneyed companies in the world behind Exxon Mobil and their charity is giving some homepage real estate. That’s beyond ‘meagre.’ Less Ebenezer Scrooge, more Monty Burns.
CJ
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 7:54 PMYeah, Apple are the epitome of giving. ASKING PEOPLE TO DONATE.
Meanwhile, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is worth something like 37 BILLION dollars, and was started with a 75 Million dollar donation directly from Microsoft, and sustained a few years later with a 100 million dollar donation from Bill Gate’s personal wealth.
But yeah, at least Apple asked people to donate some money while buying more music from their (World’s Largest) Music Store.
Joe Magic
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 3:55 PMYou would think apple would be throwing their support behind cancer research. You know the thing that actually got old mate Jobsie in the end. Unless……..
Jimmy
Saturday, December 3, 2011 at 11:51 AM….it was AIDS that killed him?
Sylver
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 3:58 PMI bought a (RED) iPod nano a year ago. I didn’t have a clue that it was actually helping charities until I received an email from apple about what I’d done, because they just don’t tell you. I just wanted a shiny red iPod, but it feels nice to help out.
Steve
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 6:06 PMOh, they tell you. Maybe because you didn’t pay attention to it, but I remember them marketing it heavily at the time and the Apple Store page for the device had the (RED) logo all over it, with external links.
CJ
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 7:56 PMWell, that and the extra 30 dollars you have to pay for it, so as not to eat into Apple’s profits.
MD
Saturday, December 3, 2011 at 6:55 PMIts a beatup.
These companies don’t do charity…
They give part of the special charity mark-up, or specifically marketed items for a cause… It is marketing… they expect to clean up when people buy BECAUSE itis for a charitable cause, things they maybe wouldn’t have bought otherwise…
Charity does not impact on the bottom line, or the investors would veto it.
HTS
Sunday, December 4, 2011 at 10:19 AM+1
Finally, someone spoke the truth…
People sometimes forget that a business is a business, consumer will always be the loser in this game