Apple's ties to Israel are much deeper than you think

By Kei Pritsker

Apple’s ties to Israel are way deeper than you think. Apple made headlines last week when it basically erased Southern Lebanon from Apple Maps. If you go to Lebanon on Apple Maps, you’ll see that the names of all of the villages in the South are gone. And this is obviously the region of Lebanon that Israel is currently invading and trying to annex.

A lot of people have pointed out that Apple has donated money to Zionist groups, that it fired workers for supporting Palestine, but Apple’s relationship isn’t some amorphous ideological one. Apple quite literally wouldn’t exist without the Israeli tech sector.

For starters, Apple’s second largest research and development facility in the world, second only to their headquarters in Cupertino, California, is in Israel. It’s a massive campus in Tel Aviv that employs 2,500 people. The engineers there have helped develop the Macbook, Apple Watches and played a crucial role in developing the recent Apple Vision Pro, their VR headset, which features extremely precise eye-tracking, retina scanning cameras that were largely developed by Apple Israel. Apple plans to move to a new building in Israel, so they’re only planning on doubling down on their presence there.

Apple also buys Israeli technology outright and some of the most critical components in the most popular Apple products come from Israeli firms. Apple acquired a critical component for the iPhone’s flash memory drive by buying an Israeli company called Anobit. It’s believed that Apple’s FaceID technology came from its acquisition of Israeli motion-tracking company, PrimeSense. They also bought an Israeli company that made facial recognition software called Realface. Apple upgraded the iPhone’s camera by buying an Israeli camera company called LinX. They also secretly purchased another Israeli camera company called Camerai and moved their workers to the Apple Israel campus where it’s believed they helped develop Apple’s augmented reality features and the Apple Vision Pro headset.

Apple’s most recent acquisition in Israel is its second largest buyout of all-time, second only to its acquisition of Beats headphones. The company is called Q.AI and it claims to have a technology that reads subtle facial expressions. While they’re being really secretive about what they’re going to be used for, Q.AI recently filed a patent for headphones and glasses that use “facial skin micro movements” for non verbal communication. Apple is trying to increase its market share of wearable devices and people think that Q.AI is going to help them develop devices that you can command without having to say anything. But the obvious implication is that these devices are going to be constantly monitoring your face and undoubtedly training some AI algorithm to know exactly what you’re thinking based on small movements of your lips, or your eyebrows that you might not even realize you’re making.

Many Israeli tech companies are founded by Israelis who come out of elite military units, and since we subsidize the Israeli military, it’s really not a stretch to say that we’re the ones funding Israel’s tech sector and our own surveillance for that matter. The United States is the world’s largest consumer of Apple products and whatever facial recognition or AI technology they end up developing this time is going to be tested on us.

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