Protesters Take to Apple Stores Worldwide on iPhone 16 Launch Day

On Friday, customers around the world flocked to Apple Stores locations to buy the iPhone 16 on its launch day. But customers in over a dozen cities were met by protests organized by current and former Apple employees.

The protesters—holding signs and banners saying that Apple is “profiting from genocide”—demanded that Apple stop sourcing its cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where mines are notorious for dangerous conditions, low wages, frequent use of child labor, and human rights violations.

Apple has said it does not source minerals from mines in which these conditions take place, though it has said that there are “challenges” in tracking its mineral supply chains. In 2022, this tracking led the company to remove 12 suppliers. Congo’s government recently questioned the company in relation to potential “blood minerals” in its supply chain.

The protesters also told Apple to break its silence on the ongoing war in Gaza, which has been called a genocide by some human rights experts.

The protests, which took place in 10 countries, were primarily organized by Apples Against Apartheid, a group of five current Apple employees and around a dozen former Apple employees. They have primarily held retail roles at Apple Stores.

The group, originally called Apples4Ceasefire, partnered with the organization Friends of the Congo and local activist groups in cities around the world. Posts on social media show protesters holding banners outside Apple stores in Bristol, Reading, London, Tokyo, Brussels, Cape Town, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Montreal, and Cardiff. In the United States, protests took place at Apple’s flagship Fifth Avenue Manhattan store, as well as in Palo Alto and Berkeley.

Many of these protests had just a few participants, often waving big banners and large flags of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Palestine. Most of the in-person protesters were not themselves Apple workers.

The largest turnout was in Berlin, where more than three dozen people participated in the protest. They chanted from behind a barricade, which distanced them from the Apple Store. Footage shows police officers directing protesters farther away, and arresting a person wearing a keffiyeh. Tariq Ra’Ouf, a leading Apples Against Apartheid organizer, tells WIRED that five protesters were arrested.

Ra’Ouf worked at a Seattle Apple Store for 12 years before being fired in July. They say that they were fired for a “technicality” that they believe “should have been a misconduct warning.” They believe that their dismissal was likely retaliatory for challenging the company publicly on “anti-Palestinian bias and racism.” Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the protest or Ra’Ouf’s allegation.

“The idea is we want to bring this to them as consumers, and so we want to disrupt their biggest day of the year as much as we could,” Ra’Ouf tells WIRED. “We want [them] to assess how much money they make on launch day, and how many phones they’re able to sell, and really show them visibly that there’s a lot of support for these communities that they’re just ignoring.”

In March, Apples Against Apartheid published an open letter signed by almost 300 current and former Apple workers, which alleged that retail and corporate employees were being disciplined or “wrongfully terminated” for supporting the Palestinian people by wearing pins, bracelets, and keffiyehs.

On Instagram, ahead of the iPhone 16 launch, Apples Against Apartheid encouraged people to boycott the iPhone16, post about the issue online, and use Apple’s online ticket system to speak out against what they believe to be the company’s alleged complicity in the Congo and Gaza.

Friday marked the latest protest organized by current and former tech workers targeting their company’s stance on the war in Gaza. Google workers have been particularly active in protesting Project Nimbus, Google and Amazon’s $2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government and military. They have interrupted conferences with ties to Israel, and in May, they staged a multi-city protest and office occupation that resulted in the arrest of nine workers. Google fired those workers, and more than 40 others. Those former employees later filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.

Outside Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York, TV cameras watched as many dozens of customers waited in roped-off lines snaking around the clear cube. Seven protesters arrived with signs and flyers. Facing the people in line, and then passersby on the sidewalk, they chanted “From Congo to Palestine, apartheid is a crime!” One sign read, “A child died in the Congo to make your iPhone!”

As they chanted, security guards and NYPD officers stood nearby, watching but not engaging. Passersby occasionally took the flyers that the group was handing out.

Meanwhile, the people in the line for the new iPhone took pictures and videos of the protest, but they didn’t exit the queue.