Depositphotos / Скриншот з TikTok
Apple got into an interesting scandal — when recording a voice on an iPhone, the word «racist» was automatically changed to «Trump».
The incident went viral on TikTok when users started sharing their videos. The problem caused a mixed reaction: some considered it a simple technical bug, while others accused the company of deliberate political manipulation. In particular, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones called the bug «a vicious subliminal attack on President Trump». For its part, Apple did not deny the problem.
«We’re aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that supports dictation, and we’re rolling out a fix today», — an Apple spokesperson said in a comment Fox News.
The company claims that the problem arose due to the peculiarities of the voice recording system, which accidentally changed words with similar phonetic sound. Allegedly, on the iPhone, the word «racist» was suggested to replace «Trump» through the consonant «r». The bug affected other words with this letter, but the spokesperson did not give specific examples.
Former Apple employee John Burkey, who worked on Siri, said that the incident «smells like a serious prank». In his opinion, such a word change could have been deliberately made by someone inside the company. Therefore, the question remains how the curious substitution passed Apple’s internal testing.
This is not the first time Apple has faced such political bugs. In 2024, after one of the iOS updates, when writing the word «Jerusalem» devices offered emojis with the Palestinian flag. However, not all layouts were affected by the error.
The incident occurred when Apple is trying to improve its relations with the Trump administration. Recently, the company announced an investment of $500 billion over the next four years. In particular, Apple seeks to minimize the impact of Trump’s decisions: a 10% duty is already applied to goods imported from China, and a 25% duty on chips is already being prepared by his administration.
Analysts predict that Apple will have to significantly increase iPhone prices and other products because of duties. But until that happens, the first company to has announced a price increase, Acer has become. In addition, the cost increase is influenced by shortage of NVIDIA video cards. Therefore, we should expect that the introduction of a 25% duty will only have a negative impact on prices for machinery.
Source: The New York Times