According to the Guardian, Apple genii are forbidden from using the words crash, hang, bug, or problem when talking about their overpriced out-of-date gear.

Instead, employees are advised to us the phrases and words does not respond, stops responding, condition, issue, or situation.

They are also not allowed to say their gear is “incompatible” with other hardware, instead, they are supposed to say it “does not work with it”.

If a customer shows up hacked off that their expensive keyboard is jammed because Apple could not be bothered installing filters, genii are encouraged to sympathise, but only by apologising that customers feel bad rather than the "issue" being "true". The customer should not feel that Apple is in anyway responsible for making her or his life a misery.

They are not allowed to tell customers that they cannot help even in the most hopeless cases, leading customers into circular conversations with employees able neither to help nor to refuse to do so, the Guardian wrote.

The article argues that since their launch in 2001, Apple Stores "have raked in more money -- in total and per square foot -- than any other retailer on the planet, transforming Apple into the world's richest company in the process".

But it complains that Apple's wealth "flows from the privatisation of publicly funded research, mixed with the ability to command the low-wage labour of our Chinese peers, sold by Orwellian empathetic retailers forbidden from saying 'crash'".