Cook has openly embraced Trump, particularly in his second term, attending the president’s inauguration, presenting him with an engraved golden trophy, and giving money to the White House to help construct the president’s $300 million pet project ballroom.
The relative workplace calm may be over. “I hope we never find out, but I seriously started wondering what our leadership would do if an Apple employee was summarily executed by our government,” wondered one employee.
Many workers claimed hypocrisy between Apple’s longtime professed commitment to progressive values and causes and the extent to which its CEO has cozied up to the Trump administration. “But but but…. we changed the Apple website to MLK last Monday, so that cancels out.” Another pointed sarcastically to the company’s recent announcement of Black History Month Apple Watch bands. “Went to hang out with the guy who didn’t even acknowledge MLK Day and took away park access on the day,” commented one worker.
For some, the affront was personal. “As a lifelong Minnesotan and an Apple badged employee for over half my life I feel pretty abandoned by the company that has told me it stands for humanity more times than I can count,” wrote another worker. “Silence on ICE violence speaks volumes.” Another pointed out the “Three retail locations in the Twin Cities and not a peep” from Cook. “This isn’t leadership. This is an absence of leadership.” To which a colleague quickly countered: “I disagree, this IS leadership. This is intentional, nobody travels to the white house by mistake.”
An Apple employee who has spent decades at the company said they had noticed a marked cultural and political shift within Apple under Cook’s tenure. “A lot of people are talking about how Steve Jobs would have never given a gold bar to a politician,” referring to the 24-karat gold trophy Cook presented Trump at the White House in August.
Fuck Apple. They are no better than all other fascism supporting US corporations.
I used Apple products for 20+ years. Switched to Linux 10 months ago and replaced my iPhone with a used Graphene OS phone.
No more US cloud services, no more US subscriptions. Fuck these fascists.
Same, completely big-tech-free now and it feels great. I moved to Linux roughly around the same time, I’m curious how your Linux journey is going?
I’ve always been using Linux on the side for the past 15 years, a little bit of selfhosting stuff here, raspberry pis for projects there, proxmox for pi-hole and home assistant, etc.
So it was more of a natural progression than a switch into the blue. I’m pretty familiar with Linux on the backend, so this is just my first deep dive into all day productivity on Linux. I am a fan of KDE plasma currently, and I use a lot of vim keybindings wherever possible - there’s a great plugin for librewolf too.
TL;DR: Overall, it’s going great.
This is the only answer
How much does an OS graphene phone cost?
Others have answered so I’ll just add, if you have any old smartphone kicking around odds are you can slap LineageOS on it as an alternative if you can’t afford a Pixel for Graphene.
It’s a pixel device right now https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices
I got a Pixel 6 for free from a friend. It’s completely sufficient for me right now. Older phones are incredibly fast without bloatware and tracking.
I’ve been using my Pixel 6 since it was new and I don’t see myself upgrading unless it no longer gets security updates.
Depends on which Google Pixel phone you need. (GrapheneOS only supports Google Pixel phones due to their hardware security features and closeness to stock android with minimal additional necessary modifications, though they are working with an unnamed OEM to make a non-Google Pixel phone sometime this year, supposedly.)
A Pixel 9a will run you about 400 bucks, and works perfectly fine. A more expensive and newer Pixel 10 will run you about $800 if you really want the newer hardware, but imo it’s just not worth the jump in price. Phone hardware has kind of stagnated so unless you really care, the $400 extra isn’t worth the slightly better camera and processor and whatnot.
Of course, you can always get one used/refurbished, too, but more recent models aren’t much cheaper than brand new. Always buy unlocked as carrier locked ones can’t be flashed with a custom OS unless you unlock them later through the carrier (if they even allow it in the first place)
The install process is easy and of course since it’s open source, it’s free, so there’s no additional cost there.