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.

  • Jack_Burton@lemmy.ca
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    15 hours ago

    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?

    • comrade_twisty@feddit.org
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      14 hours ago

      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.