When I heard that Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, was donating to The Convicted Felon’s (TCF) inauguration, I was beyond outraged. I considered it a betrayal of everything that Apple stood for.

Then when Tim Cook added insult to injury by actually attending the inauguration:

Notice how happy he looks.

I had been seriously considering replacing my five year old 27″ iMac Pro with a new Mac and had been trying to decide exactly how to configure the replacement. Also, my iPad was getting a bit long in the tooth, and I thought that it was ripe for retirement so I was looking at newer models. But nope, I’d be damned if I’d buy anything from Apple at this point. That’d show ’em!

Of course, any alternatives in tech-land were not to be considered. Certainly nothing from the dreaded Microsoft or Google, let alone Samsung (I don’t want my devices catching fire and exploding in my face now, do I?). I’d just put off my purchases for the time being.

Then I listened to one of my tech podcasts, ATP, where Marco Arment, Casey Liss, and John Siracusa discuss Apple and other tech stuff. Normally, I get a bit annoyed at Marco, who develops the Overcast app for the iPhone, and typically goes a bit overboard in his criticisms of Apple. Not that Apple doesn’t deserve criticism, as its treatment of developers often leaves a lot to be desired and its handling of bug reports the same. But a lot of those criticisms are mostly inside baseball and I think Marco tends to pile it on a bit too thick and he gets repetitious and boring.

But not this time. I was cheering him on as he laid into Tim Cook’s kissing TCF’s ass. The same with Casey.

But then John spoke up, who as (nearly) always was the Voice of Reason. He was just as angry as everyone else about what Cook did, but he pointed out that Tim Cook paid from his personal account not Apple’s.

So what, it’s still Apple, shouted Marco.

And, continued John, Cook probably did it because he thought he was protecting Apple and Apple’s employees. If TCF took actions that harmed Apple, that caused Apple to have to raise prices and therefore caused losses for the company, that could lead to layoffs—not for Tim Cook and other high ranking executives but for the rank and file employees.

Then there’s Apple’s stock price. Apple’s employees depend on it as part of their compensation and it’s a large part of millions of 401K retirement accounts. If the stock price took a big hit, that would hurt potentially millions of people. Tim Cook, by writing a personal check to TCF, knew he was going to piss off a lot of people and probably damage his reputation, possibly irreparably, but perhaps he did it in order to preserve the retirement accounts of millions of other people. He certainly doesn’t have to worry about himself; he’s set for life whatever he does at this point.

Sure Apple (or Tim Cook) could have held out while other large companies paid their bribes to TCF, but that would have just made TCF want to single out Apple for even harsher punishment.

After listening to John Siracusa’s partial defense of Cook’s actions, I did a little rethinking and I calmed down somewhat. Maybe Cook didn’t really look all that happy in that inauguration photo.

Then an article came out stating that “Apple shareholders voted to keep the tech giant’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, a win for management which had opposed efforts by a conservative group to scrap the program.”

And I realized further that at least so far, Apple’s policies have not changed. It’s still committed to becoming carbon neutral. It’s still making lots of headway in promoting non-white men and women into prominent positions. Just look at any of its recent videos of new product announcements and you’ll see that the people announcing the new products are largely women and non-whites—and those are the folks who are actually in charge of those products.

And then there’s this little bit of whimsy: MacRumors reports that iPhone owners “noticed a pronunciation processing issue that causes the word “Trump” to momentarily show up when using dictation to send a message with the word “racist.” 

Here’s a brief video that shows the, uh, problem:

Meanwhile, as John Oliver discussed this week, Mark Zuckerberg has gone full MAGA, turning Facebook into a cesspool of hate pretty much equivalent to Elon Musk’s transformation of twitter.

I used to say that I was sorry that I cancelled my Facebook account because I lost touch with so many of my high school classmates, but now I can proudly say I’m glad to be out of that muck—and most of those classmates voted for TCF so who the fuck wants to be in touch with those assholes anyway?

I wonder if anyone else feels that strongly about what Zuck did to Facebook? Cook paid the bribe in order to allow Apple to do business the way Apple wants to do business. Zuck not only paid the bribe, but he transformed the company into a hideous monster. If I hadn’t already left FB, that would have been enough for me to pull the plug. Anybody else? If you were angry at Apple because Tim Cook paid that bribe, shouldn’t you be even angrier with Facebook?