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494

Apple Workers Are Livid That Tim Cook Saw “Melania” Movie Hours After CBP Killed Pretti (theintercept.com)

submitted 19 hours ago by FirstCircle@lemmy.ml to c/news@lemmy.world

87 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 hours ago

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.

I'm rather amazed with comments like these Did any of you really actually believe that the Apple CEO's (any of them) actually gave a single fuck about these "charitable" subjects? Did you really actually believe that time cook could give a single shit about black History month or LGBT rights?

Fuck, he won't even give a single shit about the trump administration or fascism for that matter. It's all a means to an end, and the goal justifies the means.

There is one single thing that Tim cook, other apple CEO's, and just any CEO in general cares about:

Money. Lots and lots of money

So far, pretending to be a progressive company got Apple loads of addicts that for some unexplained reason can't seem to go without the company.

Now the trump admin came in and they saw where the wind was blowing. More moneys now requires Apple to cost up to the fascist government? Then we do that! The goal justifies the means.

I fucking guarantee you that if Apple can make more money by throwing their users under a figurative or even a litteral bus, Apple will do so. Apple will do whatever the fuck tum cook wants and Tim cook wants money

And if it wasn't clear: This isn't exclusive to Apple, this applies to prettyuch every big company out there. Even if you find that unicorn CEO that actually wants to make the world better, at some point he will quit (or get fired) and move on and you'll have a different CEO who I fucking guarantee you, will not feel the same about peaky things like Richard and privacy.

So with all that in mind, how could you be so fucking stupid as to believe that apple was one of the good guys, are you still so fucking stupid to believe this of any other company, and have you now finally learned your lesson?

[–] ComradeRachel@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Billionaires stick together. Doesn’t matter the company, rich people will support their fellow rich people.

[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 4 points 3 hours ago

No War but the Class War.

[–] OldQWERTYbastard@lemmy.world 18 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

If you're supporting Apple at this point, that's kind of on you.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world -1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

They've got a bunch of genuinely good content, which is a bit ironic given their dismal subscription numbers.

Apple TV runs circles around Netflix, HBO, and Hulu. But they've got a meager 3% of the streaming market share. It's infuriating.

[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 6 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Pirate it. All of it. None of them care about you. Support independent media.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago

Sure. How do you think I've been watching it to begin with?

But ffs, why is it so hard for Apple to figure out how to get those numbers up? Every other company knows how to bundle their shitty products. You'd think they would know how to bundle something halfway decent.

[–] Gammelfisch@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Hello Fairphone. I read Finland will streamline their immigration policies to attract US AI and tech specialists.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 11 points 4 hours ago

So we've confirmed exactly one person has seen the movie.

[–] HulkSmashBurgers@reddthat.com 21 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Never trust a corporation.

[–] TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 5 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Even the "good ones" eventually turn evil.

[–] titanicx@lemmy.zip 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Apple has never been one of the good companies. Anyone really in technology knows this.

[–] YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 7 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Like everybody collectively decided to forget what happened to Wozniak.

[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

There's a better timeline where they also brought back Woz and OS X had Linux underneath. All the 3rd party media software would inherently be cross compatible with linux and the windows userbase would have started eroding much sooner.

[–] YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 2 points 2 hours ago

Now I'm sad I'm in the worst timeline. I expect Jeff to lose an eye any moment.

[–] titanicx@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 hours ago

I mean shit they were all part of the group stealing technology clear back when they first started also. Whatever it took to make that money and get their product out there. And then they were the ones that also started dabbling into the luxury PC market.

[–] 7101334@lemmy.world 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Except, maybe, the employee-owned ones. Glory to Winco.

[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

Newman's Own seems good.

[–] kandoh@reddthat.com 26 points 9 hours ago

Capital always yields to fascism

[–] Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 9 points 7 hours ago

Cook, and Apple, can fuck right off.

[–] KelvarCherry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 60 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I'm shocked people are shocked Apple is supporting Trump. Apple's been contracting slave labor from CCP concentration camps. They sell expensive gadgets that are hardwired to not let people repair them, and harass those who offer fair market repairs. Again, though, slave labor. Apple has not been on the side of human rights in decades.

[–] BanMe@lemmy.world 19 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Amazon, Dell, Google, Huawei, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Xiaomi have all used Foxconn. By 2012 it was producing 40% of all consumer electronics. That blood is on everyone's hands.

Likewise Amazon, Samsung, Google, Tesla, Dell, Lenovo, HP, Cisco, Sony, and Microsoft all have supply chains tied to CCP forced labor. Hell Volkswagen has been tied to it. Over 100 global brands were found to be connected in a 2025 investigation.

So let's not act like Apple's out there alone in this. You've most certainly got electronics in your house that have components produced in such a way. You'll buy more.

However, you're very much right in that Apple is not the company it used to be. Lots of us who have used Macs since the 80s or 90s have an emotional connection to the platform and the brand, which has taken a lot to dissolve.

When Apple was the underdog, churning out failures and oddities, it was easy to love them, even as we despised a lot of the decisions they made. They were the crazy alternative to giant corporate bullshit. Jobs would walk into recruitment interviews with IBM employees, barefoot, sit on the conference table, and ask if they had ever done acid. Was he an asshole of epic proportions? Yes. Was he fascinating and unlike anyone in the industry? Yes.

Now people are waking up to the real Apple of today, the one that's become a massive corporate juggernaut, the one that openly supports fascism, and we need to keep encouraging that, giving people offramps and alternatives, like I am looking for myself. We gotta cheer that on.

[–] hector@lemmy.today 4 points 9 hours ago

The labor abuses aren't tied to ccp forced labor either. All factory workers in china are abused for starters, and a lot of the other countries are even worse. Vietnam, cambodia, bangladesh, excepting south korea and japan basically all of them.

They force them to work 6-12s generally, 6 days a week 12 hours a day, for starvation wages, under brutally repressive governments. In China a good share of the population doesn't have citizenship in the cities they work in, the government forced them en masse from smallholdings in their great leap forward, and shuttled them as basically illegal laborers in the cities. They can be beat up, imprisoned, and thrown out of town on a word from their employer. No protections, no safety net, pollution is dumped in the ditch.

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 7 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

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.

Lol.

[–] poor_choices@lemmy.ca 46 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

The mental gymnastics Apple cult members have to do each day must be exhausting.

[–] rozodru@piefed.social 15 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

And I, as a linux user, thought our community was bad sometimes. it's no where near what the Apple Community has been like since...well...since forever.

I'm old enough to remember what it was like in the 80s and 90s, especially the 90s when Apple was on deaths door. To Apple users the company, even then, could do no wrong. I remember reading old Macworld magazines and it felt like reading a cults bible or manifesto. And the amusing thing is it was never a Jobs thing regardless of what anyone says. They followed and praised that company even when Scully, Spindler, and Amelio were in charge. They bought the Newton and loved it. When Jobs came back and killed the newton saying how he hated the stylus because he had five of them on his hand they were like "yeah, the newton sucks! we don't need a stylus!" then well after his death when Apple released the Apple Pencil those same people were all "YAY A STYLUS!"

As long as it has an apple logo on it and they can whip it out at their local starbucks to show people that "they have money" that's all they care about. Apple has and will always be a social status symbol. that's it. And heaven forbid you call their products shoddy because then you'll get flooded with replies saying their not and quite the opposite. "My Macbook lasted me 5 whole years!" yeah Chris, that's not good. how are all your cables holding up?

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 10 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

I think you’re always going to look smart if you cherry pick the things said by different members of a large group. I can go back over that same timeline and find Apple users criticizing everything the company has done, all the way back to and including the Mac.

People criticized the original Mac for having a paltry 128K of non-upgradable ram and being basically obsolete within 6 months, after Apple released the 512K “fat Mac” and developers wrote software that used more than 128K of ram. People also criticized the Mac for not having colour (unlike the Apple II), and for breaking backwards compatibility.

That last point became a recurring theme throughout Apple’s history. People have been endlessly critical of Apple for it and Apple in turn has maintained a consistent contempt for backwards compatibility.

People criticized the lack of focus and the bewildering array of model numbers during the 90s. People criticize Apple every time they discontinue their favourite model.

People have criticized their butterfly keyboards and their stupid touchbar and the damn PowerBook 5300 battery fires. They criticized the cracks in the G4 cube’s case corners and the ducking iOS keyboard autocorrect! They criticize Apple’s forced software updates and their skeuomorphic designs and their use of colour and their taking away of colour and their damn one button mice!

On and on and on it goes! The point is that large groups of people don’t have consistent opinions. Heck, even individuals don’t have consistent opinions over time!

[–] YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 3 points 3 hours ago

I have been ostracized by a peer group, unmatched and blocked on dating sites, and I'm sure lost professional advancement all because I refuse to ever get an iPhone.

They are past cult at this point. They are technological magas.

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[–] gustofwind@lemmy.world -1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

people need to hate computer programmers a LOT more

[–] Psythik@lemmy.world 4 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Where were you in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s? People have historically hated programmers. They've been picked on for so long that they made a documentary about it called Revenge of the Nerds.

Then something shifted in the 2010s and suddenly it's now cool to be into technology. I used to be picked on for being on the computer all the time, now everyone is addicted to their pocket computer, even the ones who made fun of me for it! It's so bad that we have an entire generation of children who can't function without being glued to a screen 24/7. I don't get what happened. Engagement algorithms?

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 163 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

Oh wow a rich white gay man hid behind his sexuality to present faux-progressive values when he was actually pretty conservative? Funny how that keeps happening.

It's almost like class identity often matters more than social identity in respect to politics.

[–] tidderuuf@lemmy.world 57 points 19 hours ago

He's the perfect example of "Well they aren't breaking down my door, it's their door a few houses away."

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 102 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

If there was only something Apple workers could do to send a message to Tim Cook that he can't ignore. If only there was a card they could sign, and together do an action, a .. collective action of some sort...

[–] AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 36 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

maybe one where they join together in a kind of organized... group? collective? I don't know what the word would be for that, but it's right on the tip of my tongue...

[–] Witchfire@lemmy.world 30 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

In mathematics it's called a union, but idk if that's related

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[–] Deceptichum@quokk.au 15 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

We could call it a iNion. And we think you’re going to love it.

[–] UltraMagnus0001@lemmy.world 5 points 11 hours ago

Never had an apple product, mainly because of their lock down eco system. I used to recommend apple products for those that are not tech savvy (boomers). I know Google and Microsoft are similar, but I usually think of apple as a socialist OS in the sense of what boomers think socialism is.

[–] CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 12 hours ago

Apple was started by a smart nerd and a guy who thought that he could cure body odor by eating exclusively fruit. The latter guy, 30 years later, thought he could cure pancreatic cancer by eating exclusively fruit.

I do think those guys would have resisted the temptation to woo Trump, though Jobs was a wildcard.

Tim Cook, on the other hand, is a businessman through and through. At all costs, line must go up. By all accounts, this has been an obvious focus at Apple well before Jobs died. I’m not sure what kind of rock you’d be living under to think that Apple is the same company that built the Macintosh while working at Apple.

[–] petersr@lemmy.world 14 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Not trying to protect Apple or Tim Cook, but can I just say that the headline is kinda silly.

This

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.

should be a much bigger problem than watching a random movie at some random that was probably planned weeks in advance.

But I guess they need something news-worthy to pin it on.

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[–] comrade_twisty@feddit.org 54 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (8 children)

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.

[–] Jack_Burton@lemmy.ca 6 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

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 4 points 12 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.

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[–] inkzombie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 9 hours ago

I hate that Procreate is so good otherwise I'd never use Apple

[–] Novis@lemdro.id 36 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

"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.

Feel like people are giving Jobs a lot more credit than he deserves. We have to remember that there's a very good possibility that Jobs would still be here IF HE HAD LISTENED TO HIS DOCTORS about treatment for his rare type of cancer that actually have him better odds of survival. He thought he knew better and died because of that foolishness. Kinda sounds like an ego that would serve him well with the republican side of politics, now doesn't it?

[–] comador@lemmy.world 32 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (4 children)

First of all, Steve was a prick who would have sold his daughter to a whorehouse if it guarenteed him fortune and fame. He had that level of issues, often screaming his points at people. I met him twice at the great mall in san jose pre-ipod days while working for CEO Scott Mcnealy at Sun Microsystems.

I will say this though: Steve definitely would NOT have paid off politicians though. He hated politicians enough.

Second, my Dad died of the exact same mother fucking pancreatic cancer and the BEST Steve would have gotten with perfect care would have been an extra year at most. That pancreatic cancer outright destroys you in a very horrible way.

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[–] GreenBeanMachine@lemmy.world 7 points 13 hours ago

Are they just now realising who they work for?

Damn, those mountains of cash at Apple must be pretty high for them to be so blind. Fuck them bitches.

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