One bad Apple

A Moral Dilemma (Amoral Dilemma)...

Is this the Droid I'm looking for?

My iPhone 12ProMax, which I bought brand new from Apple in March 2024, is already showing signs of slow death - or at least the battery is.

Two weeks ago, after years of owning a FitBit Versa 2 (which I love) it finally stopped syncing with my iPhone and I made the reluctant decision to buy an Apple watch instead. (I never buy new electronics, but rather refurbished, either from the manufacturer directly or from Backmarket, because I refuse to pay full price and contribute to our landfill, in case this inspires anyone reading this.)

Last week, I witnessed this (I am reposting a brilliant video posted by the Great Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI):

MAKE SURE TO TURN ON YOUR VOLUME

Although it’s hardly surprising that Apple is among the corporations perpetually pandering to Trump and his latest unsanctioned, despotic, egregious oligarchic takeover of the US, I find myself circling the drain of a moral dilemma*: does one bad Apple, in fact, spoil the whole bunch…girl?

After Trump was elected, I took note of which greedy corporate heads donated money to his (as usual) garish Inauguration Ball. In addition to the usual suspects - Amazon, Meta, Uber, Google, Open AI - I was also surprised and disappointed to see Microsoft and Apple. As a social media consciencious objector, I've never used Meta, I'm not on Facebook, and totally reject AI in concept and practice. I immediately cancelled my Prime account and quit using Amazon altogether (that's a subject for another post). Apple was a tough one, though, as I am already sort of dialed into the Appleverse with my iPhone and iPad, but I self-talked away my guilt, excusing Apple because Tim Cook used his own money, not mine.

Cut to: according to the most recent piece from Politico (October 23), "Tech, crypto, tobacco, other companies fund Trump’s White House ballroom" the list of donors again includes Apple and, while there's no clear answer as to where the Apple donation funds are coming from this time, the very fact that they're donating to yet another abhorrent show of Trump ostentation (with the very high likelihood that Apple users are well among those unable to feed their families due to the government shutdown and layoffs) is...well...not nice.

And although, in reaching back into the archives of Apple's magnanimous and charitable contributions from years past - World Aids Day (Support (RED) with Apple Pay), Apple Employee Giving Program, Support for Racial Equity, among others - we are no longer living in a world of philanthropic parity. The regular rules don't apply (Apple-y); you're either a good witch or a bad witch, relative to which (witch) party you're asking, but either way the current administration has fostered a staunchly Us v Them society.

Moreover, as everyone knows, it's never "what have you done for me?' but rather "what have you done for me lately?"

But back to my moral dilemma. Do I send back my watch and trade in my iPhone for a (refurbished) Samsung (incidentally, the Samsung Galaxy S25 is one of the S20 series of phones NOT made in China, but also that's a whole other post)? Samsung indirectly donated $315,000 to Trump's inauguration, but so far has not contributed to anything else. Or is this whole quandary tantamount to rearranging chairs on the Titanic: not a question of IF so much as a matter of WHEN?

As a world-class obsessive ruminator (if I do say so myself) , I will most certainly agonize over this for at least another two weeks. That's long enough for Trump to solicit even more donors for his ballroom, which will no doubt by then be up to $500 million dollars (or will it be billion by then?), and then perhaps my decision will be made for me.

Or maybe I'll just give up all of my tech, put in a landline, thank you very much, shut up and have a nice day.

*Let me just qualify here that I thoroughly recognize that this is a petty First World problem, and hardly as awful as, say, the very real-life problems of the family of four that’s living in one of the storage units in the facility across the street from me (but that’s a whole other post) this, for many people, may hopefully be one component of salient decisions made in fighting against Absolute Governmental Takeover. #Pegasus