Many are currently lamenting what they see as the fall of Apple from a tech company that “did it right” to one that goes where the winds of power takes them. They see Apple advertising on X again or donating to the inaguration as some personal affront to their sensibilities.

The problem is that people identified with a company and took on it’s brand as their own. Apple has been anti-consumer for years. They charge outrageous markup on their hardware, particularly their storage and RAM upgrades. None of these things are new though, that RAM article is from 2007.

Apple has never liked you, or cared about your beliefs unless it came to their marketing where they could align with you and get you to pay crazy prices for their products. I did this for years with many desktops, laptops, phones, and tablets still floating around my house in use by different family members. They were great products, and still are great products that serve useful functions in my house.

Apple does make some great hardware. I’ve tried a bunch of tablets running Windows or Linux in the last year and none of them hold a candle to the iPad. I’ve been looking for an affordable Mini PC to hook up to my bike smart trainer and after hours spent the base model Mac Mini is by far the best value with nothing else in it’s price point coming close to performance for dollars spent. I’m likely to have an iPad around for a tablet and a Mac Mini in my home for a while.

Looking at my wife’s software needs, Apple is still the best choice for the tools she uses daily so she’s likely staying in fruitland for her laptop and iPad.

But, I’ve bought my last Apple laptop for personal use for a while. I’ve been happy with my Framework laptop for more than a year. Fedora is an excellent operating system and Nixos keeps calling my name. My next desktop machine will be a PC I build and run Linux on. The cost will be cheaper than an Apple machine for similar or better performance and far more storage and RAM. I’ve moved all of my personal cloud storage off paid providers and run my own Synology which has paid for itself in the last two years.

Remember, Apple is just a business and they’re here to make money. When that meant not interfacing with the Mango in Chief they took a stand and stopped advertising on the Nazi owned platform formerly known as Twitter. Now that making billions of dollars a year relies on cozying up to fascists, they’re going to cozy up to fascists.

Apple doesn’t care about our feelings, they care about making money and they’ll do anything they need to so that the dollars keep flowing. If that feels like a personal affront, time to give props to their marketing team because they fooled you into thinking that the company had morals which aligned withy yours.