Apple’s political turn is leading it down a sketchy road

In a clearing in a forest, near the magical river where the gnomes harvest mushrooms and the fairies argue over an editorial in the latest issue of Teen Vogue, sits a Macalope on a stump, hunched over a keyboard. Is it ergonomic? No. It’s a forest. How is it going to be ergonomic? Magic? Magic is surprisingly un-ergonomic. There isn’t even a power outlet. Thank god for the M-series processors’ low power consumption.

There is Wi-Fi, though, because the centaurs set up an open network for their late-night MMORPG sessions. They are loud and anger the nymphs, who have to be up early to dance in the glade. It’s a whole thing.

But let’s return to the lone Macalope. He’s trying to think of what to write for this week’s column. There’s going to be an Apple event this week. He could write about that. But it’s probably just the new iPhone SE, maybe with a new name. Nice, but it’s not exactly huge news.

He could write about Apple Intelligence and the company’s rumored struggles getting Siri to be smarter. But there’s only so many times you can write about AI without your head exploding.

The thing is, he knows what he should write about, he just doesn’t want to.

The Macalope doesn’t want to write about politics. These days, he doesn’t even want to think about politics. Have you seen politics? Ugh. Blech. It was never good on a good day. But now…

And writing about politics on a technology website is the very definition of a Kobayashi Maru. Except without the Klingons. And spaceships. So, not the very definition, but you know what the Macalope means.

People will yell “Stay in your lane, mythical beast! Just shut up and be funny about Apple!” First of all, that’s an oxymoron. Unless the Macalope is supposed to do a funny interpretive dance about Apple and he wouldn’t even know where to start with something like that. Julliard? Could he even get in at his age? Second, though, believe the Macalope when he says he would love to just be funny about Apple. But it’s getting harder and harder to do.

IDG

And the Macalope isn’t the one who started it. Apple was conspicuously non-political for years, not having its own political action committee while almost all of its U.S.-based competitors did. Okay, sure, it hired a few famous former members of Democratic administrations. But it also took on the Department of Justice during a Democratic administration over privacy concerns.

The first thing that drew attention to Apple’s new game was in January when Tim Cook made an unprecedented $1 million donation to the incoming administration’s inaugural fund. The Macalope says “unprecedented” because he’d never done it before. All of a sudden he’s really into the transition of power. Sure, Tim.

Now, Apple has decided to resume advertising on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Let’s remember the reason Apple stopped advertising on that site in the first place:

The move follows Musk’s endorsement of antisemitic conspiracy theories as well as Apple ads reportedly being placed alongside far-right content.

Axios, November 17, 2023

And it’s not like he’s apologized. Still, at least since then, he’s stayed out of the spotlight and only gone on to… [pretends to put on glasses and read a piece of paper]… be the unelected, unconfirmed, unqualified auditor-in-chief of the entire U.S. government.

Huh. Don’t remember that in that Schoolhouse Rock song. Guess he got the gig by doing such a bang-up job with Twitter.

It’s little wonder that people are upset with Apple. The company has clearly decided to buy itself access, no matter what the cost to its reputation and, yeah, gonna say it, the rest of us.

You picked a really bad time to start being political, Apple. And we see you.

Plus, you’re apparently never going to make a phone in a size the Macalope likes again, either. So there’s also that.