I might be done paying Tim Apple.

It’s no secret that I’ve long been a fairly hapless Apple fanboy. My first machine was a grey plastic PowerBook 100, which I saved up for over the better part of two years. I’m pretty sure it’s still around here somewhere, buried among the many dead laptops and iMac carcasses that litter my office and storeroom.

My current machine, which I’m writing on right now, is a big arse M4 MacBook Air. I bought it for my trip to Sydney earlier this month because I knew my 13-inch Air was gonna be way too cramped to wrangle a 100,000-word manuscript without making me nucking futs. And sure enough the extra couple of inches of screen real estate was enough to make everything doable.

I try not to think about how much money I’ve paid the Fruit Company over the years, although it does ease the sting that I can claim most of it on tax. And even without the offset, I’d have made a lot of those purchases anyway. Cos I’m a sucker.

Which is why it pains me to admit that I might be done paying Tim Apple.

What’s turned me off isn’t the increasingly shitty software design or the endless subscription grift. It’s Apple’s utterly gross collaboration with the Trump regime.

I thought the worst so far was their public donation to build the Orange Czar’s new ballroom. Apple did not have to do that. They could have quietly declined.

But they didn’t.

I would’ve been annoyed at that anyway, since it feels like I’m paying for it, but on the same weekend that Trump’s goons murdered ICU nurse Alex Pretti, Cook turned up at the White House for the private premiere of the Jeff Bezos-funded Melania documentary. That was not an event any decent person needed to be seen at, and certainly not on that weekend.

My brain finally broke when I heard.

I’ll admit I have no idea where this leaves me, because I’m not about to start buying Windows machines. We have a couple of beige boxes in the house for Thomas’s gaming rig and Jane’s work laptop, and nothing I’ve seen from those pieces of shit makes me want to spend even a single dollar on the hardware or software.

I doubt this is the year Linux finally claims the desktop, so we’ll not indulge that fantasy, either. Which means that, in practical terms, I am more or less stuck in the orchard.

My phone is a different matter.

I bought a 16 Pro shortly after launch, planning to keep it for six or seven years in the way I usually do, but it gets uncomfortably hot after a few minutes of use, and the battery life has fallen off a cliff after the latest operating system update.

Until a few weeks ago, I was telling myself I’d just write another Axis of Time book, then spend some of the royalties on a new phone and possibly an iMac upgrade. Now I find myself thinking that my old iMac works perfectly well for writing and it’s statistically likely to outlive me anyway, given my world-class ability to grow melanomas. I might as well use it until it dies, or at least until I do.

If and when I do replace that machine, under the current circumstances, I don’t think I’ll be buying anything from Apple or its resellers. I’ll be looking for a second-hand unit so the money goes to another human being and not to a corporation that seems intent on supporting an increasingly shitty regime.

The phone is harder. Dropping out of Apple’s ecosystem would mean losing a lot of amenity, as most of my work and life runs through that ecosystem now. But I am travelling to Korea in a couple of weeks, and the battery issue is becoming a problem. I can’t buy a Google Pixel because they, too, are helping fund the ballroom and appear to be enthusiastically supporting the same creeping authoritarian horror circus. Which leaves me, in a plot twist for the ages, contemplating a Samsung.

I have no illusions about Samsung being a virtuous choice. They’re a bunch of cunts. But as best as I can tell, they are not openly funding American fascism and the collapse of the global order. So maybe I’ll give them a try on their home turf.

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