You are doing the exact thing I am complaining about. I DON'T trust Apple and never said I did; I quite explicitly elaborated on this above.

Not trusting Apple doesn't magically bring a trustworthy iPhone competitor into existence.

Trust in this discussion isn't a binary 1/0. You do trust Apple in some regards, else it'd be impossible to use their devices for anything. There's a tradeoff being made, that Apple does not do 'certain evil things'. This one's crossing the boundary for some, opening the floodgate for others. That's the issue at hand.

For example, say US government. I trust the US government not to kill me (Dutch citizen, not a terrorist, not a criminal, etc etc). Does that mean I trust the US government with my personal data? No, that's a different discussion. And if I were to trust them with my personal data, does that mean I believe the US government has integrity? No. I've been very disappointed with the US government with regards to a recent war (I'll refrain from details as its irrelevant), so they need to earn back credibility. In my language there's a saying 'vertrouwen komt te voet, maar vertrekt per paard' which translates to something akin to 'trust comes on foot and goes on horseback'.

> magically bring a trustworthy iPhone competitor into existence

Well, purchase a Pixel 5, install CalyxOS or Graphene, lock bootloader again. Job done. Probably you'll lose some convenience, but you know, you may always ask some FOSS dev to bake a feature for you and pay for it.

> Probably you'll lose some convenience, but you know, you may always ask some FOSS dev to bake a feature for you and pay for it.

The amount of money needed to bring CalyxOS to the iPhone level of polish and to get the same sets of popular apps on there is probably in the millions.

Freedom and privacy are not free.

> Not trusting Apple doesn't magically bring a trustworthy iPhone competitor into existence.

But spending your money on Apple products certainly won't either.

> Not trusting Apple doesn't magically bring a trustworthy iPhone competitor into existence.

I'm afraid that'll never happen, at least, until most people don't care about their privacy and are willing to accept one-sided tradeoffs with phone vendors. BUT, there are alternatives like LineageOS that do a pretty good job. They only need more acceptance by public to be able to compete at the level of a trillion-dollar company like AAPL.

Right. And I think projects like LineageOS are super interesting.

My beef is just with statements like "people ignore RMS," as I have yet to see any evidence of this. Everything I have observed is that anyone who has heard of RMS is fully aware of his concerns, but most of those people just have different priorities.

That much was known upon purchasing the axe - maybe it cuts trees 50% quicker and thus was worth the tradeoff, but now you can re-evaluate your options and purchase a different axe.