Re:Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance a...
by swiley on Thursday August 12, 2021 @08:13AM
(#28155234)
I Was the reason my family switched from Windows and Linux to OSX back when it was popular among hackers. They had seen the ads with celebrities for years and it didn't move them the way I did. I thought we finally had a unix-like OS that we could all standardize on without my mom freaking out at Gnome and for a time that was true.
They remind me every time I bring up stuff like this that I was the one who pushed them to use Apple. In retrospect I wish I had taken FOSS more seriously.
Re:Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance a...
by idunnoman on Thursday August 12, 2021 @07:02AM
(#28154703)
I dunno. Isn't this how Chrome became so popular, and Firefox before that?
"We" are the people that support, recommend and install this stuff. Hardware just has longer life cycles.
Re:Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance a...
by xvector on Thursday August 12, 2021 @07:30AM
(#28154928)
Not to mention, the "nerdy guys" play a big role in deciding what hardware your company buys, what OS and applications are installed, etc. Friends and family reach out to the nerdy guys for recommendations, etc. The impact is slow but massive.
We sure did. We're also ignoring all the celebrities that helped to push the Apple brand (remember the iPod and it's terrible but iconic white headphones?).
Popular culture has a much stronger influence on Apple's standing with non-nerds, than nerds do. We like to think we're important, and that people value our opinions, but increasingly that's not true. as the differences between the options diminish to 'probably bad for the world long term' (big tech) and 'probably bad for you today' (open source / pinephone / etc, they're just not usable enough yet), the value of our opinions drops, because there's no real choice between bad or badder.