I guess what I'm saying is, at least for me, this backlash is blurring their entire privacy and security pitch. Apple built a walled garden, told me it was for my own protection, then come to find out the cameras are all pointing to the inside.
Are you sure? My local Apple store is just as crowded as it was two weeks ago.
I already own a Pinephone but it's not at a point where I'd want to use it as a daily driver. But they're only $150-$200, so worth taking a chance if you don't want an Android alternative. You may end up liking it. I do know people who are using it daily. It's just not for me. Not yet.
If you want to look into the Android alternatives further, this HN discussion about CalyxOS went into some great detail about that OS, and about other alternatives too.
And we're on Hacker News. People know about ROMs and how to use them. Get a Pixel and throw Lineage onto it. It'll be at minimum $100 cheaper and the specs are pretty damn close (minor trades in either direction).
Yes, and I've used it. I'll admit, it is nice. Apple is great about things "just working," but there are also costs to that feature. I'm not sure why people think this is the only way to have said convenience. The major difference is just that Apple this convenience is by default. Honestly Google provides most of this by default too.
> I haven't used others and I am telling you how it looks from my point of view.
And I've used both, and telling you how it is from my point of view. Stop having strong opinions about things that you admittedly don't have experience with. It isn't a good look.
> I will have to invest resources to discover the things you talk about.
You had to invest resources to adapt Apple's ecosystem.
> And there are lots of assumptions in the things you suggested, like that I am fine with using Google or Linux,
Well Google, Linux, Windows, and third party ROMs like Lineage are essentially the only other options out there, so I'm not sure I made many assumptions. And of the most popular, for phones your options are most likely to be Google (i.e. Android) or iOS. The only other option is... third party ROMs. I guess for desktop you could in fact develop your own (besides Linux or Windows), but I think this would fall under a third party custom ROM (if phone) or Linux (if computer). Then again, you could be a BSD person or someone that insists it is GNU/Linux. Let's be real, that's just pedantic, you know what I mean. I'm not going to name every alternative (that's impossible), especially since I covered by far the most popular ones, which share >90% of user share. Why do we have to be so pedantic?
I don't know man, the more you're fighting against this the more it seems like you're just saying "I don't want to try something new." That's fine, but just be open about it. I get it, new things are scary, different, and require you to relearn some things. But that's a different argument. Just state that argument if that's what you're trying to say. Don't make me work for it. Just be honest.
For the past week (entirely related to this being a kicker of a motivation on top of a bunch of other simmering long term concerns over Apple and the tech industry in general), I've been carrying around a Nokia 8110 4G - also known, for very understandable and valid reasons, as "The Bananaphone." It's quite literally curved and bright yellow.
The world hasn't ended yet...
It's a bit less of a step for me than other people because I'm already pretty cell-phone hostile. My iPhone (I regret buying a 2020 SE to replace my 6S under the assumption that the 6S wouldn't get iOS 15, which it's getting... maybe...) was pretty well nerfed to start with - very few apps, literally the only apps on my homescreen were person to person or group chat apps (Signal, iMessage, Google Chat, and the Element Matrix client, plus phone, browser, and camera in the bottom). Everything else had to live in the app library thing, which increased friction to use it, and I really didn't have much on there.
But that has been shut down except for a few 10-15 minute windows the past week, and I've been trying, very hard, to work out the transition back to a "dumbphone" (or, as we used to call them, a cellphone).
The main pain point so far is that all my messaging apps used to come to a central point on my phone - so if someone wanted to contact me, it didn't matter what they used, it would ping me if I had my phone on me. Now, that's split (my wife is the main party impacted, I'm pretty high lag on other platforms anyway). If I'm out and about, I can get SMS, but not Matrix/Signal/Chat. If I'm in my office, I can get all of them, but would rather not have a long conversation over T9 - except some of them don't do a great job of notifying me, depending on what machines are running and muted at any given time. Etc. I'm still working this out, and some of it is simple enough - add audio notifications to my "Chat Pi" by wiring in a speaker instead of relying on my phone to chirp if I get a message in Chat or element. That my M1 Mac Mini is going out the door at some point gives me added motivation to solve this.
When out and about, I do at least have the option of tethering to the banana - so I could carry some other device that handles more than the phone does (which seriously isn't much). I'm debating between going back to a small tablet (2nd gen Nexus 7 would be a perfect form factor), or something like a YARH (http://yarh.io) of some variety - a little Pi based mobile computer thing that is exceedingly "We didn't invent smartphones"punk.
I'm at a point in my life (professionally, socially, culturally, etc) where I can happily do "You're weird... whatever..." sort of things with regards to technology, and I'm going to pull the thread until I either figure out alternatives, or determine that they simply don't exist and I can't live without them.
I thought you were going to say it's cellular, modular, interactivodular.
I think the pros list stays longer than the cons list.
Where you put these will depend on your view on a lot of the issues, certainly.
But, in the past decade:
- Every interaction with your primary device is now, by default, an opportunity for aggressive data collection, often in ways even the people who write the software don't know (because they rely on tons of other libraries and toolkits that are doing this quietly under the hood).
- The default is now that you use a smartphone for everything, with the desktop experience limited or turned into a crappy version of the smartphone version (Image! Video! Scroll, scroll, scroll, never stopping, always seeing more ads! Text, who cares about that ancient stuff?)
- The default has gone from "If you're alone in a social space, you talk to other people" to "You stare at your phone." Certainly was a trend before, with the Walkman/iPod/etc, but it accelerated dramatically.
- Everything has been turned into either a subscription service, or a "Free-to-play" world in which the goal is addiction and microtransactions.
There are plenty of benefits of smartphones, but culturally we're exceedingly bad at looking at the opportunity costs of new technology, and they're increasingly becoming harder to ignore.
If you can honestly evaluate the device and decide it's a net positive, great. But I know an increasing number of people, myself included, who are evaluating them and saying, "You know, never mind. They're not worth the downsides."
I’m starting graduate school in the fall. A few weeks ago, I went in to pick up my new college ID card. The security guard would not let me into the building until I downloaded an app called “Everbridge” on my phone and used it to answer a series of health screening questions (ie, have you tested positive for COVID in the past 14 days).
The app was for iOS and Android. There was no web version. There was no option to fill out a paper form. I was not warned in advanced. But I guess it wasn’t a problem for anyone (including me), because who the heck doesn’t have a smartphone? It’s like having a wallet now—an expected requirement for modern life, even in situations when an analog solution could have worked just as well.
Again, I'm at a point where I can be a thorny pain in the ass about stuff like this, but you carrying a smartphone, even though you (presumably?) know it's evil means that people can do things like this - expect you to download some large blob of unknown code that you're going to run.
As long as they don't encounter people who literally can't comply, it's fine. It works for them.
I mean, I would have refused to download an unknown app I'd never heard of, but... if I pull out a clearly-not-a-smartphone, what are they going to make me do? Go down the street to Best Buy, buy a phone, and come back?
What if your phone was too old to run the app (which looks like a steaming pile, based on reviews)?
Unless there was something in the application documentation about "owning a modern smartphone and being willing to install random applications as required by the university," I would have plopped right down, pulled out a laptop, and started making phone calls to figure it out.
But, again, I'm at a point in my life where I can be a thorny pain in the ass about stuff like this without any real consequences.
I needn't be holding child pornography to be concerned about a third party viewing my photos, writing, or other media on a device that is just mine and not published, public content.
The weirdly less discussed aspect of this is that anyone who is storing their images of any kind on someone else’s computer and network thinks that nothing could have been viewed before. If Apple or Google or Amazon want to scan the data you store with them they could be doing it, so if that was a concern for a person from the get go then they wouldn’t have been storing their data with third parties to begin with.
I honestly don't understand why this is a relevant point. It's still surveillance.
> that anyone who is storing their images of any kind on someone else’s computer and network thinks that nothing could have been viewed before
I don't think that's the confusion. I think a huge part of the issue is that the surveillance is not taking place on someone else's computer, it's taking place on your smartphone. Yes, Apple says it only happens if you're uploading to the cloud -- but that's just Apple saying "trust us". If they did the scanning on their computers instead of yours, it wouldn't be necessary to trust them on this point.
My point is we've already been taking the same risks and the only reason it’s something now is because it’s a transparent process. It’s always a “trust us” scenario unless a person routinely scans all software they is and all updates for malicious server calls or some other kind of recording of data and maybe opening of a back door.
On a side note: I went to Apple site trying to find that page for all those new features and I could not find one (at least by going to obvious places). The way I was able to get it to link in my posts is by googling it… this whole thing is not yet obvious to laypeople.
We drank the Apple Privacy Kool-aid, and now we are holding them to it.
This is totally a battle worth fighting!