I think there’s a difference. “You are the product” means that your usage and data are the primary thing the company develops (with software) so it can be sold to their actual customers, namely, advertisers.

I’ve been involved with many software companies that gather various metrics (analytics, crash logs, user info, etc.) but do not sell that data to anyone. As such, the user is not “the product” but the customer. I think there’s a meaningful difference here.

In those cases the user is an asset for the company. And not "asset" in a good way if you ask me. It's more of an resource than anything noble.

Since it's a pet peeve we share I'll add... I feel it's a bi-directional exchange. A trade. I consume a product (Gmail) and they consume a product (my personal information). At best I'd be "a" product not exclusively "the" product.

Self hosted is the only good future

I kind of agree and would like to try selfhosting stuff for myself, but in the future where should the self hosting lie? Not everyone can self host (your mother, cousin, etc, people with disabilities, etc) So if it is the future, would level of society would host it reliably? Family, government, etc. Everything seems problematic either in terms of practicality and security.

Is that true for Apple?

You are the product Apple sells to app developers for 30% of their income. Notice that you are not allowed to do things that interfere with this.

That's not at all the same thing as the person I was replying to was claiming, though.

One of the biggest problems with surveillance capitalism is how it subtly guides you to the thing the corporation wants by manipulating search ranking or using ML to influence human behavior.

With Apple there is no subtlety because you just can't have what they don't want you to. Apple wants to have a deal with Hollywood so no iOS BitTorrent clients for you. You don't even know that the things you're being deprived of would have been available -- it's the same problem. It's worse. At least with Google if you notice they're removing things you want to see from search results you can switch to another search engine and still use Android. If you want video game ROMs on your iOS device you have to throw it away and buy something else.

And the privacy thing feels like a Trojan horse when they still have all your data on iCloud and have root on your device. Supposedly they don't do anything with it now (except allow iCloud to be subpoenaed by law enforcement without a warrant), and I tend to believe them.

Now suppose we finally get a free hardware phone that isn't a dog. It runs an Android fork with all the privacy invasive stuff stripped out but can still run Android apps and gets OS updates for 10+ years (i.e. indefinitely) because the drivers are in the kernel tree. That would eat a big chunk of Apple's market -- the people who don't want the central control but do want the privacy are going over there. Or just pick whatever scenario you like where Apple's business starts shrinking rather than growing. Nothing lasts forever.

Their executives are under pressure to keep profits up and they have an enormous trove of everyone's data they weren't previously monetizing. Desperate companies do desperate things. Or get acquired by Oracle or AT&T or Huawei.

Since that can happen with non-trivial probability at some future date, you can't put anything on your iPhone you're not willing to have that happen to. And then how is that any better than the alternative? It's even worse if you don't expect it to happen and then it does.

Looking at Apple's latest hardware changes, I think users are once again the customers.