It took him years to realise Google search results had a scroll bar, and it wasn't just the 3 items that fitted on the screen.
He wrote simulation software for the radio propagation of military IFF transponders before he retired, and his idea of "computer safety" was therefore somewhere between "do not connect them to the internet" and "put them in a faraday cage".
Do you also want to take away everyone's cars because of traffic deaths? That's far more serious than someone's parent installing malware on their shiny digital toys.
What about taking away kitchen knifes? Those things sure are dangerous!
This isn't the same thing. The equivalent in your anecdote is that Car A comes with a three point seatbelt that you don't want to use, and you want Car A to be sold without it so you can use your preferred safety device, despite multiple current owners of Car A telling you that they _want_ the three point seatbelt. And you can always buy Car B if you want to install a lap belt instead.
That this isn't "infantilizing".
> Do you also want to take away everyone's cars because of traffic deaths? That's far more serious than someone's parent installing malware on their shiny digital toys.
My mum did that for my gran when my gran got Alzheimer's and my mum realised she'd been driving for 6 months without paying road tax.
And then the same happened to my mum.
Also, you're giving the exact argument in favour of self-driving cars as soon as the tech is actually ready, and also the reason that crumple zones and seatbelts are mandatory.
And also the reason we have (revokable) driving tests to be allowed to use the vehicles in the first place.
> What about taking away kitchen knifes? Those things sure are dangerous!
https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives has a high degree of popular support, and has done since I was a kid myself.
No, that's dangerous! Everyone should crawl everywhere while wearing an iHelmet if we were to apply apple's modus operandi to transportation.
> And also the reason we have (revokable) driving tests to be allowed to use the vehicles in the first place.
Hmm, so you think that maybe qualified people should be allowed to use dangerous devices? I'm fine with you taking devices away from your parents. That's up to you and your parent.
> https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives has a high degree of popular support, and has done since I was a kid myself.
Is your argument that your iphone should not be allowed outside where it might scare other people? Odd take. Even in the UK an adult is allowed to buy & posses a kitchen knife.
I wrote "Back when he was still alive", so… no.
> Is your argument that your iphone should not be allowed outside where it might scare other people? Odd take.
No, and I don't know why you'd think that. In fact, that's such a weird take, I think you wrote that in bad faith.
> Even in the UK an adult is allowed to buy & posses a kitchen knife.
Buy, yes. Possess in public without "good reason" as defined by the police and prosecution, no.
That's the house they chose to live in. It's a house in which no knives existed. Now you're saying "let them put knives in, how dare you restrict them from having a knife!" whereas most consumers are saying "I like this house, wow living here feels great.". It's not a knife issue. You're trying to make it a knife issue.
The success of the iPhone was never obvious from day one. To attribute Apple's success to monopolistic behavior and consumer oppression, rather consumer behavior and expression, is just denying reality.
I wonder if this is because today's interfaces are actually so much worse for scrollbar UX (usability and discoverability) than anything we had since they were invented 43 years ago.
Just look at it... https://scrollbars.matoseb.com/
By the time I was in college, he was on his way towards retiring, and knowing that I was into software, decided that I would be his IT support person. He went through various laptops and desktops (PCs, Macs, he even gave Linux a real try but gave up when he couldn't get his financial planning software to run on it), Android phones, etc. The one platform he liked using in his later years was iOS/iPadOS specifically because, in his words, "there's not a bunch of other s--- here, and I don't need to manage it".
It's ease-of-use dovetailing with computer safety, and that's a _hard_ problem.
Almost everybody has to use a computer for work and other stuff, and they are willing to pay for a safe and sound system. They are not interested in becoming full time Arch Linux root administrators just to conduct their daily business on their device. Just like almost none of the people who drive a car are full time mechanics and welders.
Be real.
Sort of like how you keep bringing up guns, knives, and car safety in a conversation about phone apps, to illustrate your point.
They don't need to if they don't want to.
I'd be one of the users who are not inclined to transform my iPhone back into my days using Linux on desktop and suffering the pains of doing it. I do have the option to turn my computer into that if I want, I do not have that option for my phone even though it's just a computer.
No one would be forcing users into doing that, it's about allowing the users who want that control over their own devices.
You are attacking a strawman.
Any effort to disenfranchise me from those rights is, in my opinion, unethical. If a company were to try to do so under the guise of a semantic argument, I would find it even more distasteful.
The "point" at which such things should apply is when they are large enough that anti-trust laws and pro competition laws apply to them. IE: when they are very very large and are worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
The moment this is a thing is when the social engineering attacks to get people to root their own phones, to set up untrusted app stores that firehose shitware down onto phones, etc. starts to happen. "I'm from Microsoft, you need to add the Microsoft Store to your iPhone, here's how." I get your concern, and in a world less built on open grift I would share it, but our esteemed tech brainlords have built a tech ecosystem that exists to enable scams. (Hell, I almost got popped a few months ago by a scam, and I tend to be pretty cautious about things.)
Unless the opt-in mechanism is something like "open the phone and turn a jumper" or "buy a different model of the same phone" I genuinely think it's way too dangerous for the average target of a social-engineering attack. People buy iPhones to not deal with this shit as much as is possible; taking that away hurts a lot more people than it helps.
Apple offers security and convenience on their devices, which is why many people like them. Windows offers no security but some convenience, Linux offers security and no convenience.
Like I said in another comment, if Spotify is not happy with Apple they can manufacture their own device and sell to consumers. People buy and use Apple devices of their own free will, and developers develop for their devices of their own free will as well. And there is plenty of competition in the market.
I invested money in the ecosystem and now there's vendor lock-in, I'm bound to it unless the usage becomes so unbearable that the pain to change vendors is less than continuing the one I have, the pain threshold only grows for each passing year I'm invested in the ecosystem. Do you comprehend that?
Opening a phone for others to develop apps on top does not encroach anywhere into Apple's sale of phones, it just creates a massive wall to guard against other competitors selling apps to their platform. They charge for the phone, and now they extract rent from something they sold through the App Store. Please, think deeper about this, you are missing the point entirely.
> Like I said in another comment, if Spotify is not happy with Apple they can manufacture their own device and sell to consumers.
No, they can't. That's not their business, they don't have the capital to develop and foster a whole 3rd platform of devices + OS just to move away from Apple's ecosystem, that's the whole point of developing a platform: creating a massive lever against competition because of network effects. Network effects are very hard to break from, hence why most major tech companies try to leverage that (look at Meta/Facebook, they are shit but still it's very hard to compete against due to their size).
> People buy and use Apple devices of their own free will, and developers develop for their devices of their own free will as well. And there is plenty of competition in the market.
There's only 1 competitor in the market: Android, manufacturers using Android are not 1 competitor each since none of them are providing a full platform, the platform is Android on top of some devices.
Free will is a massive naïvete to throw here. Is there free will when there are no other options to reach a market? Is there free will for online sellers in the USA to not put their products on Amazon since you'll be living on the outskirts of the market without any meaningful way to penetrate into it if other competitors have an advantage simply by paying the Amazon tax and selling their products through Amazon?
I think you are too naïve and ideological, that blinds you from understanding market forces and markets in general.
I know you're being sarcastic, but it is extremely trivial and simple to buy another phone. Because you can also keep the phone you have!
There is a hang-up among hackers that think it is impossible to use different phones, different computers and different browsers. You can have one phone for this and another for that. You can use both vim and emacs to edit a document and you can have several computers with different systems. Hell, you can even have different sets of cutlery at your home.
> No, they can't.
They sure can. Being incompetent or lacking in capabilities is an acceptable excuse for a person, not for a billion dollar company like Spotify. I have here on my desk a pocket music player of excellent quality that was manufactured in 2023. It is not Android nor iOS and the company making it is much smaller than Spotify. So why can't they? "Not our business"? If they're that incompetent, the CEO and the leadership should apologise for being failures, step down, pay back to shareholders all salary they have received and go hide away.
Yes there is free will for sellers to not put their products on Amazon. That's called retail, and it's a tough market. If your product is good enough you can sell it without putting it on a third-party marketplace. Just like with hotel aggregator websites and food delivery apps. Companies are doing fine without being there.
> There's only 1 competitor in the market: Android
There's thousands of different Android phones in the market, that's the competition. And it's not that difficult for a tech company to develop their own mobile OS if they'd like. Microsoft made Windows Phone which many people liked, Nokia made the excellent and ahead of its time Meego OS, BlackBerry 10 OS was excellent as well. And there is absolutely no blame on Apple for these tech giants discontinuing their OSes. They were discontinued because they weren't profitable enough for the owners taste. So now Apple should be forced to make sure that their competitors can make a profit from their customers? Because that's the core of the matter. Other companies do not want to do the work and investments that Apple did to get a loyal customer base willing to spend money, so they're using EU regulators to freeload.
No sympathy to any of them. Make better ecosystems if you want to compete, you have the money and the means. Try giving a fuck about your customers and your business. That's something that the general public and consumers also would benefit from.
Well, actually, it seems that spotify won the lawsuit.
So, it is instead that Apple will have to pay a fine, and if they don't like it then they can pull out of the EU entirely.
> people buy and use Apple devices of their own free will
And Apple participates in the EU market of its own free will, and can shutdown if they don't like the law.
And users who buy from Apple will be free to install or not install whatever they want on their devices soon.
If those users don't like it, then they can simply not install apps that they don't like and are free to only install apps from Apple.