You can use a Mac or iPhone without an iCloud account. Doing so works fine for Mac, most applications can be downloaded outside an app store. Sadly on iOS it makes the phone pretty useless if you want to install any third-party apps.

Like others say, it's fairly easy to escape, just keep backups outside iCloud. Also, it's probably best to use a password manager that is not iCloud Keychain.

Agreed. What’s more, I find iCloud’s implementation in MacOS to be far less intrusive than OneDrive in Windows, which constantly pushes me to use it as a default, and has at least once unilaterally forced the issue during an update by moving my home folders into OneDrive, and leaving an absolutely wild text file titled “Where Did My Files Go.txt” on the desktop. If I don’t want to use iCloud, I can easily forget it exists.

I’m not terribly partisan when it comes to platforms, I own and actively use an M1 Mac Mini, Dell Precision running Windows, and a Kubuntu box. I understand the assertion that software ecosystems tend to be a featured player in tactics aimed to fix users on a particular device or platform, and I think there’s plenty of evidence that this is broadly the case. But I wouldn’t use iCloud as a particularly good example of it, Apple’s clearly not banking on their cloud storage to drive its revenue.

Can you? You can skip using the measly iCloud storage I guess. But can you activate a phone without an apple id?

How's that? All my contacts can be stored locally, photos backed up both on my computer and to a separate service plus iCloud, it's pretty easy to set up Dropbox or Box in-place of iCloud Files. Apple Wallet is handy but it really just stores digital copies (over-simplifying) of my physical cards, any of which I can request a replacement for outside Apple.

I don't use Safari but if I did any of its bookmarks/history are easy to import into other browsers.

Yes, you can do this with considerable effort. But the moment you use OIDC with Apple ID there is a good chance you will lose many of the accounts created this way.

The effort is actually minimal. Just export the passwords occasionally and save it in an encrypted file. 30 seconds

The issue is rather, that most people rely on these convenient services 100% and dont (want to) think about what happens in a bad case scenario.

“Save in an encrypted file”? Christ. We really need to draw a HUGE line between “hacker news user solutions” and “things that are practical for actual people to do”.

Most people have a file encryption program of some kind on their computers. WinRAR, 7-Zip, some versions of Microsoft Windows (note: not supported in Windows 10 Home), Microsoft Word…

I agree, that there is no obvious solution by just enabling a setting... But no matter what tool you use for it, that is what needs to be done. It is quite simple for example if you use Macpass or Cryptomator on a Mac.

OIDC is the one part of this that really is an outsize problem.

I’d say email providers are an even bigger problem though. Good luck getting your accounts back if you lose access to your own email account. I don’t know that iCloud mail is particularly popular, but the risk really applies to any provider.

Your contacts can be stored locally but your device will not work if Apple says so as it needs to be "activated" against their servers. And there is no "secondary system". So no, you are completely dependant on Apple and their infrastructure even if you (think you) store data locally.

I use Tailscale, NextCloud (files, pics, calendar, contacts), Podverse, Obsidian, Bitwarden (Vaultwarden), Home Assistant, ProtonMail, Signal, Element, …. If my iPhone (iCloud) goes down it’s just a node in the network with all my data still my own and available.

That's great for you and everyone on HN who's tech savvy, but your average smartphone user has no idea what those even mean let alone how to set them up and use them. Your parent is right and is being needlessly downvoted.

My dad is often defeated on how to set up or use basic features of his smartphone, let alone on how to migrate stuff from one ecosystem to another, which let's be real, is purposely designed to be as friction inducing as possible.

It will be great this set up can be commoditised so everyone can buy one for themselves/family.

You can add it the bucket of similar crap that nerds make when they don’t think to actually check if they’re building something that solves a problem that people actually want solved.

The reality is that if you go to any family BBQ and start going on about the importance of self-hosting, I - someone that’s been working with computers my whole life - am going to roll my eyes and not be all that interested in the conversation, let alone anyone else there (chances are they don’t want to talk about computers at all).

The reality is that these open-source / self-hosted solutions are, the vast majority of the time, harder to use and maintain. There are few things that sound less appealing to me than dealing with the realities of helping my family and friends with using any of that stuff.

This is all just some nerd’s out of touch pipe dream.

> This is all just some nerd’s out of touch pipe dream.

Yes, though only because it's a lot of trouble to set up today.

If it were completely commoditizated -- imagine one more button when setting up a new phone ("Choose where your data resides: Apple, Google, Facebook, Self hosted") and it was completely transparent then it would be used much more, especially if that's complemented by one of the nerds setting up e.g. a neighborhood sync server and everybody around knowing it and using it.

So yes, you are not wrong but the situation can change dramatically if ergonomics are improved. Which sadly most of the nerds never work on.

I used to think this. The Google, Apple, and Facebook options are the improved ergonomics solution. It just never pans out for these open solutions. I've been waiting decades for it things to get to that level, but it always ends up the same way - fiddling with servers.

You are restating that the self-hosted options are not as ergonomic yet which I already acknowledged.

As for waiting, yeah, sad story, but most of us don't want to be on the computer for 16-18h a day anymore. I implore any of the more privileged programmers -- people with job security, $200K+ annual salary, a lot of social safety nets -- to open their eyes and stop fucking around with the one millionth LISP interpreter and just start making non-corporate-controlled tech already.

understood. I am only extending that to say that virtually all software is built with the headspace of "some amount of maintenance" is to be expected. To overcome this, it needs to be delegated to someone. That someone will cost money. It's unclear to how this cycle will ever be broken unless the entire solution is somehow also controlled and produced with uniform open source hardware.

Sure, I don't disagree with that, though I think that we the "nerds" should _really_ stop churning tech and versions of stuff so hard, but that's sadly outside of your control and mine.

In other words, if you built one nice Golang / Rust program and only update the server once every 3 months, you can go quite far without touching it too much. Likely 3-5 years.

So, say you choose the "self hosted" option. I really hope you have at least a RAID10 with 2-drive failure, and regular off-site and off-line backups as well. Choosing "self hosted" is a very risky option, because most people have no clue how to protect their data from loss. I'm sure you'll explain next that some hack0r will figure out how to do redundant backup self-hosted for very little cost that even the stupidest human could use, but I just don't see that being an option in my lifetime, if ever. Okay, so then "self-host" in the cloud? Well that's not really "self-hosted" is it?

I will agree that nerds work far too much on pointless pursuits.

I get what you're saying, but not all of those things are self-hosted. For example, Proton Mail isn't harder to use than Gmail. Signal isn't harder to use than any other messaging app.

I've had great luck convincing even church ladies in their 60s to use both just by explaining that "end-to-end encryption" means that only the sender and recipient can read the messages, not big tech companies and advertisers.

We are in a 0.01% bubble.

For most people, losing their iCloud or Google accounts would be devastating.

I always joke that I'd rather lose all my documents and credit cards than lose my main e-mail account. And only tech savvy folks understand that it is not, in fact, a joke.

"Garden" is too good of a word. "Prison" is more apt.

This is not exactly true. I can lift and shift to Google or Microsoft or standalone if I want to in a day easily. I just don’t want to!

(I have tested this - always have an exit strategy)

If you prepare for a case like this then it's easy. If you get caught off guard (like I imagine most people will) it's hard.

I have an unhealthy habit of switching between FOSS and Apple a few times a year (don't ask) and generally it is pretty easy. The most annoying thing to me is Photos export, especially if you don't have access to a Mac. You can't download your whole library from the online environment, there's a 1000 image limit per shot.

edit: Also I have not found a good way to export from Apple Notes so I have a habit of typing into .md files from the terminal.

edit2: Gave it a search and tried Exporter. Duh. Works great!

Agreed.

Actually an anecdote on switching, my father in law bought an iPhone in a pawn shop. It was logged in with someone else’s iCloud account. He just used that until he dropped dead. We had no idea until I had to clean his phone out. My mother doesn’t even know what iCloud is. Literally total ignorance must be the default for everyone these days.

I’ve done the random switch thing as well as a test case. But to Microsoft. It took me a day to export all photos from Photos.app and into OneDrive and that was with a Mac (105Gb). And of course you lose all the edits you did if you export the originals.

Yeah, I never understood this whole "you're locked in, you can't get out of their ecosystem."

This has always been BS. I've switched from Apple to PC to Linux back to PC to Apple back to PC and then Android etc etc. It's actually quite simple. At the moment I'm using Apple stuff, but there's nothing holding me here other than just me being here.

This is missing the point.

Suppose Walmart has a monopoly in California and Target has a monopoly in Florida. Anybody in California can shop at Target, they just have to go to Florida. "I've switched from California to Florida and then back, it's actually quite simple."

But if you're in California and you need some batteries, even if flying to Florida to buy them from Target is possible, even if you used to live in Florida and might move back there next year, even if you have the money to buy the $300 plane ticket, it's still prohibitively expensive to do it solely to avoid a $5 markup on batteries. Then the two stores don't really have to compete, and you get stuck paying the monopoly price for everything. That's what it means to be locked in.

This is a crap analogy.

You buy different stuff, copy your data across and sell the original stuff.

That’s not lock in. It is if there is no other stuff to buy.

> You buy different stuff, copy your data across and sell the original stuff.

You buy a different house, move your stuff across and sell the original house. How is it a crappy analogy?

The issue is that the cost of moving removes your choice from individual decisions because they all have to be made together. If you want iMessage then you have to sell your Android and get an iPhone. If you want F-Droid then you have to sell your iPhone and get an Android. What if you want both? This isn't because the free software community would be unwilling to set up a store/repository for iOS, it isn't because no Android messaging app would be willing to interoperate with iMessage, it's because you're locked in to one platform or the other at any given time and have to make all your choices together.

Someone who wants to provide an app store that charges lower fees would have to convince everyone to switch to their platform instead of only convincing people to switch to their store.

The reason they make it that way instead of being able to choose what you run on your device independent of the kind of device is in order to lock you in.

Where is the button to copy your photos from apple to google? Until something like that exists normal people are 100% locked in.

They may not even own a laptop with sufficient storage to download all their photos to. If all they have is one, maybe two, phones with limited storage they're totally fucked. Just like Google & Apple designed it.

And it's not like these services make it easy to bulk download/upload your photos, either.

"Even though I paid for this home (laptop) and have all my things in it, I can totally buy another from another realtor if the current locks me out. So joke's on them, it's not exactly a walled garden"

We can all use hyperbole and carefully pick our narratives when we want.

Example: I can live in this nice comfy condo for a sky high fee (Apple) or I can live in a rickety old shed I have to keep fixing for free so I don’t have to pay the ground rent (Linux).

I’d rather live in the condo even if the lease runs out one day.

The analogy is all well and good, except missing the point we're discussing that happened to the parent:

It's not: "I’d rather live in the condo even if the lease runs out one day"

It's more like: "I’d rather live in the condo even if the realtor arbitrarily locks me out, even though I did pay for it"

I'm not saying it was a bad analogy, just that it's easy to create analogies to create a narrative based on your own perception. Obviously the point was missed.

In this case, their analogy seems to be based on reality.

The key point of their analogy is that buying another condo isn't a good solution to someone locking you out of the one you paid for, just like buying a new phone isn't a good solution to Apple locking you out of your phone that you paid for.

Your complaint with their analogy seems to boil down to "they used an analogy", without actually addressing the point above. Try to focus on the point instead.

And apparently, sometimes, when you want to return to that walled garden, your keys to the front gate just don't work anymore.