The older I get, the more certain I am that Apple products are designed from the ground-up as ad-watching appliances. On iPad, you're restricted to a sandboxed environment where you are not encouraged (or in many cases, allowed) to do anything other than watch ads. You cannot sideload apps that are Open Source. You cannot install emulators or fullspeed VM software. You cannot switch the browser out for one you would prefer with controls amenable to your satisfaction. You watch ads, because any holistic path to entertaining yourself is either sold by Apple or monetized through advertisements. On every Apple platform.

I remember watching those "what's a computer?" ads and laughing out loud. Yeah, what is a computer? We've gone so long watching YouTube ads and Music.ly sponsored content that half of us don't even know what one is. Are we even still connected, when companies like Apple mediate how we're allowed to communicate with each other and share ideas? Apple's design for a bicycle for the mind has been repurposed into a flywheel for cash generation. I don't meet a single person "riding" their iPhone anywhere more important than Pornhub or Instagram.

> You cannot sideload apps that are Open Source. You cannot install emulators or fullspeed VM software. You cannot switch the browser out for one you would prefer with controls amenable to your satisfaction.

Worth noting that while this used to be true, those things are now/soon geofenced features that only Europeans get to enjoy. Too bad if you happen to live in the home country of Apple.

I don't believe you're allowed to run fullspeed VM software or JIT-enabled browsers, even with the DMA. Nothing has been super set-in-stone yet, but those are the terms Apple is intent on promoting.

> I don't believe you're allowed to run fullspeed VM software or JIT-enabled browsers, even with the DMA.

You can. There's a new JIT entitlement for web browsers in Europe. It's still limited to _only_ browsers, so emulators are out of luck.

The intention is for people to be able to run whatever software they want, and Apple is currently figuring out if EU wants Apple to follow the intent of the law, or the letter. We'll see how it goes but I wouldn't hold my breath for Apple to get their will.

> Apple products are designed from the ground-up as ad-watching appliances.

That’s funny. I have virtually no ads on my Apple devices. I associate ads with Windows and Android.

And I have several browsers on my iPad, one reason being avoiding ads.

> I have virtually no ads on my Apple devices.

Virtually. It's great when you log into iCloud and only have to deal with the App Store's "Suggested Content" and the Google suggested results in Spotlight Search and the misery of the default YouTube client running 30s midroll ads. Then you can make the little storage nag go away with a convenient $2.99/month payment addressable to Apple Inc. Oh, you wanted sideloading? That's to the tune of $99/year... can't pass off the SDK for free, can you? We'll assume you ignore Apple Music, although it will certainly nag you to try it.

For cloud storage and basic sideloading capabilities, Apple will charge you $11.24/month for basic features of the phone you bought and still treat you like garbage. The premium brand-halo surrounding their products is the well-documented Reality Distortion Effect - you are being fooled into defending nonsense because you think this grifting benefits you. To be clear, I think Android and Windows both suffer from similar problems, but their users aren't fooled because it's explicit. Apple uniquely abuses their position as OEM, and the problem literally extends to them advertising to their users and convincing them it's harmless when Apple does it. If you don't understand it by now, just read the affidavit once the FTC wraps up their case.

> And I have several browsers on my iPad, one reason being avoiding ads.

You have one browser, with multiple interfaces. When Apple serves you boot, your browsers have no choice but to lick.

Sideloading is free (no need for a developer program subscription) and cloud storage isn't a "basic feature of the phone you bought".

> Sideloading is free

Not if you want the nag to go away

> and cloud storage isn't a "basic feature of the phone you bought"

I agree, but Apple thinks otherwise if you want the Settings nag to go away.

Yes, if you don’t want your software and services to be ad-funded, then you have to pay for them. I thought that was sort of obvious.

So you're coping. That's fine, just make sure you never use Android and discover how green the grass is on the other side. AOSP has fewer ads than iOS in it, and that's just an unfortunate fact.

On Android you install Firefox, have real ad blockers and have effectively the same system as any desktop computer.

On iOS you install a variety of shady ad blocking browsers because the Safari system of extensions doesn't really let the ad blocker extensions block what is needed. You are also trapped in Safari, which is not a good browser, just something that prevents Chrome from ruining everything.

> I can't imagine being locked in till it dies, because as you said, the iPhone is such a miserable product. I'm sure you could resell and get a flagship for a similar price. You'd still net loss, but IMO it would be better than keeping the phone since you don't like it.

I'm not locked to it but honestly I spend so little time on my phone that it's one of the smaller problems in my life. I do despise it, but not enough to sell it before I can't use it anymore.

Along these same lines, the tabletification of Mac OS is annoying. A friend asked me to help with importing photos from the Apple Photo app on his brand new desktop Mac.

The sequence of events was:

Lightroom Legacy needs photos imported because the new Lightroom (cloud/subscription version I believe) has a different workflow, interface and apparently, features, so he's using both for the time being.

So he follows guides on Adobe to import from iPhoto through a plugin.

I had to learn after much google-fu that iPhoto has been replaced by the new Photo app. No compatible libraries found, says the unhelpful error message.

No way to import his Photos library into it without first exporting all photos into a separate folder and importing that one into Lightroom Legacy. Why there is no compatibility shim/layer for that functionality I will never understand...

He refuses to export and reimport all his photos because he has A LOT of them. He does photography as a hobby primarily, but has been using his iPad and iPhone for a while without a Mac PC and was astonished at not being able to do such a simple process.

Part of my troubleshooting involved looking for a potential directory where the Photos app stored the files. It's some sort of package file that creates what seems to be the equivalent of a virtual directory. So I search for the Mac Drive icon... that took me to google, to then Finder, settings, and enable showing the drive. Why the hell does Apple hide the frigging storage device?!!! (I know why... but it's maddening)

One more reason to never want to use or support any Apple product in the future.

See, the file system is a fine system for general data, but if you have data of a specific kind, then there’s often a better way than just dumping them in the file system. That’s always been Apple’s approach: let data assigned to a specific app be handled by that app [1].

Apple’s approach has also been to allow export of that data into standard interoperable formats (be it music, photos, emails, contacts, calendars, etc.).

And FWIW, the photos are in “~/Pictures/Photos Library” - that must have been very difficult to find.

[1] it had two pieces of metadata, content type and creator, for files in Mac OSes prior to OS X, when it regressed to the windows/Unix way of handling things with inelegant file extensions.

Windows has a Pictures folder. Before they started screwing with the OneDrive directories, it used to be in ONE location. Now it's in OneDrive\directory location, which works, even if it annoys me. The upside being automatic backup and restore. That Pictures folder is accessible systemwide and is accessible through EVERY application that can browse directories.

The Photos library on the Mac was not accessible via Lightroom Legacy. He (& I) could not locate it through the "Browse" functionality within the application. I think I could open the photos through finder, but could not import them through Lightroom Legacy. I could, however, Open With: from the Photos app, which then imports into the application just fine. This irked him enough to not want to do it, and I explained that it was the only way to do so, or otherwise export and import the desired photos in bulk.

I see what you're saying, but Apple's approach was clearly not intuitive for me, nor the Mac user. It's what it is, but Apple needs to facilitate working with their virtual folders/libraries natively through applications, not force users to resort to using workarounds... to export into interoperable formats for applications that run natively on their OS. Either Adobe is screwy or Apple is screwy here, but I'm leaning on Apple so far.

There has always been a vision in computing where you can access the same data with different tools.

In the Kernigan and Plauger Software Tools book that describes the Unix user space you could use tools like wc, awk, sort, uniq, and grep, bound together with the shell, to do all kinds of things on plain text files.

As a photographer of course I want to share images between Lightroom Classic and DxO and as a computer graphics “artist” (I almost want to say “technician”) I want to work with images in Photoshop, web editors, tools I write to create images, etc.

Shouldn’t I be able to make music with GarageBand and then listen to it in iTunes and then write a program that plays it through my smart speakers at sunrise to wake me up?

Office 95 revolved around COM which meant that a Microsoft Word file was a composite file that could also contain data from other programs like PowerPoint and Excel so I could embed a small spreadsheet in a word document. (The fact that this system was documented and open was a weakness as much as a strength because you never knew if the recipient of a file had all the applications to open it)

Currently Office uses a documented XML and ZIP based file format. It is easy-peasey to load data in Excel format into pandas to do data analysis (less error prone than CSV even.). It’s not hard to write a program in PHP or Java that makes an Excel sheet complete with formulas for somebody to fill in then have them upload it back to a web site and suck the data out.

Locked in data is one reason why the cloud and mobile age feels like a step backwards than forwards, never mind the possibility of losing your data because you couldn’t pay the bill or your vendor got bought by Google, etc.