Apple also seems to intentionally cultivate and sell their products as privacy-friendly, which is clearly not the case (see image above).
2nd reason is that I had an iphone 2g (one of the first models, I forget which one), and it had bluetooth support. An iOS update broke it, and when I reached out to apple, they lied to me and told me my device had no bluetooth module at all. They’re one of the worst offenders of planned obsolescence, and have become one of the richest companies on the planet because of it.
3rd reason: they sell overpriced products to mainly to high-income imperial-core consumers, selling an image of “upper-class professional”. Look at a graph of iOS market share worldwide, vs its market share in the richest countries. Apple didn’t even bother to condescend to make affordable products for the global south.
The markup on iphones is something outrageous, like 40% of the purchase price is going to the shareholders of apple, not the workers who built the phones. By buying apple, you are mainly supporting these wealthy parasites. Its also why other smartphone brands have higher performance at half the cost of iphones. They really bank on the fact that they’re selling an upper-class identity, and less of a phone.
4th reason: Their ecosystem is locked down in such a way as to make it difficult for open source development. iirc apple won’t even let you use the GPL for any app on their app store.
apple products are coveted both in and out of imperial core; whether or not they can afford them.
my point is that the most well educated and leftist leaning generations we’ve ever had (i’m assuming) continues to place a premium on products like these and that makes the eventuality of breaking out of this imperialist cycle seem unrealistic.
Wow, this is the most complete answer I have ever seen. But is it wrong if I stay at Apple? Are there any competitors on the Android side that are worth it (I am thinking in particular of a pixel on which GrapheneOS is installed)?
I don’t think it’s wrong to stay with apple, you could always just go with something else for your next phone, although if you are concerned enough about the privacy aspect, you could always sell your phone, and get some advice about which are the best smartphone models to run the privacy-focused android variants.
Some of them list the devices they work on, like lineageOS.
There’s ppl here a lot more knowledgeable than I am here that could help you choose one.
I’ll mention that a pixel with CalyxOS works great as well, no google code code other than AOSP which helps battery life a lot.
Some things like voice controlled companion or android auto are being implemented, but I never really gave a fuck about that stuff, being on bicycle or motorcycle only.
I’m currently using Graphene and I love it. There are some features in this OS that i have never seen before. It feels like I’m just running a regular OS. I don’t notice anything unusual.
One thing I really like with gOS is the ability to remove network permission on apps. I use Gboard with no network, and I have found it so far to be the best keyboard for me.
Exactly as per the label in 2016, the biblical themes and involvement of children were too spicy for the App Store, and the folks in Apple weren’t allowed to think outside their box, so it was rejected.
Even now, Apple is fighting gunpower and gelatine to sabotage all efforts to allow side-loads and stores they cannot control.
From their own privacy policy they outline what they do:
For research and development purposes, we may use datasets such as those that contain images, voices or other data that could be associated with an identifiable person.
To provide location-based services on Apple products, Apple and our partners and licensees, such as maps data providers, may collect, use, and share precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device.
Apple’s websites, online services, interactive applications, email messages, and advertisements may use “cookies” and other technologies such as pixel tags and web beacons.
We also use personal information to help us create, develop, operate, deliver, and improve our products, services, content and advertising
At times Apple may provide third parties with certain personal information to provide or improve our products and services, including to deliver products at your request, or to help Apple market to consumers.
Apple may collect location, IP Address, network information, Bluetooth information, connected devices, accessories, personal demographics, browsing history, browser fingerprint, device fingerprint, search history, app data, usage data, performance, diagnostics, product interaction, transaction information, payment information, purchasing records, contacts, social graph, watch history, listening interests, reading list, call metadata, device information, messaging metadata, email addresses, salary, income, assets, health data, ad interaction, in-app purchases, in-app subscriptions, app downloads, music downloads, movie downloads, TV show downloads, Apple ID, IDFA, Random Unique ID, UUID, IMEI, Hardware serial number, SIM serial number, phone number, telemetry, cookies, Nearby WiFi MAC, Siri request history, Web sign-in, songs played, play and pause times, playlists, engagement and library.
Literally all of this is what Google does. The only thing Apple does differently is hinder 3rd party apps to a greater degree, whereas Google is more permissive. But to be fair, Google has been improving the Privacy features of Android with each version.
I think for most privacy nuts it comes down to “I don’t trust them and it’s closed source. They could be hiding anything in that code.”
And then there’s the people who can’t afford or won’t spend the money it takes to have an enjoyable Apple experience. It genuinely costs multiple thousands of dollars to get into the Apple ecosystem and then it’s massively painful to get out. It’s basically just “corporation bad” because corporations are bad. The only way to be truly private is to not carry a phone at all and use only FOSS solutions.
I keep hearing how painful it is to get out. Can someone please elaborate on this?
I am not super tech savvy and was DEEP in the ecosystem but didn’t think it was hard by any stretch.
I migrated my data, purged my files, canceled my subscriptions in a few taps/clicks, sold our imacs, MacBook pros, homepods and iPhones and moved on with my life and haven’t looked back since. Took maybe an afternoon for the data piece and a few other after-the-fact logins to cancel things I forgot about. This is legit the 4th time in two days I’ve read this comment so I am just genuinely curious!
If you have terabytes of data in iCloud, use their mail, contacts, photos, everything? Plus decades of purchased content, expensive devices losing functionality by dropping the iPhone… you have to basically replace everything with something else and it’s tedious especially for a less techy person. This is the reason walled gardens are anti consumer.
Security theater: All you stuff is encrypted but they have the decryption keys
Proprietary App Store: The apps and the store itself are proprietary and I don’t trust Apple.
Gaslighting their customers: Images shared with Android users from iPhone are purposely crushed to a unreviewable quality. The idea is to convince people that Android takes terrible photographs.
From recent experience: They read your screen which means the government reads your screen as well. Its okay. if you’re doing nothing illegal, you have nothing to hide! All history books that could tell you otherwise are paywalled anyway!
And in addition they run big adverts on caring about privacy, while in reality they do the same shit as all the other tech companies, but just use their monopoly power to push out surveillance advertisement competitors.
They don’t, actually. They only sell anonymized statistics and don’t allow advertisers to choose who they advertise to. As a result, they can’t charge as much for advertising. So they are actively taking less money to better protect your information in that respect.
Apple runs their own advertisement network these days. Its pointless to argue that they sell less data when they themselves still collect all of it for their own advertisement purposes.
About “Security theater”: you can enable what’s called “Advanced Data Protection” so the encryption keys are only stored on-device for most types of data including photos, backups and also notes for example. Mail and calendar is one exception that comes to mind, but you could also always use a different mail and calendar service. This is a fairly recent feature, so you may have missed it. Sure, it’s not your fully self-hosted “cloud” on which you can audit every single line of code and whatnot, but it might actually be the best “compromise” of ease-of-use vs. privacy for many people outside the tech bubble we’re in in this community.
About “Proprietary App Store”: the store itself and many apps on there are proprietary, but there are a lot of open source apps on the App Store as well. The bigger problem is the fact that the App Store is the only (hassle-free) way to install apps to the iPhone and only recently the EU seems to change that with alternative storefronts now emerging, but Apple is limiting the use of them to the EU, so they’re essentially doing the bare minimum to comply with EU law.
About “Gaslighting their customers”: I’d like to see hard proof on that. I think what you’re talking about is the fact that messages sent to Android users using the default “Messages” app are sent as MMS, which is an ancient technology and as such only support tiny, low-quality images. Android doesn’t support iMessage and Apple seems to like to keep it that way as it’s apparently selling a lot of iPhones this way in the US (and sure, I agree that’s a bad thing). It does get better with the just-announced RCS support (a supposedly open protocol which Google added so many proprietary extensions to you can’t really call it open anymore) so pictures can be send in full quality to Android users using the Messages app. Also, you could always use a third-party messenger like Signal or WhatsApp and send full-quality pictures just fine.
I’m not saying there aren’t any concerns, but some of the information you provided is at least out of date.
I think it’s the inverse: iMessage doesn’t support Android.
Those aren’t equivalent statements; the first implies that something about Android makes it impossible for Apple to produce an iMessage client for it when that is purely a business decision on Apple’s part.
You are correct and the person you’re responding to is wrong about just about everything they said. Funny to me they think mms is why those images look so shitty when no android users have ever experienced that without an ops device involved
MMS does have size limits that can hurt image quality, but I have the impression iOS applies limits of its own that are considerably lower. I’m not sure why anybody in 2024 wouldn’t have at least a couple modern messaging apps, but it seems a lot of people don’t.
Well yes exactly. I have noticed for years that every photo or video an iPhone sends me is worse quality than flip phones used to send/receive. Amazing to me that iPhone users fall for this trick
Like they missed that the whole apple MO is to make them feel superior without evidence
It seems unlikely to have that effect when the recipient presumably communicates with people who have other brands of phone, from whom they receive better looking media.
I mean, it certainly has that effect. The in group “knows” your phone sucks and will shame you into getting an iPhone. That’s the idea and it’s probably worked millions of times.
Just doesn’t seem plausible to me. If Alice gets low-quality images from Bob and higher-quality images from Charlie, her most likely assumption if she’s not sophisticated enough to be aware of the cause is that Bob’s phone has a bad camera.
I’ve literally experienced this first hand. At least three times I’ve been told that I should get an iPhone when I pointed this out. You’re giving people way too much credit for being rational
Hey that video you sent me is tiny. I can’t even tell what’s going on
Dude when are you going to get an iPhone? iMessage works great. Janky Android phones can’t even receive videos?
Wouldn’t surprise me at all if they’d hired psychologists to figure out the best way to make conversations like that happen
I have no doubt about the part where iPhone fans waste no opportunity to tell someone else they should get an iPhone. It’s the other side of the argument that falls flat: Alice receives video from Charlie that’s perfectly fine, but Bob’s iPhone sends a pixelated mess, and Bob says the iPhone is better?
Android users would use RCS for communicating with each other via the default messaging app on Android.
MMS has a hard size limit depending on the carrier the sender uses, that’s independent of the sender using an Android phone or an iPhone. This limit can be as high as “more than 1 MB”, but also as low as 300 KB or even less. Compressing an image down to 300 KB will naturally incur a quality penalty.
iMessage is an app. Android is an operating system. I think what you meant to say is iMessage doesn’t support RCS.
The difference is Apple worked hard to keep it this way for decades, even so far as “patch” a fix that was created to make it possible for their customers to communicate securely with Android users.
And Apple is only going to support RCS because they were forced to, and they’ll on comply to the degree that they think they can get away with. Just like they’re doing with app stores.
Interest in RCS is recent - newer than iMessage, which launched in 2011. RCS with Google’s proprietary extensions is just another proprietary messaging app, and I am not particularly excited about it.
even so far as “patch” a fix that was created to make it possible for their customers to communicate securely with Android users.
There’s no shortage of options for doing that. What Apple wants is tight control over all of its walled gardens, which should be no surprise given the company’s history. They’re very good at making it appear as if decisions made to increase their profits are aligned with the interests of users. It’s probably even true that someone would have exploited the technique Beeper Mini was using to send spam if Apple hadn’t closed it.
I don’t know that that’s true. But regardless, I agree and wish they decided on a more open protocol, but that is just not the corporate way. Anything is better than SMS/MMS.
There’s no shortage of options for doing that.
Sure. Ask yourself why Apple users don’t use them? The answer is SMS fallback. A feature which you can use with any app on Android and literally only with iMessage on iOS.
It’s probably even true that someone would have exploited the technique Beeper Mini was using to send spam if Apple hadn’t closed it.
Well Apple doesn’t seem to give a single fuck about SMS spam, so I’m not sure what your point is. Google at least incorporates spam filtering.
SMS fallback. A feature which you can use with any app on Android
SMS fallback is not a common feature of internet-based messaging apps on Android. Signal used to do it, but does not now. I don’t think WhatsApp or Telegram ever did.
keep in mind that companies can lie on how their stuff works, also I don’t think the nature of the store matters, as much as the fact that you’re only allowed to get the open source apps from there which will also run on top of a proprietary OS, with proprietary firmware
Gaslighting their customers": I’d like to see hard proof on that
Consider that I have a low standard on what a hard proof should be,… I consider telling people that : “Privacy, that’s iPhone”, while literally developing nothing in the open, which is the best and ONLY way to guarantee transparency, instead they went with the “trust me bruh” method, plus they display ads… like…they have… a… dedicated… ad … platform…
You don’t respect my Privacy while you target me with ads
Or being unable to install third-party apps or other browser engines is supposed to be for security reasons. Or being environment friendly through their recycling program when the truth is that they only do that to keep spare parts out of reach of independent repair shops. Pure gaslighting.
They can lie about how the advanced data encryption works…. But then they also tell you that you’re shit outta luck if you forget or screw up your decryption code. If they really had a back door, then I would expect them to take a much less hard line on you’re screwed if you lose the key.
I would be surprised if they had a back door too given how they’ve pushed back on back doors from the NSA and EU
I mean they understand their encryption algorithm, they made it after all, and with the advancements of Quantum computing it could be possible to decrypt someone’s data… So what good does providing quantum computing for Imessages do… If they : understand how the algorithm works + they have enough computing power to decrypt it + it’s proprietary.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was all a theater, and it’s the best backdoor implementation to exist
This feels a lot like the argument of well what if they break TLS? A lot of hypotheticals when I don’t have any reason or proof to believe that they’ve made a back door
No, breaking an encryption is all about knowing how it works, many cryptographers make their algorithm proprietary in hopes that an attacker will have a hard time figuring how it works, however they turn out to be weak, other encryption algorithms are developed in the open so that many people look at it and see the flaws
The key word is : weak The idea is not making a backdoor directly, the idea is making it flawed, it’s like securing a bank with steel doors with the exception of one door, that door is made out of wood and only you know where it’s located.
About “Proprietary App Store”: the store itself and many apps on there are proprietary
Doesn’t matter. The point is that devs have to jump through completely arbitrary hoops and pay Apple money just to make their apps available to Apple users. And any money they take they have to give 30% of the income to Apple for the privilege of running it on their hardware.
About “Gaslighting their customers”: I’d like to see hard proof on that.
There isn’t any. But all you have to do is look at their actions.
I’m not saying iPhones don’t have their advantages but you don’t understand what the actual problem is. And it comes off as intentional.
Regarding iPhone photos, these are usually stored in HEIF/HEIC format, which is a large annoyance if you want to edit, and sometimes show, those pictures. I work at a photolab and whenever we see customers with iPhones we immediately say “There will be issues to develop your pictures”
You can tame even Windows, making it reasonable private, because in Windows you can set almost everything (most things a certainly hidden and without much documentation, logic, but it’s possible) in Mac you can’t set nothing what Apple don’t want.
On mobile, forcing browsers to only be designed as re-skins of Safari. I would like an actual Firefox mobile browser that you can use uBO with. Right now Orion can do that somewhat, but it’s not polished.
I really enjoy Apple products, but this is my biggest peeve. It’s not like I cannot manage without a different browser—certainly about half of americans primarily use Safari—but the flexibility and customization of Firefox or chromium would be very welcome.
Yehhh it’s interesting reading this thread but I’m on my still-super-fast five or six year old iPhone and my biggest complaint is I would LOVE to have an actual version of my beloved Firefox with plugins and whatnot. Firefox Focus works fine but it’s still WebKit. Safari works great with Wipr, vinegar, and baking soda but it’s no Firefox with ublock.
They pioneered modern day planned obsolescence, they also popularised unrepairable electronics. They try to block or bastardise any right to repair bills. They force chip distributors to not sell chips they use so their products can’t be repaired. They make building applications for Mac at scale a huge pain in the ass and extremely expensive, the solution I recently built wastes insane amounts of power because of the way Apple licenses their stuff. Overall it’s a shitty company who fucks poor people in developing nations, fucks the environment and fucks it’s customers. I don’t care how well it may or may not work, fuck Apple.
Their hardware is just poor. They can charge whatever they like, I’m fortunate enough to not look at prices for that type of kit. Objectively, their hardware sucks compared to many other brands, especially at the same price point.
Their OS sucks for 90% of my use cases. If your “work” involves you just using a browser then yes you can use a big phone to get your work done. Slap an arm in a big case with a keyboard as a “pc” or a big screened arm for a tablet, or a small screen for a phone. But if you do anything where you use a computer, you need an x86 architecture and you need certain hardware capabilities. Over the time, they have all been lacking in performance even at the highest tier, and the price has been high end. Overall makes zero sense. The locked down *nix systems hide everything useful to make it pretty. Isn’t compatible with real software. And isn’t backwards compatible. I can install windows and my software from the mid 90s or 2000s or today and it just f’cking works. That’s why Windows is king. Bloated absolutely. But it just works.
That doesn’t make me hate the company. That just makes me sad for the uninformed people that get fooled into spending their hard earned money on sub optimal pieces of kit.
What makes me hate them is this game of “we just invented this new feature from 10 years ago!” and then all their fan bois go apeshit over it like they just stepped into the future. And they’re too stupid to know they’re being lied to and manipulated for profits. But they are also vocal and arrogant about their stupidity and ignorance, so I don’t like them either.
My phone has more RAM, more storage, better screen, better camera, faster charging by an order of magnitude (120W wired, 50W wireless…), more radio transceivers for global connectivity, better battery life, and honestly looks better. There is not a single thing I prefer about an iPhone and there is not a single qualitative metric an iPhone beats my phone on.
My laptop has more RAM, more storage, better screen, better camera, faster and more charging, more ports, upgradability, and is a BEAST that will eat even mid range desktop computers. There is no equivalent Apple product. Not even close. And when you factor in the best and beefiest new macs can’t even run my software, it’s not even an option. Now my battery life sucks and it looks like a zombie movie prop, but it is actually functional. I can run a simulation or a LLM/ML algo that stresses the CPU at 100%, the Quadro RTX5000 at 100%, and gobbles up 120GB of system RAM plus the 16GB of VRAM writing TBs of data to the 5 internal M2 drives. And I can do so indefinitely with the temps peaking to 100C and limiting to about 300W of power draw. It blasts air out of 3 sides that I could probably cook an egg in. But it doesn’t thermal limit after 5 mins of web browsing like the Macbooks or the Airs. It’s a beast that is made to beast and it does. Apple can’t even compete in the class.
For a tablet, I don’t have a need. My phone gives me a giant screen and my tiny auxiliary laptop does everything I need. My aux laptop is beefier than most, but it would be slower than a top of the line mac doing basic tablet things of web browsing. If I did need a tablet I’d just get a Xiaomi Pad. But in general I feel that the entire tablet market is a solution looking for a problem that only exists because Apple and fan bois are idiots again. I’ve been taking notes on TabletPCs for 20 years now. Seriously, Windows XP had a tablet mode. As did every one after. My laptops have touch input. My laptops in university the screen swiveled and then laid flat on the keyboard with a stylus to write on the screen. All of those fancy new Apple pen features? I had them in 2005. Pressure sensitive, gyro enabled for brush strokes/widths. Eraser on the other end. It was capacitive and needed a proprietary pen which was evil to say then. Now that’s Apple motto and they stole the idea and people are believing it’s new.
If they release a good product, I’ll try it. I’m not brand loyal. If they keep releasing shit, I’m going to keep calling them out.
When I was going through college I had to work as a Microsoft salesperson in the largest commercial shop of my country. Basically I had to sell Windows laptops and ensure every purchase had a Microsoft office attached.
My stand was right next to Apple’s and I had a lot of Apple fan boys tease me saying how superior Apple hardware was, how fast and secure everything is. I felt that by having no experience with Apple devices I was not doing my work properly, I couldn’t personally disprove their experiences and opinions with my own. I ended up buying a 13 inch MacBook pro for 1300 euros, I believe. Since I worked at the shop they gave me a considerable discount, I’m unsure what the actual retail price was but certainly at least 1800 euros.
I felt robbed, to be honest. Using an Unix like system was nice, I always loved posix shells. Everything else was honesty a terrible experience. Why the hell do I need xcode to do anything? Why does git depend on xcode? Why is xcode no longer available for my machine directly from the store? Why is the store sooooo damn slow? Why am I forced to use Safari’s garbage engine, regardless of the browser I choose?
I understand the appeal of having an entire ecosystem of devices that play nice together but MacOS was the only operative system I tried that would actually get on the way of doing work for me personally. For 1300 euros I could have gotten a beast windows laptop at the time, with a nice dedicated GPU instead of that Intel integrated garbage card that can barely play a YouTube video without full speed fans.
A couple of months ago I ended up installing EndeavourOS on this MacBook and it honestly brought this laptop back to life. So much faster and I can finally go back to installing up to date browsers! I have full Java stack running on an up to date intellij IDE and it works nice. A little slow, sure, but fast enough to get work done on emergencies. No more eternal spinning wheel loops.
Hate is a very strong word, I don’t hate Apple. I just would not buy or recommend anyone to buy any of their products. They’re pretty, tho!
Walled garden, overpriced exploitation of that locked ecosystem ($5000 monitor stand kind of shit), green bubbles/blue bubbles, dominating all tech with their middle of the road/copycat approach where Android was eventually saturated with same type of execs and “gave up” on differentiating until everything was the same sealed back glass rectangle without MICRO SD expansion memory, leading the charge on “brave” feature killing enshitification like removing the headphone jack, plenty more…
Tbf that’s more of an apple fanboy thing (though apple created, encouraged, and exploited that as an advertising technique, it’s an extension of iPods and their “white headphone cord”).
Basically apple cultists judge you as less than because you’re too poor to afford an iphone and use android instead.
Apple is actually just a really good marketing company that hawks mediocre tech, not a mediocre tech company with a really good marketing team.
An elitist dog whistle built to “other” the “poor” people - people that may have otherwise been successfully socializing or “passing” with wealthy people to the point of the first text message sent. Also a quiet tool for labor discrimination.
Only took them about 20 years of oppression to finally announce they would potentially end the practice.
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