I want to talk about this because of a conversation I had with a colleague on a lunch break a few days ago. I am a doctor, and I was talking to him about how angry I was (and still am) about the fact that the COVID vaccines, when they were first invented, were not made public, but instead were patented and sold. This basic fact made millions of people around the world suffer. I was rambling about how scientific information should always be free. How we should be able to use the internet as the greatest library our ancestors could have only dreamt of, instead of putting information behind paywalls. Even back in med school I was an avid user of sci-hub and I wasnāt ashamed of it one bit. I still use sci-hub to keep up with new researches so I can treat/inform my patients better. And I hate how some of my colleagues think that I am stealing othersā work.
Anyways, so I was rambling on and on. I sometimes do that. And my friend said something so strange and unrelated (in my eyes) to the conversation. He said āLook at you, defending open access to medical information for everyone, yet you only use Apple products.ā I was like, āWhat? What do you mean?ā He explained, āMan, all the things you use are made by Apple. Your laptop, tablet, phone, watch, earbuds or whatever, made by the company that is one of the main adversaries when it comes to right-to-repair and open source software.ā So you need to see here, Iām not a tech guy. Itās just not my field. My job only requires me to read textbooks and keep up with new researches in my field, which any device can do. So I was like, āIā¦ I donāt think I follow.ā So he briefly explained what open-source software is, and how itās related to my idea of free and open access to information for everyone, but this time itās not in our field but programmersā. And when I almost reflexively said āWell weāre not programmersā he said āI mean, when it comes to software, itās the programmersā and developersā thing. But free and open source is an idea. It applies to everything. And I think youāre supporting a company that opposes your views by buying their products.ā
We didnāt have much time left so that was the end of that conversation. And I have been thinking about it since. When buying tech products I mainly care about if they are integrated with each other or not. Like if I turn on Do not Disturb on my watch, I want my phone, tablet and laptop to go quiet as well. Or I like being able to answer a phone call on my laptop. And I love the aesthetics of Apple products, at least more than what other companies have to offer.
Every evening since that conversation Iāve been looking up stuff related to open source software. Linux, distros, the philosophy behind it all, Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak, Arch, āread the wikiā, terminal, GUI, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA my brain is filled with so many things at this point that I donāt understand anything at all.
So, TLDR; Iād love to hear your opinions about Apple. Most people (myself included) buy Apple devices because of the ecosystem, the design, privacy (?), consistent updates (especially on mobile), or for you might say, a lack of knowledge in the field of tech. Do you support Apple or are you against them, or are you indifferent? Do you think people who are not in the tech field as well should look into and use open source software? Leave your thoughts below! ^^
Personally, I strongly agree with your colleague. If you truly believe openness is a good thing (and it sounds like you do), Appleās ethos is just about the direct antithesis. They only collaborate with the wider tech industry when they absolutely have to. Otherwise, they are greedy, secretive, controlling, and vindictive - oftentimes openly hostile to anyone who dares choose a non-Apple device/platform.
The best example of this is the iMessage āgreen bubblesā phenomenon. Some background: Appleās default texting experience is iMessage. This service has a bunch of nice, modern chat features - except theyāre only available when texting another iPhone. These ābetterā messages are indicated by blue bubbles. People who donāt use iPhones (whether by choice or by necessity) are forced to use the ancient, insecure, feature-poor SMS protocol, reducing the privacy and security of everyone involved (including iPhone users). Itās also extremely obvious when this happens, since the chat app will switch to green bubbles.
In places where this service has caught on (such as the US), Apple uses this separation to deliberately make texting non-iPhone users a significantly worse experience. This causes social effects, especially among teenagers, where those who donāt use iPhone are bullied and shunned for being a āgreen bubbleā. The Wall Street Journal did a great expose into this phenomenon.
Now, to be clear, this is a totally artificial problem - Apple could fix this overnight if they wanted. For years, the wider tech industry has been working on replacing SMS with a much more modern standard called RCS. Every single other party in the mobile industry has moved on. Apple, however, is the lone holdout. They see kids bullying other kids into buying an iPhone as a good thing - more iPhone sales! In fact, Apple openly encouraged that narrative: when a journalist asked the (very reasonable) question of āhow can I make texting with my Android-user mom better?ā, Apple CEO Tim Cook responded with ābuy your mom an iPhone.ā
Thereās plenty more examples of this antagonistic behavior I could talk about, but this one is the most telling.
Of course, if you do choose to go all in with them, you wonāt see that side of Apple at all. They are frighteningly good at cultivating their image as the āgood guysā among Big Tech, and, honestly, itās not unwarranted. They are good at what they do, and they do take care of their users. Their tech is great.
Ultimately, my take is that if you prefer using Appleās stuff over more open alternatives, donāt change what you like! Just remember that they have a dark side. It is good to be aware of the wider tech ecosystem, and to make open technology choices where you can. By being active on the Fediverse, youāre already doing your part š
Of course, if you do choose to go all in with them, you wonāt see that side of Apple at all. They are frighteningly good at cultivating their image as the āgood guysā among Big Tech, and, honestly, itās not unwarranted. They are good at what they do, and they do take care of their users. Their tech is great.
This paragraph perfectly describes me. Way back, I was a blind Apple fanboy. In my eyes, they could do no wrong. Plus, I enjoyed rooting for the underdog, because back then people were constantly publishing stories about how Apple was doomed to go bankrupt any minute.
Later, I learned how terrible they are in many waysā¦ but I still use their stuff. I first learned how to use computers on a Mac, so any other OS is weird and unintuitive to me. Besides, it just works, literally right out of the box. Yeah, Apple is still overpriced, but itās not as bad as it seems. If you enjoy spending hours to get something to work, and you think your time is worth nothing, then okay. If youāre like me, part of what youāre paying for is quality design and convenience.
you think your time is worth nothing, then okay.
What exactly do you mean by this? Do you really think that people who use or try to use open source software do not value their time?
Commenting to agree. The green bubble is very literally a deliberate choice on the side of Apple. The infrastructure is already in place to merge with every other phone manufacturer.
Addendum: Apple products as status symbols has been their project from the start. āSent from my iPhoneā as default on emails, being the most emminent example.
Sent from my fairphone3
As a follow up for those interested, hereās the exception that proves the rule: Appleās adoption and support of the Matter smart home standard.
For those who donāt follow the smart home, the basic backstory is that there are several competing ācontrollerā platforms for the smart home, including: Amazon Alexa, Google/Nest Home, Apple Home, and Samsung SmartThings.
Each of these platforms can control smart home gadgets like smart switches, lights, and thermostats, and they all do so in a slightly different way. However, this diversity in platforms posed an issue for gadget manufacturers (think Philips Hue): in order for their gadgets to work with each platform, they had to write integrations to talk with each service. This added a ton of extra cost and complexity to something that should be a commodity, meaning that only the larger players could afford to make gadgets that worked with every platform. Smaller vendors didnāt have that ability, so theyād focus their attention to just one or two platforms - often the largest ones.
This market setup was (fortunately) a disaster for Apple. As it turns out, people arenāt willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a nice speaker and Siri when you could get the vastly more capable Google Assistant/Alexa for literally a tenth of the price and blanket your home with them. Appleās arrogance and hubris had landed it in an unfamiliar position: they were, by far, the smallest player in the smart home market, and accessory makers werenāt building for Apple Home as a result.
Faced with abject failure, Apple pulled a very un-Apple move: they joined an industry standard! They open-sourced parts of their HomeKit framework and helped the next-generation Matter protocol come to market, in collaboration with all the other big players (Google, Amazon, Samsung). Matter is great because it provides a single protocol for accessory makers to build for: as long as it supports Matter, it will work with any of the big smart home controllers, including Apple. Now that this standard is out in the world, itās great: most newly-released smart home gadgets will work with whichever platform you prefer, including Apple!
So: why did Apple suddenly become collaborative in the smart home space? Because they were going to fail otherwise. Their backs were literally against the wall; their hand was forced. You can bet your lifeās savings that if HomeKit had been even moderately successful, they would never, ever have supported the Matter protocol. They would have preferred the lock-in to their dystopian walled garden.
Apple doesnt even need to support rcs to fix the issues with imesage. They just need to open the chat API for third party support or just release an imessage for other platforms like every other chat app does.
The current system they have essentially tricks less savvy users into thinking that iPhone is just better at texting and other services are bad, when the issue is that apple stealthily enrolled you all into a restrictive IM program that cant communicate with anything other than apple products. Itās actually quite devious. If imessage and itext were two separate apps from the start then it would be more apparent that you are texting the green bubble and using a limited chat app with iphone users and more people would probably just use one of the many chat alternatives that exist. Because they are able to still communicate with nonapple users in their chat program and even add them to groupchats and stuff it gives this weird appearance from the inside that the green chats are the problem.
I like to think that the initial goal of imessage being this way wasnt locking but as a way to seemlessly push grandma who would never go out of her way to download a chat app, into an IM client. The lockin side effect just wound up being a happy accident.
It is with high confidence and with a straight face that I can state my opinion that Microsoft is a better partner of open source software than Apple. Microsoft contributes back, Apple pretty much doesnāt. Theyāre better than AWS, but thatās more a matter of damning with faint praise.
Appleās built up a vertically integrated market of disposable widgets which cannot be repaired or upgraded. Their sole positive is theyāre better than the other guys at keeping older software updated, but Iām sure they did the math on having their customers not getting hacked at the time.
Iām my opinion theyāre worth looking at for anti-trust.
A good recent example of Microsoft supporting the open source community is Orca. Itās a LLM that was basically taught by ChatGPT (GPT3.5) and GPT4 instead of training on its own dataset by having the chatbot explain its reasoning step by step, ELI5, etc. And itās about to go open source.
Microsoft email address were collectively top contributers to Linux kernel patches for a few years, particularly as they were building out Azure and Hyper-V support. Theyāre contributed a service mesh to kubernetes. Visual Studio Code is open source. Theyāre backing GitHub. They developed typescript. Their developers are all over various GitHub repos.
Really jumped in the deep end with your research, huh? :)
I guess a good place to start would be deciding what actually bothers you. Megacorp sucks because of [shitty capitalism, shady labor practices, locking down devices, privacy, insert other complaint]. Weigh those against the benefits you get.
My biggest concern is generally privacy and monetization of my data, but I still use an iPhone because my family wouldnāt get off my case about ease of sharing photos, videos. So I only have the iPhone. Donāt buy anything else from them. I turn off as much tracking and data collection as possible. I only have two outward-facing files in iCloud ā my encrypted password keeper so that I can access it both from phones and mobile, and an encrypted file vault that can only be opened if you first get into the password keeper.
FWIW on the FOSS side, I still use Linux. I used to use GrapheneOS on a Pixel 5a that worked otherwise well.
Idk how to edit my comment on this app, but my password keeper (KeePass) and vault (Cryptomator) are also FOSS fwiw.
I like to tinker. I donāt buy apple products. I get that most people want a device that just works when they pick it up and integrates with the rest of their devices. Apple does this really well.
While I personally agree with your colleague, one must consider oneās use case and the amount of time and effort it will take to replicate the things you like about the apple UX and ecosystem and make a judgement call. I have a Windows desktop, a Linux server, an Android phone and tablet and I spend a fair amount of time seeing them up and keeping them talking to one another to share data, but even then I canāt get them to share settings simply like do not disturb.
Apple has innovated on the user experience to the point where if I pick up an iphone I canāt navigate around it because it relies on a soft touch, āintuitiveā, gestural interface. And therefore itās easy for me to shun apple products on principle. The real hard work is migrating off the platform you know. And for people that were raised in the apple touch ecosystem, I donāt realistically see many of them ever leaving.
I dislike Apple due to their user-hostile business practices. They donāt let you install alternate browsers or keyboards (TRULY alternate and not just re-skins of Safari and the iOS keyboard). They donāt let you sideload (officially). They donāt want you to interface with other phone manufacturers in an equitable way (see the whole blue bubble/green bubble drama). They donāt want you to have the freedom to repair your own devices (see the whole right to repair movement).
And so on and so forth. They are nice products and do what they are supposed to with minimal friction. I just cannot support a company that is so blatantly user-hostile.
And this is the main reason I like Google phones. I think their phones are the most anti Google phones (if you know how to do that). Its so much easier to de-Google a Google phone than it is any other phone. I wish Apple were more like that. Hardware is great but its the fact I cant sideload (officially) apps and install FOSS.
It is interesting that a Google phone of all things is the phone that best supports making it anti Google as you said. So many other manufacturers donāt even allow it by locking down the bootloader in certain countries or punishing users for unlocking it like Samsung does with Knox.
Yeah it is pretty interesting. Im thinking of buying a pixel just so I can install one of the more privacy based ROMs. Right now im using an Xperia and ive installed FOSS wherever I can.
Apple is just about the worst offender out there in terms of desire to maintain a closed ecosystem.
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They only adopt open hardware standards when forced to by law
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They scrupulously enforce price controls on their resellers, ensuring that you canāt usually purchase prior generations at a discount
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They intentionally degrade performance on older generations of devices through malicious software updates to force users to upgrade
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They aggressively combat open source and cross platform integration. E.g., Apple TV canāt be cast to a Google device, etc.
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Iāll admit Iām not the biggest FOSS evangelist, so this comes with a grain of salt. From a right to repair standpoint, I donāt care for Appleās policies at all. But from a security and (perhaps counterintuitively) user experience standpoint, I agree with Appleās walled garden approach, locked down OS, and single app store. We see the alternatives in Android, and we see how much worse its security is.
Apple products are great if youāre already in the ecosystem. As someone whoās only Apple product was an iPod nano, I never understood the hype. Yes, they make nice looking devices, but Apple products are all soā¦ Locked. If you want to run Adobe Premier on your new M1 MacBook, great, it does it amazingly well. If you want to run a half dozen virtual machines on the same M1 (which has more than enough power to do it), then youāre totally out of luck.
Itās the āwalled gardenā approach that I donāt like. Computers, and by extension, smartphones and smart watches, are capable of so much more than what we ask of them, but if weāre not allowed to even try then why would I dig myself further into an ecosystem that says āhereās what youāre allowed to doā rather than āhereās what you can doā.
Apple has itās place; if you like it, great, but itās not for me.
So Apple is obviously an evil, profit seeking company that exploits users and developers, maintains a monopoly and actively hurts efforts towards openness.
But bro, what else am I gonna use? Do you think Google is any better.
And, as you already noticed, most open source alternatives suuuck. (Man, Iām gonna regret saying this on an FOSS community) With some research youāll get a usable desktop OS for some use-cases, but phones such as Fairphone and Purism are another story entirely. Donāt even think about watches or tablets. I love the Purism Firefox demo, where they enthusiastically say: āWith Settings unusable in Portrait, itās time to switch to landscape modeā.
The āyou think ā¦ yet you buy ā¦ā argument is pointless, because it ignores the realities of monopolies and globalism. Iām sure his T-Shirt that day wasnāt made from ethically sourced cotton or whatever.
I would argue that Google is much worseātheir entire business model is built around collecting personal information and selling advertisements.
If we talk about smartphones, Android is open source, but is very limited without Google Services (GrapheneOS is great for privacy and security, but then you cannot pay with your phone, for example, because it needs to be approved by Google).
Linux on smartphones is more of a proof-of-concept, and not really usable as a daily driver.
So, Apple is the āleast badā option now. (and there are ways to sideload FOSS apps)
While I agree that the options arenāt always great, there is a bigger issue. We are all just too enslaved to convenience.
People right now wouldnāt be able to bear doing some of the difficult things we used to do. And the average Joe wouldnāt be caught dead using computers from 15 years ago. We have grown accustomed to our convenience. OP said what we looks for is being able to answer a call on his laptop and while I agree itās a great feature, itās a convenience. We canāt be bothered to pick up the phone.
The realityās you talked about are there but another is we think we need these things, but really, itās completely possible to live without them. Weāve just become to lazy, entitled, and rich too make the open philosophy important enough to us. So Iād ask, do you care more about your conveniences or for a more open future?
I consider Apple to be one of the most evil corporations out there, but it appears that my interpretation of āevilnessā seema to coincide with size a lot.
so maybe i just donāt like (stupidly) successfull companies.Anyway, I think Apple locks people in their very nice walled garden and in that garden uses a lot of public infrastructure (like open source software, but also other open services on the net), and gives comparatively very little back to the community.
and they do it, because they think it propably makes slightly more money.
Which is also the reason I donāt trust their privacy promises at all, since they canāt prove many of them.
Apple could be an enormous force for good, but to me it feels like they care more about making 0.5% more money to put into their hoard.
Terrible company, I do believe the world would be better if it vanished.
Apple isnāt super popular among the geeks for this exact reason. They make everything proprietary. Like, everything everything. They arenāt willing to give up even their charging cables.
Yea they make stuff convenient for people who donāt want to think about the tech at all, but youāre giving up a huge deal of your freedom. And by extension even of other people, because by using Apple products, youāre helping them strengthen their iron grip. See the bubble color debate regarding iMessage. Worse, they turn this into a trend that other companies follow.
Linux can be as complicated or as simple as you want it. Yea if youāre a programmer or a nerd, you can use Arch and literally take it apart.
Or you can use Mint or Ubuntu and your experience will be as smooth and straightforward as using MacOS. True, nobody has as interconnected ecosystems as Apple but againā¦ Itās not just money youāre paying with.
The analogy of free access to information is indeed apt.
I have an iPhone, use a MacBook for work (only options are windows and Mac), but use Linux at home. I was an android user years ago, but one of the things that pushed me away is google treating android users as a data source. There were ābugsā which caused the google services to run constantly in the background. In my opinion, Apple cares about users privacy lot more than google does. Use whatever tool suits you best.
Ethical consumption is nearly impossible to actually achieve which is why the best way to solve corporate bad practices is a healthy dose of regulation and government. It never hurts to, if you can, avoid doing business with certain bad actors if youād like but often times youāre trading one bad actor for another in a different way.
Personally though Iām not a fan of Apple products. They can be well made and their silicon is incredible. Very fast and energy efficient and for a few years it was far ahead of other arm offerings and in terms of efficiency is still ahead of mobile x86 offerings(though the gap isnt that gigantic anymore it does still offer far better single core performance per watt at low levels). Their software manages to be well designed and whether I agree with it or not manages to get certain features in the mainstream.
That said I prefer the more open way of doing things. Like for example take moving files into and out of an iphone. Pre-airdrop you had to use all kinds of syncing software in order to move files out whereas on android I could just plug it in and navigate my files like a usb. Post airdrop, well airdrop only works on apple products as a means of keeping you locked into the ecosystem. I dont think a good chunk of the way they do things is necessarily better, and they rarely do things first, and worst of all when they do itās often a proprietary way that is not compatible with other devices and OS.
Ah my favourite topic to rant about lol
https://aus.social/users/ajsadauskas/statuses/110483562412884529 I saw this post the other day about apple and I left this comment https://sopuli.xyz/comment/137641
Wow, thanks for sharing, I didnāt realise Apple has been doing this for so long
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-geep-iphone-recycle-shred/
They sued a recycling company for reselling old iPhones instead of destroying them and now they force recycling companies to shred the phones so that they canāt be reused.
Apple has fantastic marketing on a surface level they manage to convince their users that they are a green company but when you push a little bit and ask for more info they just shut you down.
Louis Rossman has shown how anti repair Apple is by not providing basic replacement parts for their Macs and how secretive they are about their clearly subpar repair program
Hugh Jeffreys has shown how anti repair Apple is by locking components like the screen and camera of new Apple devices to their motherboard so that even if you repair and iPhone screen, they take away features like true tone or certain camera modes for no reason.
Apple is trying its best to kill 3rd party repair of its products and at the same time try to convince people that they are pro repair by offering screen replacements for nearly the same price as a new iPhone.
Also if a user sells on their old iPhone but doesnāt unlink the device from their Apple account, the new user wonāt be able to use the phone.
The only positive thing Apple has done for consumers is offer software updates for years longer than any Android OEM offers.
Android OEMs really lacks in software support but at least with some phones, less in more recent years, users have the option to install custom ROMs to prolong the life of their devices. Projects like LineageOS, GrapheneOS and DivestOS are so important from delaying phones from becoming ewaste.
Unfortunately, Apple pushes the limit of what they can get away with in the name of the environment and other companies follow suit.
Bare minimum after market support is the name of the game and every company in the industry is happy to play.
Imagine how different the consumer electronic market could be if Apple had grown their relationship with Bob and extended that to people like him all over the world. We could have had a much better ecosystem.
But like I always say, you canāt become a trillion dollar company without exploiting everything and everyone you possibly can in the name of profit
When it comes to privacy, Apple has attempted to block other companies like Facebook from tracking iPhone users, they say its because they care about their users privacy but really all Apple cares about is controlling their users data and monopolizing on it.
They also have wanted to implement scanning software to scan their users files for CSAM, again marketing it as protecting their users and children but Iām sure theyāll figure how to monopolize that too.
Apple has been trying to prevent 3rd party app stores and side loading of apps on iOS for years, they say its because its a security risk, but in reality theyāre just calling their users stupid while attempting to keep complete control over the software you can use on the device you paid way too much money for. Recently the EU has forced Apples hand on this and they can no longer prevent users from doing it, or at least when the law comes into place.
Apple is also being forced to switch to type-C chargers, I think next year, by the EU because it is more consumer friendly and helps to prevent e-waste, which is something Appleās marketing loves to claim they are by removing chargers from phone boxes and forcing its customers to buy over priced chargers that come in more packagingā¦
I always say this, You canāt become a trillion dollar company without exploiting everything and everyone you possibly can in the name of profit.
Apple doesnāt care about you or its workers or the environment, the only thing Apple cares about is profit. It does everything it can to lock down its products, force its users into its ecosystem and block any other companies from even attempting to function and profit within its ecosystem, Apple is ruthless and will not stop until they have squeeze as much money out of everything they possible can.
Apple is the epitome of capitalism and parasite on society, it offers nothing of value for a premium price.
Like you, I agree the internet should be open and the wealth of knowledge that humans have accumulated shouldnāt be locked behind paywalls.
A lot of scientific research is publically funded but then its locked behind a paywall so the public has to pay again. For people that think you are stealing others work by using sci-hub, tell them to email one of the authors of the papers and ask them if they can get a copy. The majority of authors would be happy to send them one.
Donāt think you can get much more thorough than this write up and is right in line with how I feel.
Ethical consumption is nearly impossible to actually achieve which is why the best way to solve corporate bad practices is a healthy dose of regulation and government. It never hurts to, if you can, avoid doing business with certain bad actors if youād like but often times youāre trading one bad actor for another in a different way.
Personally though Iām not a fan of Apple products. They can be well made and their silicon is incredible. Very fast and energy efficient and for a few years it was far ahead of other arm offerings and in terms of efficiency is still ahead of mobile x86 offerings(though the gap isnt that gigantic anymore it does still offer far better single core performance per watt at low levels). Their software manages to be well designed and whether I agree with it or not manages to get certain features in the mainstream.
That said I prefer the more open way of doing things. Like for example take moving files into and out of an iphone. Pre-airdrop you had to use all kinds of syncing software in order to move files out whereas on android I could just plug it in and navigate my files like a usb. Post airdrop, well airdrop only works on apple products as a means of keeping you locked into the ecosystem. I dont think a good chunk of the way they do things is necessarily better, and they rarely do things first, and worst of all when they do itās often a proprietary way that is not compatible with other devices and OS.