Apple produces a very nice set of golden handcuffs. Polished shiny look, comfortable fur lining. Customers are really going to going to scream bloody murder when Apple latches them down tight.
The problem here is we are wholly dependant on Apples goodwill. It is not required in anyway (hence Googles behavior). At any moment Apple can revoke said goodwill and exploit us to our hearts content and we will have no fallback what so ever because we decided to let the market codify our freedoms rather than preventing companies from being ruthless.
It's because the "lanes" that non-tech juggernauts break out of are typically pretty restricted, much in advance (aside from "Emergency Use Authorization" etc). Maybe it was "paranoia" (thinking of conditional incentives ahead of time), or people had to suffer enough before these to come into existence.
What's the equivalent of the FDA but for consumer privacy?
That has nothing to do with Apple. Just because the American government doesn't understand the importance of technology doesn't mean Apple is in the wrong.
Let's assume they do eventually flip their brand on its head and turn on the users.
While waiting for them to latch you down tight, you could have already been enjoying the most consumer-centric and privacy-conscious mainstream mobile OS since 2007.
>Let's assume they do eventually flip their brand on its head and turn on the users.
Chinese customers don't need to wait. Apple flipped sometime in 2017 and gave up all user emails, photos, messages, etc. to the CCP to stay in the market.
People complain about TikTok spying for China, but Apple is one of the biggest CCP spies around. That runs counter to the brand headspace they keep investing in though.
I'll never understand people who expect Apple to try and fight the CCP and inevitably get themselves barred from the Chinese market. It's not principled, it's just dumb and will completely screw over all of their current customers in the country who will now have useless devices. Apple is not a nation-state and has no judiciary or military power, and if they're to have any hope of making positive change in the country they need to play ball to some extent and become a large player who can actually exert some influence.
>I'll never understand people who expect Apple to try and fight the CCP and inevitably get themselves barred from the Chinese market.
People have this expectation because other companies have done this.
For example, Google employees revolted when dragonfly was leaked, and got the CCP search-spying project killed. It's weird to think that Google cared more about user privacy than profits than Apple does, but that's how weird the branding works here.
"I am in a benevolent dictatorship, nothing ever could go wrong"
Just because Apple is playing nice at the moment, there is no reason not to force them, and all the other players to have a legal requirement of playing nice. I mean, the hog that is fattened for slaughter thinks its life is great, right up until its not.
I've been using an increasing number of Apple products since 2006 or so, after having used Linux for a decade and Windows from 3.1 through 2000.
If it's a benevolent dictatorship, it's undeniably been a good one to me over nearly half my life. If they ever do turn, I can always just leave. But what is and/or was my alternative? The less-benevolent dictatorships of Google or Microsoft? Spending inordinate amounts of time and effort making a hodgepodge of various Linux devices work together (often unsuccessfully)? I'll pass.
Except Apple does not have a police force that will detain you if you try to leave after they institute less-desirable products, and I'm sure they'd lose a lot of money and value if they literally disables data exports.
I used to think Apple could be forced to play nice, and again and again that doesn’t seem to happen. The hammer never fell on their 30%, nor on Safari binding, nor on third party stores. And the funny thing is Google sees that and just goes the same direction, so if tomorrow Apple goes south it’s not like Google would rise as a bastion of vertue.
The question could be less if Apple should be trusted, and more if phone makers in general should be allowed to be dictators.
Why should phone makers not have ultimate control over their devices?
Say I make the Avocado Phone:
- my entire shtick is that "you can only run apps we make, and we vet the source code of every one of the few thousand third-party apps we allow on our device. We will pay you $10,000 if you get compromised using our phone"
- Of course, to achieve this, the phone can't be susceptible to "informed" evil maid attacks (as in, say the hotel's cameras capture you entering your passcode and Avocado ID Password) that replace your OS with an identical one preloaded with Malware. This means that, even as a user, you literally can't load any other software onto the bootloader or OS that would touch the operating system.
- it also takes every opportunity to prevent third-party apps from gaining access they don't need, which includes disabling JIT compilation (ruling out third-party browser engines, unless they want to use a slow javascript interpreter).
At what point does my phone turn from a product that services the security-conscious crowd with a completely bulletproof device, into something that people want to be able to preload software onto, because they didn't realize that security comes at a price? Is it when I sell enough? Is selling 10 million a year enough to where my market presence becomes a problem? 100 million a year? Why would people buy it if the government forces it to be 'open' at the cost of invalidating its entire use-case of being a secure device?
> Why should phone makers not have ultimate control over their devices?
First part is, fundamentally these devices are sold. You could eschew the very notion of property and make it a pure rental, but it’s not the point we are now.
The second part is, as you point out, your idea is completely valid until your service becomes life critical, a huge portion of the country’s population relies on it day to day, you killed any competitor that had a significantly different value proposition and it would have catastrophic consequences if you were to screw it up badly. Basically you became part of the infra. Is it 100 million units ? It’s up to your regulators to decide.
I think a lot of the privacy-conscious Apple users would wholeheartedly support laws that guarantee better privacy than is currently required. That said, we have to act in the world we live in not the world we want it to be.
In any case, I don’t see how using Apple products is at odds with supporting better privacy laws. If anything, they are perfectly aligned since it demonstrates a $2 trillion alternative to surveillance capitalism.
the fact you believe this is true today is most telling, I do not find them to be "consumer-centric" they have very draconian policies and if your use of the device fits in their narrow band of use cases then it is find, if it does not you are SOL
Given they accommodate over 50% of United States residents[0], I'm not sure the band is as narrow as you say it is. Of course, for those it doesn't accommodate, there is a different product that hopefully better fits their use cases.
Market share is irrelevant if there’s a high enough barrier to entry and cost of switching for the user. For instance Comcast probably has a very good market share and competitors too on paper.
Is the cost of switching that high? People at the phone store do 'data transfers' already (seemingly just texts, pictures/videos, and contacts), and, hilariously, the transfer to Android is a lot better than the 'move to iOS' app that has terrible reviews[0]. I bet most of the time being spent on switching will be on reinstalling all your apps and logging back into them.
It is, depending on how long you've been using the platform.
For instance if you've been on iOS for a few years and bought a healthy amount of music, those are virtually gone after moving to android. You can mitigate that by either
- forever keep paying Apple through an Apple Music subscription
- somewhat extract the tracks and DRM free them (tracks were DRM free when bought from the Mac, but not when bought on iOS last time I tinkered with it). Of course Apple will make as hard as they can to block this route.
Same for movies and books, and for games/apps as well if they don't have a multi OS pricing scheme.
Switching cost is not just time spent to get used to, more often than not it"s a non significant amount of money lost in the process.
Same deal the other way round of course: Google is more diligent on exposing their content on iOS, but there will stil be paid games and apps to be lost in the process.
If I don’t like what Apple does with iMessage, I can move to WhatsApp. If I don’t like what Apple does with photos, I can move to Google Photos. If I don’t like what Apple does with iCloud, I can move to Dropbox. If I don’t like what Apple does with iOS, I can move to Android.
> If I don’t like what Apple does with photos, I can move to Google Photos
I can’t. I don’t use Apple Photos, and I can’t set Google Photos as the default photo handler, nor default source or destination, nor tell any iOS device to never save photos in Apple’s silo.
> If I don’t like what Apple does with iCloud, I can move to Dropbox.
I can’t either. I wanted to backup my phone elsewhere and there is no option outside of iCloud.
How have you hacked your system and how long will you be able to?
To use Google Photos on iPhone: install the Google Photos app and grant it access to your phone's photos. Then you can go into the Google Photos app to see and manage all your photos.
To keep Apple from saving your photos: turn off iCloud Photos, or log out of iCloud.
To back up your iPhone without iCloud: make a local backup on your Mac or PC. You can even encrypt the backup with a password you choose. You can sync these backup files in any way you would like, including via Dropbox.
You can also sell your iPhone and get a different phone if you don't want anything to do with Apple.
You're skirting around the issues, as Apple just won't allow you to get out of their system in the key parts. Any of the alternative you describe are just clunky workarounds with utterly broken parts (local backups through a Mac have severe issues compared to cloud backups)
> You can also sell your iPhone and get a different phone if you don't want anything to do with Apple.
If you come to that conclusion, it's basically the answer to your "How am I handcuffed to Apple?" question. If you need to give up the system to properly manage your backups, it's pretty much a situation where you're handcuffed or not, with no clear negotiable middle ground option.
I use Firefox just fine on iOS. Sure, it's just user chrome and Firefox Sync, but those are the things I care a lot more about than the rendering engine.
I'd love to support Gecko on mobile too, as I've moved the vast majority of my desktop usage to it, but Webkit is still fighting the Blink/Chromium hegemony, too, and that's still fighting the good fight.
I appreciate that you feel that way. I think most users don't care about the details of rendering engines and think user chrome choice (not Google's Chrome specifically; it's stupid Chrome confused pre-existing browser language) is enough. I mostly agree, as I already stated, and I'm okay with the compromise on rendering engine for security and I'm okay with the compromise on rendering engine to keep at least one non-Blink renderer high enough on caniuse usage statistics that I can fight back some in corporate projects that "Chrome is the only browser we need to support" because we have enough iOS using users and many of them are executives. That's a more important fight to me than "user rendering engine freedom". I don't personally need IE6 2.0 "Chrome is the only supported browser for the next few decades" (whether or not you think Google would declare victory in the same way that Microsoft did and stop innovating on Chrome entirely that very minute that happens), and I don't think the web as a whole needs that either. So I'm with Apple right now on their compromise choices.
I don't expect you to agree with me. I just want you to know it is a perspective of its own merits. The web has seen what happens when one rendering engine gets enough market share to dominate and that had a decade or more of repercussions, especially in enterprise application development. We're so dangerously close to that happening again. You may think you are fighting the most for freedom of the two of us, but from my perspective you are fighting a proxy battle in the Cold War and I'm much more worried about the Cold War and the freedoms it may lose us in the long run.
In the future Chrome might achieve a monopoly, therefore we should give Apple a monopoly on Safari today? If we're doing Cold War metaphors, this sounds like "we had to destroy the village in order to save it".
I'm much more worried about the Cold War and the freedoms it may lose us in the long run.
I will have to disagree that freedom is advanced by an OS that forbids you from using software that hasn't been approved by a megacorporation.
Apple's usage of Safari on iOS is much more akin to a monopsony than a monopoly (though we are busting at the edges of the anti-trust analogy). Apple is only the only (allowed) "buyer" of rendering engines on iOS, and so is only buying Apple. So it is a bit of apples and oranges when comparing to potential monopoly where Google is the last supplier remaining for rendering engines.
We're probably all going to keep disagreeing because it is apples and oranges no matter what analogy we try to use. I do think "potential monopoly" is worse than "practical monopsony" (especially when it is a proxy monopsony and people are still free to not buy Apple and thus not buy Apple's rendering engine choice), but you are welcome to continue to disagree. Again, I appreciate why a lot of y'all see the "practical monopsony" as the larger and more immediate threat.
Whatever you label it, it's an arbitrary limitation of technical capabilities that is done for the user without asking them. You can backpedal as far as you'd like, but you can't apologize away the fact that the user should have more power over their iPhone than Apple does. That shouldn't be contentious on a site called 'Hacker News'.
I'm not backpedaling, I stand by my opinion that "this isn't a technical user choice that matters to many users (including me)". That's the first thing that I said on the subject, and that's what I've been sticking to. I don't know why my opinion is upsetting you so much, but consider toning things down a bit before they get personal or hurtful?
What may sound like "backpedaling" is that I am admitting sympathy for your concern, despite disagreeing with it. I think you've made good points. I don't find anything "contentious" about it. I still disagree with you, and I'm not apologizing for disagreeing with you. I can understand your points just fine, and also still disagree with them. I would like you to consider my point of view, and maybe engage with me on this issue that it is much more complex than a simple "good versus evil". I hope this not to change your mind, but in the hopes of a better overall discussion than just "Apple is evil and doing evil things because Freedoms". The reality is not that simple. I don't blame you for thinking it is, and you are free to continue to do so, just don't yell at me for saying "well I think it's kind of complicated", please.
I'm not yelling at anyone. You're making weasel-y statements, and I'm calling you on them outright. If Apple wants to lead the way in browser development, then they should do so on their own merits. They're welcome to pre-install it on my iPhone, and they can even make it impossible to delete like on Mac. Just don't use it as an excuse to prevent alternative browser engines, it's not a solid argument. The concerns over Javascript engines and JIT compilation was sketchy at best, but I won't stand around and listen to people defend an opportunistic greed magnet for trapping their users.
There can be no free or fair market here. The barrier to entry for new companies to enter the phone market is just unbelievably high with all the patents.
Modern human communication, phones, are too important to be held hostage by just two companies, neither of which are acting in consumers best interests.
IMO this is the time that governments should be acting on behalf of the people, and not the corporations with the deepest pockets.
There is a Chrome app on iOS. I don't think many people pick their browser based on rendering engine, but rather on actual browser UI and features (like sync).
Is it really that hard to switch from Apple to/from Google or to/from Windows/Linux?
I mean, I really emjoy my current Apple ecosystem, and I do have all the devices, and I like how everything works currently. But, a switch is mainly a matter of movies my files and exporting/importing photos, contacts, and email. It might take a few years to cycle out ALL the devices, but I don't feel like there is a ton of friction in switching my data over.
It is more that everything is working so well together that I don't want to switch right now.
I do stay away from Apple home automation though, for this very reason. I want something open and local that I control since that WOULD be a huge pain to try and swap away from.
>Because in theory Apple could go completely against their own philosophy and our decades of prior experience with them, you should instead give all your information to Google so that they can sell it
The problem here is we are wholly dependant on Apples goodwill. It is not required in anyway (hence Googles behavior). At any moment Apple can revoke said goodwill and exploit us to our hearts content and we will have no fallback what so ever because we decided to let the market codify our freedoms rather than preventing companies from being ruthless.