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.
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.