I feel vindicated for when I said that the moment Apple's line stops growing, they'll resort to monetizing their users like the rest of big-tech to increase their shareholder returns, and everyone here was like "Nooo, my sweet innocent publicly traded trillion dollar corporation would never betray me like that". Give it a few more years love, now they're boiling the frog.
What do you mean start monetizing ? I get adds for their Apple Arcade trial on top of my iOS settings main screen.
I really hate Apple - but what's stopping me from moving out of the ecosystem is that nobody else builds shit that works and is on same level. The M Pro series processor is only touchable by that one AMD chip you can't get anywhere. Windows is garbage and Linux is a part time job. Android is even worse in terms of spam and jank, and the only ecosystem that works is Google - where if you get locked out - you're just praying to HN/Google contacts that you didn't lose your access.
I don't really understand, I don't get ads on my Android phone?
And I'm not sure what you mean about ecosystems either, yes you do need a Google account to download apps from the Play store, but you also need an Apple account to use the Apple store as far as I know.
In my experience it's easier to create a second Google account than a second Apple account.
Now I'm not representative of most users, like all HN users probably. But at home, apart from my M1 Mac (running Linux because I hate macOS) my other machines are Intel n100-based. They work fine.
Android is preloaded with different flavor of crap depending on the vendor and side-loading a phone OS and dealing with everything - I just don't have the energy these days. Likewise for running Linux on top of a M series Apple device. My devices just work and they all work together - all I have to do is login to the same account. My phone shares stuff with my Mac without any setup - shared clipboard, apps, storage. Buds connect to all my devices, Mac Mini, MadBook, iPad - not just 2 BT devices at a time, and they switch seamlessly. Stuff that saves me time and just does what I want. And all of the devices are usually among the best in class individually.
Nobody outside of Apple even has that as a vision. Microsoft is so bad at building consumer products it's unbelievable. Google is struggling to build compiling phones with its own software - I doubt they can execute on other device types. Valve did a relatively small investment in this ecosystem and brought it forward light years in the gaming space.
For the desktop, I could probably just use Linux, but you're right, in terms of eco-system, where would I go?
Phones are even worse. You basically stuck on iOS and Android and I honestly see no situation where picking Android wouldn't be worse. You have a better selection of phone, and you could run /e/OS, Calyx, or something else, but that's just a hassle. I'm not a big fan of the direction iOS is developing, it tried to do way to much and the UI has become a mess.
Graphene, Calyx, /e/OS... they work and you can install apps from the Play Store, the feedback I got is just that the few apps I need that can't be replaced keeps breaking. It's just more of a hassle than I'm willing to endure. But you right, it is an option.
Isn't politics famous for moralizing inherently immoral decisions, such that people forget how to engage in constructive discourse and resign themselves to tribalism? Doesn't that process inherently degrade the quality of both politics and technology?
Maybe I'm alone, but one of the few reasons I care about technology is to not treat it like politics or fairy magic.
>It has been good enough for the past 15 years or so.
I daily drove fedora last summer for a few months and it was a joke on how unstable it was. Slack would crash when screen sharing, likewise for chrome/gmeet, camera corruption bugs. Just two days ago I was teasing a coworker on a daily that we can spot a linux user by how long it takes him to unmute himself. Chrome would randomly stop rendering all windows when watching YouToube in a separate window. KDE plasma would get messed up very frequently. Gnome was more stable but had issues with fractional scaling X11 apps on Wayland (Plasma 6 supported this). Installing a DAW took days of reading audio routing docs and trying stuff out, breaking my audio several times in the process. My LG C4 cannot be used at 4k/120Hz because you cant get HDMI 2.1 on Linux/AMD. And this is all on a well supported desktop machine. Laptop and power management was even worse last time I tried it. Hell I never had a PC laptop that managed sleep state reliably and didn't cook the battery in the backpack randomly.
I just don't have these kinds of issues with MacOS. The processor/laptops are just best on the market and it just works, support is amazing. It is hard to justify dealing with Linux desktop and PC hardware even at a price premium, but these days Apple devices are even price competitive compared to similar windows/linux machines.
> It is hard to justify dealing with Linux desktop and PC hardware even at a price premium
There is only one justification that I need: Apple wants me in a golden cage, and I don't want to lose my freedom at any cost. No matter how much cheaper it can get, not matter how much "better" than the competition it is, it is not worth the price. I do not exchange my freedom for convenience, status or some materialistic joy. It's as simple as that.
All your arguments against Linux are at best circumstantial and at worst bogus. Of course it is not perfect. Of course it has limitations. But it's undeniable that the gap between FOSS and Windows/Apple is getting narrower and narrower, despite the FOSS side getting a minuscule fraction of the resources available to trillion dollar corporations.
And the really fucked up part is that You are the one claiming to "hate" Apple, yet you keep buying their products and making their market dominance ever stronger.
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Just to address your "claims":
> we can spot a linux user by how long it takes him to unmute himself
Never had any issues of that sort, whether I was using Google Meet, Slack, Zoom or anything else.
> KDE plasma would get messed up very frequently. Gnome was more stable
I've been using XFCE since 2010 (When Ubuntu went with Unity). It is not fancy and does everything I need.
> issues with fractional scaling X11 apps on Wayland.
It has been working fine on my Desktop and my Framework laptop for some good 3 years, when I actually bothered to look. Before that, I'd just go by through customization of window zoom levels (browser) and font-size (emacs, terminal, GTK apps).
> My LG C4 cannot be used at 4k/120Hz because you cant get HDMI 2.1 on Linux/AMD
hum, too bad? How significantly was your quality of life affected by this? Curiously, I also use an LG monitor with AMD running at 4k/60Hz, and the fact that I am "missing out" on something here does not even cross my mind.
> Installing a DAW took days of reading audio routing docs
Did you get it working? Was the software FOSS? Can you share your findings back with the developers and help them improve their product, or are you going to keep rationalizing the abusive relationship you're in because "at least things just work, most of the time".
The biggest trick they ever pulled was changing Music.app into Apple Music, and on first app start showing you a "hey, want to try Apple Music? Tap here" fullscreen.
That single-handedly unlocked a huge cohort of boomers and other tech laypeople that had never tried Spotify or any other music streaming platform before.
It was smart and also a huge abuse of market power. Apple Music would have bombed without it. The only reason they didn't get in deep shit for it was that Apple doesn't have nearly the market capture in the EU that they have in the US, and in that time period the US didn't do antitrust against tech companies.
The worse abuse of market power there is that Apple Music doesn't have to pay the 30% to the app store for subscriptions made on the device, but but spotify etc do, so Spotify can't charge a comparable price on iOS, and also wasn't allowed to tell the user in the app that they can subscribe for $x online.
Do you have links? Because every single time someone claims “everyone” on HN shared an opinion and I go check, the threads are split. What that tells me is that the people who accuse HN of being a biased hive mind are themselves biased to the point of being blind to other arguments.
> now they're boiling the frog.
That’s a myth.
> according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.
Ah, sweet vindication. Eventually the only company that doesn't do (all the) bad thing will start doing bad thing.
What you say seems likely, but then what. Should I throw my phone in the bin because it might be bad in the future, as opposed to being actually bad now?
> but then what. Should I throw my phone in the bin because it might be bad in the future
No, but you should be always ready to jump the ship, always research reasonably good alternatives and never go deep in their walled garden. Ideally, you could even support the efforts to bring the freedom with your money or time, like GNU/Linux phones.
