Real question. I would like to know what drives you to hate Apple? (In terms of privacy of course because in terms of price it’s another story).
Few reasons, first is this:
. Seems like as long as something has a clean interface, or it looks shiny enough, then all its privacy faults are overlooked.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.
I wonder if younger millennials’ and Gen z’s overwhelming preference for iPhones over Androids is indicative anything in the future
Only in imperial-core countries, most Gen Z’s worldwide don’t use apple products.
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.
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.
Also OSX ui is shit and annoying.
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.
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.
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”
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!
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.
About “Security theater”:
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
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.
Android doesn’t support iMessage
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 ios 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.
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.
Rcs is a new thing and not all android phones use it even now
Photos sent from iPhones look like shit today and they did years ago. Rcs is not a factor.
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.
RCS with Google’s proprietary extensions
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.
Regarding gaslighting: See Apple’s response on the CSAM backdoor shit show. All the critics were wrong, including the various advocacy groups.
Simp.
- price
- closed ecosystem that funnels you into buying more overpriced hardware
- general feeling of superiority apple customers often seem to aquire
(e.g. my former project lead refused to touch other peoples devices because using them “doesn’t feel like apple, eww”)
All that.
BTW, of all the drivers on the road, I always hated Volvo drivers who sport an Apple sticker the most. They’re pure entitled no-good scum. Except BMW drivers, they should be euthanised.
What kind of image do Volvo drivers have where you live? Here Volvos are just seen as reliable but boring.
Here in Slovenia they have this sort of hipster/yuppie clientele, basically the same demographic as the smug Apple users, that’s why you see so many with Apple stickers. Usually they drive the estate version like XC70. The new SUVs are more for the executive smug base, though, but obviously they’re still scumbags. :)
Ah, here it is BMW drivers, most have Apple stickers on their cars, and they are all douchebags.
Overpriced hardware comes with a boon: It lasts longer. I am by no means an apple fanboy, but when I discovered the 12 year old Mac of my dad still performed like mid-range PCs with Windows, I was quite surprised.
Still not buying their hardware though…
Except a 12 year old Mac isn’t supported by Apple anymore and will likely be riddled with vulnerabilities. You could just load Linux on it since it’s probably an Intel based chipset.
Check out Louis Rossman on youtube. Especially his apple hardware design analysis.
Can you read their source-code? Nope. And they falsely advertise their phones as Privacy alternatives when they collect just as much data as Google.
This is different than my understanding of Google and Apple. Could you provide links to sources showing what Apple collects about its users?
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.
You can read their own privacy policy, in which they admit to everything: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww
Ignore their bullshit marketing as for “why” they collect it and when they try to justify it. Look at the facts laid out.
Major privacy issues that come to mind include:
- App store lock-in on iOS combined with terms incompatible with the GPL mean that some of the most privacy-respecting software cannot be distributed for Apple’s mobile devices.
- Apple proposed, but ultimately did not implement client-side scanning for end-to-end encrypted cloud storage. That such a thing even made it to the public proposal stage shows either incompetence (unlikely) or a lack of serious commitment to privacy (more likely). Apple’s proposal may have emboldened EU regulators who are trying to mandate client-side scanning for encrypted chat apps.
- Browser engine lock-in on iOS means hardened third-party browsers are unavailable.
- The popularity of Apple’s platform-exclusive iMessage service in the USA may be hindering adoption of cross-platform encrypted messaging. On the other hand, without it perhaps most of its current users would use SMS, which is obviously worse.
I do like their laptops, but for literally everything else: the fact that I basically don’t own my own hardware.
I can’t install or distribute my own software without Apple’s arbitrary approval. When Apple decides it’s done supporting the products, I can’t even install a different OS like Linux because the hardware is completely locked down… they become paper-weights.
That is not how ownership is supposed to work.
What could you not install Linux on? I’ve never had that issue.
My 2011 iPad 3rd gen.
A lightweight Linux distribution would make that thing killer for word processing and document reading. Might even allow YouTube videos to be watched again.
Any equivalent Android tablet would have custom ROMs etc. to get a bit more functionality out of it. I know it’s not a tablet, but look at the Samsung galaxy SII - the amount of community development for that is incredible to this day.
In what way is the hardware locked down? Is this something new with the M chips?
Everything except the Mac line has a locked boot process. So your iPhone or iPad must run the latest iOS, must have an Apple ID, must source apps from Apple, and Apple has gotten so good at securing their devices that its basically killed hobbyist jailbreaking.
Anything you do on these multi thousand dollar devices is only because Apple allows you to— reluctantly, I might add.
Planned obsolescence: the other day I was setting up a refurbished MacBook air from 2017. It officially runs only up to macOS 12. I wanted to install apple’s productivity suite iWorks (pages, keynotes, numbers) on it.
But the AppStore said I would need macOS 13 to download and install it. Why the eff doesn’t it allow me to install an older version of those apps, and why does the 2017 not support macOS 13?
So I installed Open core Legacy Patcher, built a macOS 13 installer. Installed 13 with absolutely no issues and finally was able to install iWorks.
Any non versed or risk taking user would need to buy a newer Mac… good job apple.
Conversely I have a dell xps from 2018 that run very well with fedora atomic (kde). I upgraded the SSD, WiFi card and replaced the battery. Should easily last me another 5 years
User repairability and serviceability should be(come) mandatory!
There is no sideloading
No unlocked bootloader on iPhone, iPads and Apple Watches
The products are not repairable enough
They’ve redefined privacy to be privacy from everyone except themselves, and then indoctrinated people that they are the most privacy conscious company.
iPhone user here, that is…
…quite accurate actually.
I have used Android and even tried to switch to Android a few years ago, but whenever I use Android, I can’t shake the feeling that uncle Google watches whatever I do, I don’t get the same feeling when I use iOS.
Weather either feeling is accurate I can’t say, but I hesitate to trust an ad compny’s OS over a computer company’s OS.
Again, that is just a feeling, I make no claim wither way which is factually better.
Try GrapheneOS (on a Google pixel, ironically) if you truly want privacy
iPhones tend to send close to the same types of info back home. When started, idle, inserting a SIM, on the settings screen, even when not logged in. Like, its very similar even when you look at comprehensive lists which a lot of people either don’t know or ignore. I’m not saying that there aren’t specific benefits or reasons to feel more comfortable with Apple. But saying its because they intrinsically are more private, I feel like that’s a bridge too far
Anti-open(source), anti-open(standards) l, anti-consumer, anti-planet, anti-repair, anti-honest. What else do you need?
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!
Black box.
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Right to repair and own
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They own decryption keys
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Can’t use without an account so you can’t deGoogle or deApple them
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I just hate being told what (not) to do. If there is a solution to the problem, fucking let me solve it. I don’t need anyone’s permission or be told to deal with it just like every other schmuck.
I feel like my intelligence is being personally insulted. Any company deciding that I shouldn’t try to repair my phone, which is my property, because they believe I am too retarded to fix it, can suck a dick.
