this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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I never wrote they are objectively inferior. I even admitted they can be marginally better in some areas. My point is they'll vendor lock the hell out of you and the trade off isn't worth it.
Meanwhile you wrote two walls of text to defend company that uses your children and technology worse than ICQ (released in 1996) to make you buy their products. You're free to do so, but I'm not sure which one of us is salty :-)
Probably my fault you didn’t see this because it was buried deep in the wall of text, but I clarified that I’m definitely not trying to morally exculpate Apple.
In the context of which of two companies you choose to do business with, you shouldn’t criticize one while ignoring the immoral actions of the other. If we’re just talking about the things apple does wrong, I’m right there with you. But if we’re talking about which mobile phone ecosystem is less predatory than the other… at least my relationship with apple is a voluntary business arrangement with exactly two parties. That’s actually the reason I moved all of my stuff out of the android ecosystem in ‘21 after >10 years. Seeing ads across a dozen websites related to a private medical diagnosis made me realize Google just knows too much about me, and I do care about my privacy after all.
That’s obviously just my personal opinion but my point is that if you’re looking for an ethical tech company, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
I don't believe in ethical companies. Microsoft was cool once, then Google was cool, now some people seem to think that Apple is cool.
Best way to not get burnt is not to get vendor locked with one of them. Android allows me to install Firefox(real one, not Safari re-skin), replace launcher or even entire OS with Graphene. Google sucks in many ways, but if I'm not happy with them I just install software from another vendor. With ios I have to throw away half of the hardware I own.
I don’t believe in ethical for-profit companies either.
The open nature of Android was the single biggest reason I used it for the decade that I did. If I were to switch back, I’d buy a pixel.
But android isn’t as open as it used to be. Yes, you can still unlock your bootloader, root, and install custom roms, but Google is now actively fighting against users who want to do so. On my pixel 3, it became a never-ending battle to keep apps like my banking portal working while rooted, and to keep rooting working through updates. At least once a month, I’d be out of the house and have my phone fundamentally break in some way.
Eventually, I reached the point where I needed a smartphone as a tool more than I needed one as a toy to tinker with, so I left it stock. But stock android sucks from a privacy perspective. I realized that I wasn’t using 3rd party App Stores and I wasn’t rooting my phone, so the largest benefits of avoiding an iPhone weren’t really a factor to me anymore.
I was also extremely disappointed in the hardware, quality control and longevity of new android phones, especially compared to the iPhones being released. So I switched. And was amazed at how glad I was.
No police showed up to my door to force me to trade my Sony headphones in for AirPods or my Dell laptop for a MacBook. I already had an iPad because at the time, it was the only serious tablet of you care about using a stylus, but that had been working beautifully for me without any other apple products.
I think it’s silly to list the fact that an OEM has a ton of products that work well together as a reason not to buy any of that company’s products. If you don’t want to get locked in, don’t buy an Apple Watch. As far as I know, nothing else requires an iPad. And anyway, the resale value on apple products is so solid that if you did totally buy in, selling all your apple hardware would get you more than enough to buy matching hardware of a similar age from other manufacturers. Sell your two year old iPad and you can probably get 3 two year old Samsung tablets, assuming you can find any that still work.
The web browser thing also hardly locks you in. If you really don’t want to use safari, that’s a decent reason not to want to use iOS. For me at least, safari is the browser I would choose to use, so I don’t really care that I can’t use Firefox.