What about "Don't use Apple products"? I know that Android is just as bad in many ways...
And if all options in the modern tech industry basket of choice are terrible, well... humanity survived without them for an awfully long time.
I've gone back to a flip phone from an iPhone. I no longer use Windows if I can at all avoid it (there exist a few sysadmin tasks involving netbooting Mikrotik devices for major OS updates that are far less painful on Windows than other OSes), and have no plans to let Win11 in my life. And Apple is heading out the door too. Throw in my dislike of Intel, and... yeah, it's getting pretty thin pickings. I still have an iPad with no accounts on it as a PDF reader, but I'd like to replace that with something else (Remarkable or such).
"Agh, this is soooo terrible, but I'm going to keep using it!" just means, in practice, it's not that terrible.
> "Agh, this is soooo terrible, but I'm going to keep using it!" just means, in practice, it's not that terrible.
I don't think this is the only conclusion here.
I think we should acknowledge just how central personal computing devices are in society in 2021. Sure, it's true that humanity survived without them, but at that time, societal norms were drastically different. Removing tech from daily life today can be crippling, and that's part of what makes some of these issues so terrible. They directly threaten our daily lives.
I'd argue that it's possible for the thing to be "very terrible", and to conclude that it's still your only option to continue using the Apple/Google ecosystem.
- Not all users have the financial means to switch. The iPhone they own is the one phone they'll buy for the next 3-4 years.
- A growing number of users have only an iDevice and no standalone PC. Couple this with #1, and things get even more difficult.
- The utility afforded by the Apple ecosystem is high enough (or virtually required depending on one's job) that it outweighs the current set of downsides.
If a corner store owner pays a weekly fee to the local gang "for protection", it doesn't necessarily follow that because the owner chooses to pay the fee, the extortion must not be soooo terrible.
Good for you, not good for %99.99 of the population. For nation states, that is mission accomplished! You never get %100 compliance with anything with large numbers.
Both Apple and Google scan your cloud synced files. Neither of them claim to scan your local only files. So the choice is rather pointless as they both hold the same position.
What do you mean by this? I use Google photos on my iphone and it seems to work perfectly fine. I'm assuming you are talking about background sync but I just checked via the web version and my photos from yesterday are all there so it seems that background activity is allowed while plugged in since I have not opened the g photos app in a while.
The irony is that if you’re not updated to the latest iOS, the easier (cheaper?) it is for the CCP to run surveillance exploits on your device a la the Uighurs.
You can either trust Apple, or lose all security updates.
- vulnerable to the latest published exploits
or
- vulnerable to clientside scanning of your media for wrongthink by Apple for the CCP
Smash that iOS update button and do your part for the party!