I want to talk about this because of a conversation I had with a colleague on a lunch break a few days ago. I am a doctor, and I was talking to him about how angry I was (and still am) about the fact that the COVID vaccines, when they were first invented, were not made public, but instead were patented and sold. This basic fact made millions of people around the world suffer. I was rambling about how scientific information should always be free. How we should be able to use the internet as the greatest library our ancestors could have only dreamt of, instead of putting information behind paywalls. Even back in med school I was an avid user of sci-hub and I wasn’t ashamed of it one bit. I still use sci-hub to keep up with new researches so I can treat/inform my patients better. And I hate how some of my colleagues think that I am stealing others’ work.
Anyways, so I was rambling on and on. I sometimes do that. And my friend said something so strange and unrelated (in my eyes) to the conversation. He said “Look at you, defending open access to medical information for everyone, yet you only use Apple products.” I was like, “What? What do you mean?” He explained, “Man, all the things you use are made by Apple. Your laptop, tablet, phone, watch, earbuds or whatever, made by the company that is one of the main adversaries when it comes to right-to-repair and open source software.” So you need to see here, I’m not a tech guy. It’s just not my field. My job only requires me to read textbooks and keep up with new researches in my field, which any device can do. So I was like, “I… I don’t think I follow.” So he briefly explained what open-source software is, and how it’s related to my idea of free and open access to information for everyone, but this time it’s not in our field but programmers’. And when I almost reflexively said “Well we’re not programmers” he said “I mean, when it comes to software, it’s the programmers’ and developers’ thing. But free and open source is an idea. It applies to everything. And I think you’re supporting a company that opposes your views by buying their products.”
We didn’t have much time left so that was the end of that conversation. And I have been thinking about it since. When buying tech products I mainly care about if they are integrated with each other or not. Like if I turn on Do not Disturb on my watch, I want my phone, tablet and laptop to go quiet as well. Or I like being able to answer a phone call on my laptop. And I love the aesthetics of Apple products, at least more than what other companies have to offer.
Every evening since that conversation I’ve been looking up stuff related to open source software. Linux, distros, the philosophy behind it all, Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak, Arch, “read the wiki”, terminal, GUI, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA my brain is filled with so many things at this point that I don’t understand anything at all.
So, TLDR; I’d love to hear your opinions about Apple. Most people (myself included) buy Apple devices because of the ecosystem, the design, privacy (?), consistent updates (especially on mobile), or for you might say, a lack of knowledge in the field of tech. Do you support Apple or are you against them, or are you indifferent? Do you think people who are not in the tech field as well should look into and use open source software? Leave your thoughts below! ^^
I don’t like Apple because of their anti-user, anti-third party policies, but their quality, interoperability, and privacy make me pick it over google for my phone, tablet, and watch.
Granted, it I could replace those things with FOSS alternatives that worked as well as Apple products do, I would in a heart beat.
This is exactly my opinion. They’re not great in a lot of their stances; but they ARE better than most companies in most of their stances… and the open-source options just DO NOT WORK as well by far.
I want my software and hardware to enable my hobbies, not to BE my hobbies getting them to work and keeping them working as new versions come out.
I’ll preface this by saying don’t beat yourself up for using Apple. You can be critical and still use their products. I am typing this on Windows 10 and have a macbook for work. Microsoft and Google are far from perfect in this space. As the saying goes, “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” lol.
I think you should use open source software but I don’t think you should force yourself if good alternatives don’t exist for your use case. A good example is Photoshop. The open source version is GIMP. I use GIMP mostly because I don’t want to pay for Photoshop but from what I’ve heard from people who edit pictures professionally it is not even a competition.
Compare that to Audacity, my understanding is more people in the audio world use it. Or VLC Media player! It can basically open any format of video, it’s crazy!
If you’re curious to try a linux desktop operating system the choices will become overwhelming like you said. Ubuntu is the go-to suggestion usually. There are ways to create “live USBs” to run it from the USB like a test drive (but it may be slow). I’ve decided my next computer I build I’m going to run Linux primarily but I haven’t got around to building it.
Just FYI vanillaOS is an awesome system to suggest to both new users and experienced ones. None of the snap BS but still based on Ubuntu. It also makes it really hard to mess up your system. Vanilla Gnome too. Check it out.
I suggest Ubuntu because it is so widespread and one of the ones that “just works”. Also I don’t want to introduce a newbie to the snap debacle. It won’t affect them much to be honest.
Mint > Ubuntu if you really want to stay in the Debian space. Canonical is without a doubt the dodgiest Linux company, and Ubuntu is only being recommended because it became popular almost 20 years ago due to the easy installer wizard and free CDs.
Fedora and openSUSE are also amazing “just works” distros. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen proprietary software company provide a deb binary but not an rpm/dnf one.
There are definitely reasons to not like Ubuntu but I still believe it is the best recommendation for beginners due to the massive community. I’m not saying Canonical is faultless. Mint has its problems too, in 2016 a hacker got an ISO with a backdoor onto the website (link).
I mean, how much of the Ubuntu info won’t be applicable to mint problems? And how often is a Debian/Ubuntu derivative user going to need distro specific help in the first place?
A hack from 7 years ago is not the same thing as a company constantly trying to exploit its users. What other distro thought it was a good idea to sell user data to Amazon, show ads in the terminal, or team up with Microsoft to EEE Linux?
Most people aren’t going to distrohop all that much. So what they start with is going to be what they stick with for a while. Nobody should have to learn Linux in a snap infested canonical world.
Like I said, I don’t believe Canonical is perfect by any means, it’s just that Ubuntu has the largest community and is easy to use. That’s it. I’m not saying anything else you’re saying is wrong, I just find these things more important for absolute beginners. I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, I just believe different things are important for the absolute beginner is all.
My mom’s (mid 80s now) has been using straight Debian for well over a decade with no problem. Just stick with the real OG.
So Apple is obviously an evil, profit seeking company that exploits users and developers, maintains a monopoly and actively hurts efforts towards openness.
But bro, what else am I gonna use? Do you think Google is any better.
And, as you already noticed, most open source alternatives suuuck. (Man, I’m gonna regret saying this on an FOSS community) With some research you’ll get a usable desktop OS for some use-cases, but phones such as Fairphone and Purism are another story entirely. Don’t even think about watches or tablets. I love the Purism Firefox demo, where they enthusiastically say: “With Settings unusable in Portrait, it’s time to switch to landscape mode”.
The “you think … yet you buy …” argument is pointless, because it ignores the realities of monopolies and globalism. I’m sure his T-Shirt that day wasn’t made from ethically sourced cotton or whatever.
I would argue that Google is much worse—their entire business model is built around collecting personal information and selling advertisements.
If we talk about smartphones, Android is open source, but is very limited without Google Services (GrapheneOS is great for privacy and security, but then you cannot pay with your phone, for example, because it needs to be approved by Google).
Linux on smartphones is more of a proof-of-concept, and not really usable as a daily driver.
So, Apple is the ‘least bad’ option now. (and there are ways to sideload FOSS apps)
The Pinetime’s a pretty solid FOSS watch, actually. Assuming you’re ok with pretty basic use cases (for now)- it’s easily worth the $30ish to get one, anyway.
While I agree that the options aren’t always great, there is a bigger issue. We are all just too enslaved to convenience.
People right now wouldn’t be able to bear doing some of the difficult things we used to do. And the average Joe wouldn’t be caught dead using computers from 15 years ago. We have grown accustomed to our convenience. OP said what we looks for is being able to answer a call on his laptop and while I agree it’s a great feature, it’s a convenience. We can’t be bothered to pick up the phone.
The reality’s you talked about are there but another is we think we need these things, but really, it’s completely possible to live without them. We’ve just become to lazy, entitled, and rich too make the open philosophy important enough to us. So I’d ask, do you care more about your conveniences or for a more open future?
I spent many years trying to be as FOSS as I could. I tried many different Linux distros, hunted for open source operating systems for my phone (at the time, none did even the basic things I needed it to do) until one day I decided I was sick to death of having to spend hours researching and trying multiple arcane cli commands to get even simple things to work (like WiFi). I realised that I was wasting an enormous amount of time being all-things-open-source.
My next purchase as a macbook as it was based on a *nix and I’ve come to realise that while Apple is a walled garden and in some ways is ‘evil’, it’s less evil than Google is now, or Microsoft was back in the day.
I also like the way that the various Apple devices work really well together. But I hate the fact that it’s harder to hack things to be the way that I want. Don’t get me wrong, I still love open source software, but I have too few years left to waste them on modifying config.org files, or whatever they do now, so I’m much more selective with what I use. I tend to use FOSS applications on MacOS where the software works well enough.
Not trying to bash FOSS, just my 2 cents.
@Bluetreefrog
@IronTwo
I’ve got to say, Linux and FOSS in general has really come a long way just these few last years. For me it has gone from tedious and problem-ridden to mostly frictionless. But the times that I do stumble unto an issue, it still takes a while to figure out a solution 🙃 So, not perfect yet, but a looot more user friendly these days! 😃OP probably got really unlucky with their wifi chip and this is still an issue today with certain brands
it’s that awful that most linux user just buy a 20€ intel wifi card, open their laptop and than replace it but not anybody wants to do that so it isn’t a foolproof solution either
I like your scientific way of looking at things i am a software developer and i know few people who are using apple laptops and phones and they are defending everything that company make or say or do even it is a very anti-consumer decition like their implementation of right to repair so i am glad that not every apple user is also in their cult
I think Apple is as bad as Microsoft or even worse. Their products are not even remotely as good as their fans claim to be either.
I had to use a macbook for work once and it honestly sucked and I really tried to like it even contributed to major user space programs through out my 2 year adventure. It’s a bad platform of blind leading the blind.
I’m disabled and a heavy swype user. Apple has one of the worst keyboards and predictive texts I’ve ever used. Even switching to Swiftkey before they inevitably remove it, it’s still terrible (it was excellent on Android, for me at least). I like the privacy options of the phone, but if I’m spending most of my time fixing what I type it really sours the whole experience.
I found Mac completely unusable for software engineering. Additionally, I hate when coworkers use it because the Shell scripts get messed up
My workplace offers windows and mac machines to our developers, and since I’m a linux+KDE die-hard I thought “hey mac is supposed to be unix-y right? I’ll take that to be more comfortable.” Oh man what a mistake. I tried to download the most basic software and I had to go to random websites to see that it costs $15 for a closed source application.
I’m so used to seeing something I don’t like and then looking for the config file to change it. I have zero control over my mac, to the point that I don’t think my employer had to lock down very much (I can’t even change keybinds?). At this point, I’ve hacked reasonable keybinds into all my programs and have resigned to a basic workflow, but I’m much more comfortable on my linux machine.
Linux > Windows >> Mac for software development in my experience. I know a lot of developers use macs, but I really struggle to see why. Is it a lack of experience with linux and windows? Windows terminal is real bad but it’s probably easier to get cygwin and WSL going than to fix the rest of whatever mac has going on.
The platform is full of abandonware and legacy cruft I seriously don’t understand how people are OK with that. Like, dragging shit to a folder to install it. It’s 2023. Nobody knows how internal directory structure works and everything is all over the place. There’s a thousand ways to do one thing and all of them are bad.
The apple developer forums are extremely cringe filled with, again, blind leading the blind and worse as you pointed out is that it leaks outside of Apple, especially now with ChatGPT!
When troubleshooting Linux stuff, people usually know what’s causing the problem and they’ll give you exactly the right solution. Surprisingly often, there’s a clear error message that tells you where to look next. Some error messages even tell you exactly how how to fix the problem. If not, there’s probably an article about it on the arch wiki where things are explained in abundant detail.
When troubleshooting Windows or iOS stuff, people have no idea what’s causing the problem, and they’ll give you a list of things that might solve it. having no other resource, you’l just try all of them and find that none of them work. Well, half of the options didn’t really make any sense either, so no surprise. It’s like disabling iMessage and hoping it suddenly fixes your software update problems. What’s the logic behind these ideas anyway?
I 100% agree with your colleague, though I don’t agree with his purity test. You’re allowed to feel the way you do about medicine and still use whatever products you want. But, yeah, I don’t own or use any Apple products, though I would like to own and restore an Apple IIe.
Your friend is right. Listen to him, read and understand. Don’t feel obligated to necessarily change your habits. If you get the time and desire to make a change, that understanding and knowledge will inform your actions. ☺️
@IronTwo
Apple’s ecosystem works well for it’s users, but it screws over anyone else not completely consumed in their ecosystem.I agree. This is not only limited to the users, but also intentionally makes life difficult for those trying to develop multiplatform products and services.
Locking down the publishing routes and development tools for apple platforms is not such a big issue for parties that develop solely for apple products, but that is often not the case. Instead apple users often make up a minority of users, but maintaining and testing applications, websites and services so that they also work on apple devices can take up a disproportionately large amount of development time and effort.
Personally, I strongly agree with your colleague. If you truly believe openness is a good thing (and it sounds like you do), Apple’s ethos is just about the direct antithesis. They only collaborate with the wider tech industry when they absolutely have to. Otherwise, they are greedy, secretive, controlling, and vindictive - oftentimes openly hostile to anyone who dares choose a non-Apple device/platform.
The best example of this is the iMessage “green bubbles” phenomenon. Some background: Apple’s default texting experience is iMessage. This service has a bunch of nice, modern chat features - except they’re only available when texting another iPhone. These “better” messages are indicated by blue bubbles. People who don’t use iPhones (whether by choice or by necessity) are forced to use the ancient, insecure, feature-poor SMS protocol, reducing the privacy and security of everyone involved (including iPhone users). It’s also extremely obvious when this happens, since the chat app will switch to green bubbles.
In places where this service has caught on (such as the US), Apple uses this separation to deliberately make texting non-iPhone users a significantly worse experience. This causes social effects, especially among teenagers, where those who don’t use iPhone are bullied and shunned for being a “green bubble”. The Wall Street Journal did a great expose into this phenomenon.
Now, to be clear, this is a totally artificial problem - Apple could fix this overnight if they wanted. For years, the wider tech industry has been working on replacing SMS with a much more modern standard called RCS. Every single other party in the mobile industry has moved on. Apple, however, is the lone holdout. They see kids bullying other kids into buying an iPhone as a good thing - more iPhone sales! In fact, Apple openly encouraged that narrative: when a journalist asked the (very reasonable) question of “how can I make texting with my Android-user mom better?”, Apple CEO Tim Cook responded with “buy your mom an iPhone.”
There’s plenty more examples of this antagonistic behavior I could talk about, but this one is the most telling.
Of course, if you do choose to go all in with them, you won’t see that side of Apple at all. They are frighteningly good at cultivating their image as the “good guys” among Big Tech, and, honestly, it’s not unwarranted. They are good at what they do, and they do take care of their users. Their tech is great.
Ultimately, my take is that if you prefer using Apple’s stuff over more open alternatives, don’t change what you like! Just remember that they have a dark side. It is good to be aware of the wider tech ecosystem, and to make open technology choices where you can. By being active on the Fediverse, you’re already doing your part 😁
Of course, if you do choose to go all in with them, you won’t see that side of Apple at all. They are frighteningly good at cultivating their image as the “good guys” among Big Tech, and, honestly, it’s not unwarranted. They are good at what they do, and they do take care of their users. Their tech is great.
This paragraph perfectly describes me. Way back, I was a blind Apple fanboy. In my eyes, they could do no wrong. Plus, I enjoyed rooting for the underdog, because back then people were constantly publishing stories about how Apple was doomed to go bankrupt any minute.
Later, I learned how terrible they are in many ways… but I still use their stuff. I first learned how to use computers on a Mac, so any other OS is weird and unintuitive to me. Besides, it just works, literally right out of the box. Yeah, Apple is still overpriced, but it’s not as bad as it seems. If you enjoy spending hours to get something to work, and you think your time is worth nothing, then okay. If you’re like me, part of what you’re paying for is quality design and convenience.
you think your time is worth nothing, then okay.
What exactly do you mean by this? Do you really think that people who use or try to use open source software do not value their time?
Commenting to agree. The green bubble is very literally a deliberate choice on the side of Apple. The infrastructure is already in place to merge with every other phone manufacturer.
Addendum: Apple products as status symbols has been their project from the start. “Sent from my iPhone” as default on emails, being the most emminent example.
Sent from my fairphone3
As a follow up for those interested, here’s the exception that proves the rule: Apple’s adoption and support of the Matter smart home standard.
For those who don’t follow the smart home, the basic backstory is that there are several competing “controller” platforms for the smart home, including: Amazon Alexa, Google/Nest Home, Apple Home, and Samsung SmartThings.
Each of these platforms can control smart home gadgets like smart switches, lights, and thermostats, and they all do so in a slightly different way. However, this diversity in platforms posed an issue for gadget manufacturers (think Philips Hue): in order for their gadgets to work with each platform, they had to write integrations to talk with each service. This added a ton of extra cost and complexity to something that should be a commodity, meaning that only the larger players could afford to make gadgets that worked with every platform. Smaller vendors didn’t have that ability, so they’d focus their attention to just one or two platforms - often the largest ones.
This market setup was (fortunately) a disaster for Apple. As it turns out, people aren’t willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a nice speaker and Siri when you could get the vastly more capable Google Assistant/Alexa for literally a tenth of the price and blanket your home with them. Apple’s arrogance and hubris had landed it in an unfamiliar position: they were, by far, the smallest player in the smart home market, and accessory makers weren’t building for Apple Home as a result.
Faced with abject failure, Apple pulled a very un-Apple move: they joined an industry standard! They open-sourced parts of their HomeKit framework and helped the next-generation Matter protocol come to market, in collaboration with all the other big players (Google, Amazon, Samsung). Matter is great because it provides a single protocol for accessory makers to build for: as long as it supports Matter, it will work with any of the big smart home controllers, including Apple. Now that this standard is out in the world, it’s great: most newly-released smart home gadgets will work with whichever platform you prefer, including Apple!
So: why did Apple suddenly become collaborative in the smart home space? Because they were going to fail otherwise. Their backs were literally against the wall; their hand was forced. You can bet your life’s savings that if HomeKit had been even moderately successful, they would never, ever have supported the Matter protocol. They would have preferred the lock-in to their dystopian walled garden.
Apple doesnt even need to support rcs to fix the issues with imesage. They just need to open the chat API for third party support or just release an imessage for other platforms like every other chat app does.
The current system they have essentially tricks less savvy users into thinking that iPhone is just better at texting and other services are bad, when the issue is that apple stealthily enrolled you all into a restrictive IM program that cant communicate with anything other than apple products. It’s actually quite devious. If imessage and itext were two separate apps from the start then it would be more apparent that you are texting the green bubble and using a limited chat app with iphone users and more people would probably just use one of the many chat alternatives that exist. Because they are able to still communicate with nonapple users in their chat program and even add them to groupchats and stuff it gives this weird appearance from the inside that the green chats are the problem.
I like to think that the initial goal of imessage being this way wasnt locking but as a way to seemlessly push grandma who would never go out of her way to download a chat app, into an IM client. The lockin side effect just wound up being a happy accident.
I like to tinker. I don’t buy apple products. I get that most people want a device that just works when they pick it up and integrates with the rest of their devices. Apple does this really well.
While I personally agree with your colleague, one must consider one’s use case and the amount of time and effort it will take to replicate the things you like about the apple UX and ecosystem and make a judgement call. I have a Windows desktop, a Linux server, an Android phone and tablet and I spend a fair amount of time seeing them up and keeping them talking to one another to share data, but even then I can’t get them to share settings simply like do not disturb.
Apple has innovated on the user experience to the point where if I pick up an iphone I can’t navigate around it because it relies on a soft touch, “intuitive”, gestural interface. And therefore it’s easy for me to shun apple products on principle. The real hard work is migrating off the platform you know. And for people that were raised in the apple touch ecosystem, I don’t realistically see many of them ever leaving.
I agree. Apple’s products are easy to use because it is all controlled and created exclusively by Apple, but that is seen as problematic by many, including me. That does however mean that it will take a little more effort to use open source software, because you (and the FOSS community) are the one in control instead of apple, and it is up to you to set it up the way you want to.
Apple is the worst… and they make it really hard to break out of their walled garden once you made the mistake to enter it. But don’t throw away everything, just don’t give them any additional money and try to somehow escape from that prison over time. But it will be hard as Apple intentionally breaks interoperability with things that are not Apple.
My amateur opinion: Apple makes beautiful and thoughtful devices that are tightly integrated into a system of services that work well. But I don’t use them, mostly because of the closed nature of that ecosystem, and also because they are consistently more expensive. Back when you could jailbreak and sideload apps on iPhones, I had a series of iPhones and they were pretty good phones, although iTunes always sucked. While they were around, iPods were clever. But I preferred to buy music from a variety of places, I wanted to install apps that I wanted and not what were available on the App Store, and I really didn’t like the user-hostile decisions Apple made to sell more hardware. Getting rid of the headphone jack was one of the worst decisions to me, as was Apple’s dogmatic refusal to use USB-C until European regulators recently forced the change.
I consider Apple to be one of the most evil corporations out there, but it appears that my interpretation of “evilness” seema to coincide with size a lot.
so maybe i just don’t like (stupidly) successfull companies.Anyway, I think Apple locks people in their very nice walled garden and in that garden uses a lot of public infrastructure (like open source software, but also other open services on the net), and gives comparatively very little back to the community.
and they do it, because they think it propably makes slightly more money.
Which is also the reason I don’t trust their privacy promises at all, since they can’t prove many of them.
Apple could be an enormous force for good, but to me it feels like they care more about making 0.5% more money to put into their hoard.
Terrible company, I do believe the world would be better if it vanished.
Apple products are great if you’re already in the ecosystem. As someone who’s only Apple product was an iPod nano, I never understood the hype. Yes, they make nice looking devices, but Apple products are all so… Locked. If you want to run Adobe Premier on your new M1 MacBook, great, it does it amazingly well. If you want to run a half dozen virtual machines on the same M1 (which has more than enough power to do it), then you’re totally out of luck.
It’s the “walled garden” approach that I don’t like. Computers, and by extension, smartphones and smart watches, are capable of so much more than what we ask of them, but if we’re not allowed to even try then why would I dig myself further into an ecosystem that says “here’s what you’re allowed to do” rather than “here’s what you can do”.
Apple has it’s place; if you like it, great, but it’s not for me.
