the fundamental disagreement here is: >I expect information to continue to become more important and more lucrative. whereas I am arguing for the opposite. I

the fundamental disagreement here is: >I expect information to continue to become more important and more lucrative. whereas I am arguing for the opposite. I certainly don't know that I'm right or not, but I do think that the valuations of the companies that give away services in exchange for personal data are betting that you are right and I am wrong. Apple... I believe apple is betting my way. I believe (and certainly don't know for sure) that apple is being much more cautious about user's data because they know that, well, this is part of why they are getting my money, and I assume the same can be said for a fairly large group of consumers. >Apple has had tremendous success with computer hardware, but they don't have a monopoly. I don't think the computer hardware business is as prone to monopolies as software and information. I believe that apple is best thought of as a software company, like Microsoft. Apple gets involved in hardware because by controlling the hardware, they can make their software better, and charge more for it. Modern Apple hardware isn't particularly amazing or innovative compared to the competition. I mean, it's not terrible (except the keyboards, but that's just a matter of taste.) - it's not behind the curve in terms of hardware, but it's not really ahead of the curve, either, unless we're talking about fashion (and personally, I think it goes both ways. You'd be embarrassed to use an apple in the '90s because they were kind of terrible. it's possible that they are cool now because they actually work pretty well. It's a "smart" thing to use - It's possible that fashion is following function here.) It's interesting, because before last year, I had not owned or even seriously used an apple device in the 30+ years I've used computers. I really want to control my own software. I had a n900 for a long time, then one of the keyboarded android phones... and I worked so hard to install my own android build and control my own software for so long, but because the phone hardware market is so fractured, doing so on a phone is way harder than doing so on a laptop, so while I run linux or bsd on all my servers, desktops and laptops (aside from the one game machine) - I have an apple phone, because I have decided that I don't have the time to sysadmin my phone, and apple sysadmins my phone in ways that aren't annoying and offensive. But yeah... things haven't settled out yet, so it's possible apple will go the 'mine user data route' - but the thing is, I don't think they can do that without significantly hurting the customer experience that their products provide.