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Honestly I get the opposite of hope from people on this site. There is a large vocal population there that seems to _want_ Apple to continue to lock down and t

Honestly I get the opposite of hope from people on this site. There is a large vocal population there that seems to _want_ Apple to continue to lock down and take control of their devices, all in the name of "security." Read any comment thread on the Apple vs Epic lawsuit, lots of people defending Apple's "right" to dictate what you can and can't do with your own device. While there are others on here who don't think this way, I find is a disappointingly small minority on a site which calls itself "Hacker" News.

oneplane 6y ago
That is because a lot of people here see the masses of 'normal' or non-technically-inclined people that need to be protected against themselves because their usage of devices they do not understand has a real-world impact on everyone else when things go wrong. There is no true ideal version of this, there is no perfect world and there is no situation in which you can have full control but also have full protection without also knowing everything about the system you have. Phones and Computers are 'appliances' that do not need to be changed by the user (and we are talking about the mass-market user here), if anything it needs to prevent being changed by the user due to the larger ecosystem a device is part of. You can make the choice to not be part of the ecosystem, but most people would very much like to be part of a system, together, and one way of doing that is to have a level of sameness and consistency that so far is not viable without some sort of 'appliance-like' properties of the devices in question. You can still buy a different device, not take part in an existing system, and do whatever you want. But you will have a hard time getting the benefits of interconnection, scale, and support. Those three elements are pretty much why some brands or devices are sold in masses and some aren't. To this end I simply have multiples of most things. Some just need to do what it does for everyone else (interconnect, function the same way every day, have some company bear responsibility for practically everything), others are for me (open source hardware, open source software, no protections, but also no end-user support or responsibility).
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  > You can still buy a different device, not take part in an existing system, and do whatever you want This may not always be true, in a practical sense, for those with intense cultural pressure to fit in. And fitting in means having a green bubble, i.e. Apple phone.
  - zepto 6y ago
    Erm, Apple phones have blue bubbles. In any case nobody I know feels constrained by their choice of messenger app.
    - admax88q 6y ago
      > In any case nobody I know feels constrained by their choice of messenger app. Probably because you've already excluded them
      - zepto 6y ago
        Very amusing. But no - I mean because they use multiple apps. E.g. WhatsApp, or Facebook messenger, or Signal etc. Even the people I know who have iPhones tend to use these things. If I want to know what kind of phone someone uses, I generally have to ask. The thesis seems to be that people are so unable to think for themselves that they are compelled to choose their device by means of colored bubbles. If this is really true, then surely it’s the best argument one can possibly make for why the ecosystem needs to be locked down.
        admax88q 6y ago
        I'm only half joking. > You can still buy a different device, not take part in an existing system, and do whatever you want. The point is you can't. Intense social pressure to interact with people who _do_ take part in the existing system means you have to partake in the existing system to interact. My friends use Messenger so I need a facebook account, or my family uses WhatsApp so I need a non-rooted android phone. No mainstream messaging apps support federation and many are hostile towards reverse engineering. WhatsApp for example will permaban accounts who do not use official clients in the name of "security." You don't notice because you have already excluded anyone who chooses not to use a mainstream Android or iOS device. Or anyone you know who _would_ like to make that choice doesn't, cause they don't want to be that one friend who can't be reached as easily as the rest of the group.
codetrotter 6y ago
Speaking for myself only, I have an iPhone with iOS and a MacBook Air with macOS and a desktop computer that runs FreeBSD. Haven’t used Windows for years. Was purely Linux and FreeBSD for several years too. Back when I left Windows, Windows 7 had just come out, and I switched over to Linux and FreeBSD because I learned about those at the university and I came to appreciate open source software. Then came smart phones and I heard that Android ran Linux. So I was like wow finally a computer in my pocket where I can do everything I can on my laptop! But I soon learned that this was not the case. Mobile platforms are fundamentally different, and the terminal is not relevant for most things I want to do with a phone. I want to record videos, watch videos, talk to people, read stuff. And I still have an SSH client on my iPhone for when I need to remote into my server to do stuff on it while on the go. And iPhone is giving me the best experience, with the addition of being really tight on the security. And for my phone this is what I want. I am staying with Apple until they take it too far. Then I will leave them in a heartbeat. But for all the years I have been using iOS, everything Apple has been doing has been a betterment of the experience. The only one thing really that bothered me was I had a magazine subscription and reading those magazines is in theory only possible on iOS. Even though actually it’s just an app for reading PDF files. And I didn’t have access to the PDF files directly. But that was a minor thing anyway, and recently I jailbroke an old iOS device that I have had laying in a drawer that was running an old iOS version and I was actually able to extract PDF files from the app. But that subscription or two that I had, those were an exception anyway. Mostly when I read something on the phone I read on the web. And all of the eBooks that I have ever bought I have bought on the computer and not locked down in an app.
- webmobdev 6y ago
  > Then came smart phones and I heard that Android ran Linux. So I was like wow finally a computer in my pocket where I can do everything I can on my laptop! For linux on mobile, You want Sailfish OS - https://sailfishos.org/ https://sailfishos.org/ not Android. Also see https://jolla.com/ https://jolla.com/ who made it.
  - wrycoder 6y ago
    Doesn’t Sailfish OS have a proprietary UI? How is that an improvement? Why not support a FOSS mobile like Pinephone or Librem? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_phones https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_p...
friendlybus 6y ago
There's an explosion of people trying to get their software on your phone and application tricks scraping away information and control from the end user. Someone has got to filter the deluge of garbage, and people cling to Apple to do it. Phones aren't simple enough that the end user can manage everything it does and the software world isn't well behaved enough that we can exist without gatekeepers.
- fakedang 6y ago
  Wake me up when Apple filters away Facebook and a host of Google Apps from its store, since their apps trick users into divulging information involuntarily.
- II2II 6y ago
  As relevant as the gatekeeper argument is, there is also a big drawback: you need to trust the gatekeeper's competence and motivations. Not only do you need to trust them in the here and now, but you have to trust it into the future. Keep in mind that a change in management or a change in the viability of a company can lead to radical changes in their direction. Contrast the locked down model to the open source approach. Yes, there are nefarious operators in the world of open source. On the other hand the privacy concerns are much lessened. Now there are many reasons for that, but two of those reasons are the visibility of how the software works and the ability to modify it when necessary.
webmobdev 6y ago
That's Astroturfing at work - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/08/what-is-astroturfing https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/08/what-i... ... it's easy to forget that Apple is a trillion dollar company who'll do anything to protect their profit-margins and business model.
- noobermin 6y ago
  While potentially true, I don't see how posting on HN is protecting much. What's more likely are ofc people who work in relevant spaces who are paid to maintain the walled gardens who therefore are incentivized to not accept criticism of said systems.
- eitland 6y ago
  If you think about HN, it seems a good deal of the (annoyingly :) pro Apple users are just ordinary happy Apple users, not astroturfers.
- Xylakant 6y ago
  So you’re basically insinuating that I’m a paid apple shill.
  - antepodius 6y ago
    You're a shill; paid or unpaid/duped/fanboy is another question ;)
    - dang 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
muyuu 6y ago
When my MBP 2015 croaks I don't think I will use any Apple machines regularly again. They've been my main laptops since the iBook G3/900 (prior to that I've used Apple as well, alongside other systems). So it's going to be a solid 2 decades or so. For most of that time I had Linux/BSD/Win/Mac machines that I'd use for different things, the Mac being the "personal" computer first option. At some point Windows became unbearable and I simply stopped using down to the point I couldn't justify maintaining a machine for it neither in the physical nor logical sense (even maintaining familiarity with what's on them). This was roughly 2~3 years ago and being forced to switch to Win10 eased the decision to just EOL it. Recently I'm doing most of my daily stuff on a Linux desktop machine (I've been a Linux user since the mid 90s) partly because of the lockdown. In the desktop, Linux has been the best experience for me for many years. Just not on the laptop for a variety of reasons. With Apple's increasing anti-user hostility I think it's time to deal with the mild problems and annoyances your typical Linux laptop is expected to cause.

oneplane 6y ago

That is because a lot of people here see the masses of 'normal' or non-technically-inclined people that need to be protected against themselves because their usage of devices they do not understand has a real-world impact on everyone else when things go wrong. There is no true ideal version of this, there is no perfect world and there is no situation in which you can have full control but also have full protection without also knowing everything about the system you have. Phones and Computers are 'appliances' that do not need to be changed by the user (and we are talking about the mass-market user here), if anything it needs to prevent being changed by the user due to the larger ecosystem a device is part of. You can make the choice to not be part of the ecosystem, but most people would very much like to be part of a system, together, and one way of doing that is to have a level of sameness and consistency that so far is not viable without some sort of 'appliance-like' properties of the devices in question. You can still buy a different device, not take part in an existing system, and do whatever you want. But you will have a hard time getting the benefits of interconnection, scale, and support. Those three elements are pretty much why some brands or devices are sold in masses and some aren't. To this end I simply have multiples of most things. Some just need to do what it does for everyone else (interconnect, function the same way every day, have some company bear responsibility for practically everything), others are for me (open source hardware, open source software, no protections, but also no end-user support or responsibility).

paulryanrogers 6y ago
> You can still buy a different device, not take part in an existing system, and do whatever you want This may not always be true, in a practical sense, for those with intense cultural pressure to fit in. And fitting in means having a green bubble, i.e. Apple phone.
- zepto 6y ago
  Erm, Apple phones have blue bubbles. In any case nobody I know feels constrained by their choice of messenger app.
  - admax88q 6y ago
    > In any case nobody I know feels constrained by their choice of messenger app. Probably because you've already excluded them
    - zepto 6y ago
      Very amusing. But no - I mean because they use multiple apps. E.g. WhatsApp, or Facebook messenger, or Signal etc. Even the people I know who have iPhones tend to use these things. If I want to know what kind of phone someone uses, I generally have to ask. The thesis seems to be that people are so unable to think for themselves that they are compelled to choose their device by means of colored bubbles. If this is really true, then surely it’s the best argument one can possibly make for why the ecosystem needs to be locked down.
      - admax88q 6y ago
        I'm only half joking. > You can still buy a different device, not take part in an existing system, and do whatever you want. The point is you can't. Intense social pressure to interact with people who _do_ take part in the existing system means you have to partake in the existing system to interact. My friends use Messenger so I need a facebook account, or my family uses WhatsApp so I need a non-rooted android phone. No mainstream messaging apps support federation and many are hostile towards reverse engineering. WhatsApp for example will permaban accounts who do not use official clients in the name of "security." You don't notice because you have already excluded anyone who chooses not to use a mainstream Android or iOS device. Or anyone you know who _would_ like to make that choice doesn't, cause they don't want to be that one friend who can't be reached as easily as the rest of the group.

codetrotter 6y ago

Speaking for myself only, I have an iPhone with iOS and a MacBook Air with macOS and a desktop computer that runs FreeBSD. Haven’t used Windows for years. Was purely Linux and FreeBSD for several years too. Back when I left Windows, Windows 7 had just come out, and I switched over to Linux and FreeBSD because I learned about those at the university and I came to appreciate open source software. Then came smart phones and I heard that Android ran Linux. So I was like wow finally a computer in my pocket where I can do everything I can on my laptop! But I soon learned that this was not the case. Mobile platforms are fundamentally different, and the terminal is not relevant for most things I want to do with a phone. I want to record videos, watch videos, talk to people, read stuff. And I still have an SSH client on my iPhone for when I need to remote into my server to do stuff on it while on the go. And iPhone is giving me the best experience, with the addition of being really tight on the security. And for my phone this is what I want. I am staying with Apple until they take it too far. Then I will leave them in a heartbeat. But for all the years I have been using iOS, everything Apple has been doing has been a betterment of the experience. The only one thing really that bothered me was I had a magazine subscription and reading those magazines is in theory only possible on iOS. Even though actually it’s just an app for reading PDF files. And I didn’t have access to the PDF files directly. But that was a minor thing anyway, and recently I jailbroke an old iOS device that I have had laying in a drawer that was running an old iOS version and I was actually able to extract PDF files from the app. But that subscription or two that I had, those were an exception anyway. Mostly when I read something on the phone I read on the web. And all of the eBooks that I have ever bought I have bought on the computer and not locked down in an app.

webmobdev 6y ago
> Then came smart phones and I heard that Android ran Linux. So I was like wow finally a computer in my pocket where I can do everything I can on my laptop! For linux on mobile, You want Sailfish OS - https://sailfishos.org/ https://sailfishos.org/ not Android. Also see https://jolla.com/ https://jolla.com/ who made it.
- wrycoder 6y ago
  Doesn’t Sailfish OS have a proprietary UI? How is that an improvement? Why not support a FOSS mobile like Pinephone or Librem? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_phones https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_p...

friendlybus 6y ago

There's an explosion of people trying to get their software on your phone and application tricks scraping away information and control from the end user. Someone has got to filter the deluge of garbage, and people cling to Apple to do it. Phones aren't simple enough that the end user can manage everything it does and the software world isn't well behaved enough that we can exist without gatekeepers.

fakedang 6y ago
Wake me up when Apple filters away Facebook and a host of Google Apps from its store, since their apps trick users into divulging information involuntarily.
II2II 6y ago
As relevant as the gatekeeper argument is, there is also a big drawback: you need to trust the gatekeeper's competence and motivations. Not only do you need to trust them in the here and now, but you have to trust it into the future. Keep in mind that a change in management or a change in the viability of a company can lead to radical changes in their direction. Contrast the locked down model to the open source approach. Yes, there are nefarious operators in the world of open source. On the other hand the privacy concerns are much lessened. Now there are many reasons for that, but two of those reasons are the visibility of how the software works and the ability to modify it when necessary.

webmobdev 6y ago

That's Astroturfing at work - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/08/what-is-astroturfing https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/08/what-i... ... it's easy to forget that Apple is a trillion dollar company who'll do anything to protect their profit-margins and business model.

noobermin 6y ago
While potentially true, I don't see how posting on HN is protecting much. What's more likely are ofc people who work in relevant spaces who are paid to maintain the walled gardens who therefore are incentivized to not accept criticism of said systems.
eitland 6y ago
If you think about HN, it seems a good deal of the (annoyingly :) pro Apple users are just ordinary happy Apple users, not astroturfers.
Xylakant 6y ago
So you’re basically insinuating that I’m a paid apple shill.
- antepodius 6y ago
  You're a shill; paid or unpaid/duped/fanboy is another question ;)
  - dang 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

muyuu 6y ago

When my MBP 2015 croaks I don't think I will use any Apple machines regularly again. They've been my main laptops since the iBook G3/900 (prior to that I've used Apple as well, alongside other systems). So it's going to be a solid 2 decades or so. For most of that time I had Linux/BSD/Win/Mac machines that I'd use for different things, the Mac being the "personal" computer first option. At some point Windows became unbearable and I simply stopped using down to the point I couldn't justify maintaining a machine for it neither in the physical nor logical sense (even maintaining familiarity with what's on them). This was roughly 2~3 years ago and being forced to switch to Win10 eased the decision to just EOL it. Recently I'm doing most of my daily stuff on a Linux desktop machine (I've been a Linux user since the mid 90s) partly because of the lockdown. In the desktop, Linux has been the best experience for me for many years. Just not on the laptop for a variety of reasons. With Apple's increasing anti-user hostility I think it's time to deal with the mild problems and annoyances your typical Linux laptop is expected to cause.