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To paraphrase an old saying: Live by Big Tech, die by Big Tech. After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer I've heard others say this (and was a "loyal advocat
by userbinator 11mo ago
To paraphrase an old saying: Live by Big Tech, die by Big Tech.
After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer
I've heard others say this (and was a "loyal advocate" of Windows for around 2 decades myself), but the reality is they simply do not care. You are merely a single user out of several billion.
Many of the reps I’ve spoken to have suggested strange things
That almost sounds like some sort of AI, not a human. But if I were in your situation I'd be inclined to print out that response as evidence, and then actually go there physically to see what happens.
- trinsic2 11mo agoThis is why I don't use an os that depends on cloud functionality built into the os for much of its fuctionality. It's really stupid IMHO to depend on a closed system like this to store data.
- KPGv2 11mo ago> This is why I don't use an os that depends on cloud functionality built into the os for much of its fuctionality. macOS doesn't require this. My Apple account has a handful of apps purchased over the years, and that's it. I could've bought them directly from the vendors, but the store makes it easier to update.
- pavel_lishin 11mo agoDoes iOS?
- bragr 11mo ago>macOS doesn't require this Technically true but I tried using a mac without creating an Apple ID and gave up. You can't access the store without it so you are locked out of Mac apps that aren't installed by default, and all apps that only distribute through the store now.
- treesknees 11mo agoPerhaps that's not a loss, because why would you want to depend on apps that you essentially need an Apple account to use? I've had great luck with finding apps with Homebrew.
- bragr 11mo agoWell I just stopped using a Mac. It's not worth jumping through hoops.
- hamdingers 11mo agoI've used macbooks for 15 years and have never felt the need to create an Apple ID. Maybe I've just been lucky but I have never even encountered a piece of software that didn't offer a direct download or brew installation.
- IndianShitbombs 11mo agoAnd even if, there are torrents and sites. Same for Steam games. Fuck the cloud.
- throwaway290 11mo agoXcode.
- worik 11mo agoDevelopment on Apple hardware generally
- 11mo ago
- 14 11mo agoI don’t think it is stupid but the golden rule is multiple backups. I personally believe 3 backups is the minimum. A physical one and 2 others. Either another physical copy stored at another location to protect against things like fire or 2 cloud backups to prevent situations like this. But I have only ever met one person who did this. His house burned to the ground and lost all data at his house but had back ups at his brother and on some cloud service and lost nothing. I was impressed as most people I know have zero back ups.
- left-struck 11mo agoIt’s pretty silly to rely an OS that you don’t own. Though one can be forgiven if you have basically no other reasonable choice such as on mobile phones.
- amelius 11mo agoI don't think the customer should be required to implement their own redundancy on top of the services they subscribe to.
- 14 11mo agoI don’t think so either in the sense we are seeing in this case. As in there should be some legal protections like sure Apple can choose to close his accounts but should allow him a reasonable amount of time to export his data. But one should in best practice always have their own redundancies as too many times we have seen companies lose data for various reasons.
- amelius 11mo agoYes, therefore it is better to stick with services that have open protocols, so you can rely on FOSS tools to handle redundancy for you.
- swat535 11mo agoUsing FOSS solutions and setting redundancy is not going to work for average users. I think you’re missing the point here, which is we need regulations to protect consumers against big tech.
- kingleopold 11mo agowith this same logic, you don't want to know how much your government and your country cares about you. odds are even a lot lower for them.
- PunchyHamster 11mo agooh, no, they will do a lot to make you pay taxes
- kingleopold 11mo agothey can always print the difference, lol.
- freddie_mercury 11mo agoWhy would my government care less about me than a multinational corporation with billions of customers that isn't headquartered or listed where I live? My Member of Parliament represents about 130,000 people, does regular door knocking to talk to people, and has a staffed office a few km away the I can walk into anytime I want. None of that applies to a multinational corporation.
- naian 11mo agoBecause you can’t get rid of your government, whilst you can easily stop buying apple crap.
- kingleopold 11mo agoExactly. Corp. at least have some expectation about revenue and reputation etc. Certain % of people only cost government, literally.
- trinix912 11mo agoPeople can vote the government out on the next election but they can't vote Tim Cook and other executives out of Apple unless they're shareholders with significant voting powers. And don't tell me to "vote with my wallet". We're talking about Big Tech, not your next door kebab shop.
- christoph 11mo agoI think we must have passed peak Apple this week or something… I’ve had Clone Hero running badly on an ancient MacBook for my drums, so I decided to swap it out for an M1 Mini that was collecting dust on a shelf. I did a full erase, but I couldn’t get past its activation lock. At all. This is a piece of hardware I purchased on my credit card, for my company, (luckily) linked to a phone number I control and an email address on a domain I can control, but Apple in their infinite wisdom are still locking me out of my own hardware because I don’t know the password the last employee used on the computer! I don’t want any data off it, thats gone, I just want the computer I spent money on to actually be usable! I initiated a “recovery” process to unlock it (at Apples discretion?) and they’ve sent me an automated email saying the initial checks are passed and they will contact me again in 7 calendar days. Kafka-esque doesnt even begin to describe it. So for the next week I have to whistle Dixie! I’ve been a massive Apple fanboy since I swore off Windows a couple of decades ago, giving them a decent high 6 figure spend over that time and influencing countless others to buy Apple devices. Well that very much ended this week & going forwards without Apple will be painful, but the message they sent me couldn’t have been any louder & clearer. The writing has been slowly creeping on to the wall for the last few years, between buckling to UK government pressure, the CSAM photo scanning nonsense, the absolute UI abomination of this new glass crap, this was my final straw. I’m also going to be relaying their “message” very clearly and loudly now to any friend or family member considering another Apple device.
- heavyset_go 11mo agoThis happened to me[1] a decade ago, now. Left Apple hardware on shelf for a year or two, Apple in the mean time did their iCloud migration or something, and my login account could no longer unlock the device. It's been effectively bricked since. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26482635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26482635
- vasac 11mo agoA similar thing happened to me - I lent a phone to my mother-in-law and created an account for her. She returned the phone once her own phone was fixed. A few years passed, and a couple of weeks ago my phone broke, so I wanted to use that one until I bought a new one. It turned out that Apple had permanently deactivated the iCloud account on that phone. I could make calls, but I couldn’t install or update any apps, even though I still controlled the email address that was used to create the Apple account. Not that 5S is very useful these days but still.
- Dracophoenix 11mo ago> I've heard others say this (and was a "loyal advocate" of Windows for around 2 decades myself), but the reality is they simply do not care. You are merely a single user out of several billion. What changed your outlook? Did you get burned by Microsoft?
- cerved 11mo agoProbably they tried a real operating system.
- userbinator 11mo agoLinux and the other unices are great for their CLI, but GUIs seem more like an afterthought on that side.
- adhamsalama 11mo agoI find KDE Plasma to be much better than Windows and MacOS.
- cosmic_cheese 11mo agoWhile Plasma is among the better desktop options, it’s still something of an acquired taste, being a significantly different flavor from either mainstream commercial OS (and particularly un-Mac-like). I know some like it, but having used it on various single-purpose machines of my own I don’t think I could make it the desktop of my daily driver or work machines.
- adhamsalama 11mo agoWindows is very similar to Plasma and copies it sometimes, but is much worse.
- cwnyth 11mo agoHard disagree. I find that Linux (particularly but not exclusively Gnome) is actually even better than Windows or Mac OS. I hate having to use Windows or Mac again for how clumsy and poorly thought out they are. It took how long before they finally got Window snapping? And file search is still atrocious on both, and getting worse on Windows. It always seemed to me the people who deride Linux's desktop GUI are those who actually never bothered to use it, especially not seriously in the past decade.
- afandian 11mo agoI’ve talked to apple support reps in the past. It’s absolutely not surprising to hear that there’s confusion. ISTR some aren’t actually direct Apple employees, so they don’t have access to certain information.
- maccard 11mo ago> That almost sounds like some sort of AI, not a human It’s almost certainly not, it’s just humans being human and going off script. I worked in a place where we dealt with an enormous number of customer service requests, and one of our measured support metrics was “how often do the agents deviate from what they’re allowed to offer”.
- davidhs 11mo ago> It’s almost certainly not AIs are RLHF'd to have a corporate-pleasing interface w.r.t. metrics.