Apple was always about relentless forward progress and leaving the previous generation out in the cold. I think you have a point that they passed through a cer

Apple was always about relentless forward progress and leaving the previous generation out in the cold. I think you have a point that they passed through a certain sweet spot that would be comfortable for data portability geeks, but to assume that they would maintain some status quo would always have been a laughable thought for anybody with a passing familiarity with tech. Your Linux system may be the best bet for long-term maintenance, but it's still tech and you will still face a whole slew of tradeoffs, dead-ends and difficult migrations. I think where your article puts up a strawman is this idea that you can't use an iPhone or even an Android because of lock-in. That's just silly since these phones are 100 times more useful than a dumb-phone even if you don't put any data in the cloud at all. Put another way, it's easier to set up a system that extracts your photos from an iPhone into your Linux system and just do that regularly than to carry a Nokia and a Canon at all times. The future of consumer tech may not be what the geeks dreamed of, but as long as there is free software and open hardware we can bend it to our will as we always have.