Free and Open Source Software

I used to be the Samsung SME (subject matter expert) at my AT&T store. I was the only one in the store who used Samsung, and I defended them to the death. I left AT&T, got a job at Apple, and decided to make the switch.

I fell in love. I have the Pro Max 13, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and AirTags. You're spot on; I absolutely love the ecosystem. As cliche as it is to say, everything just works. Samsung is good. Apple is good. People have legitimate reasons for using either.

I'm a software engineer who uses a lot of open source software and I use Apple devices whenever possible. Electronic devices cost a lot of money, so I want my money to count. With that said, every Apple device I've owned has lasted me for a very long time and are still working today; The longest one being a 2012 Macbook Air which is still alive and kicking today after 2 battery replacements.

Every iPhone I've ever owned have received major iOS updates for 5-6 years. Meanwhile, every Android flagship phone (which costs similarly to the latest and greatest iPhones) I've owned have stopped getting major Android updates after 2-3 years. People criticize Apple for planned obsolescence, but other brands have it worse.

Even if you do listen to your friend's advice and decide to go for another brand, which one actually advocates for the ideals your friend has shared with you? The direct alternatives to Apple products aren't better in any philosophical way. The ones that do either offer a completely difference experience or an inferior product.

Don't feel bad about what your friend is saying. He doesn't pay for your stuff.

I'm an Apple user, and have been since 2007 when I bought my first MacBook. I have an iPhone, a Watch, a bunch of Macs, and Apple TV. I have an iPad too, but the screen's broken, I can't afford to repair it, and honestly, I don't really have much use for an iPad these days.

While I like how much these devices sync with each other, and I love how well they're built, with every year that passes it sits less well with me how, if you can't afford the latest and greatest, you'll experience some level of OS-rot.

I mean, my iPad is new enough to support iPadOS 16, but too old to support Stage Manager. That I'm not really bothered by, but it's indicative of a problem. If the device is capable of running an OS, it should get all of the OS that its hardware will allow. Even more fundamentally though, say iOS 17 has some new additions to Notes.app that will also work in Sonoma, but your Mac isn't recent enough to go beyond Monterey; does that mean you can't view notes made on your iPhone on your Mac?

And yeah, that doesn't sit right with me.

I use windows, Apple products and Linux. I prefer FOSS products and will go out of my way to use Ubuntu or arch on my desktop and laptops (going on 15 years) even if it’s harder to get working in certain situations (e.g., gaming). I have to use windows at work. I use apple products (iPhone, iPad, headphones, watch) for the same reasons OP stated, they just work. I need a reliable phone and don’t trust google or the other android manufactures so I see apple as the lesser evil.

Use whatever is best for your situation.

Apple is the symbol for a walled garden that feeds it's inhabitants overpriced crap and they love it.

When buying tech products I mainly care about if they are integrated with each other or not.

A lot of people do. That's why apple made sure you can only use apple devices with other apple devices. Bluetooth allows users to share files between any two devices? Better make sure an iPhone can't connect to anything that doesn't have an i prefix in it's name. You like our earbuds, buy an iPhone if you want the buttons to work. Sure, you can play music over the radio from your phone while driving, oh you don't have an iPhone, get fucked.

And it's an effective strategy. You start off with a phone, add a watch and earbuds to it, and the next thing you know you're buying a $1k stand for a $5k monitor to work with your $7k cheese grater of a tower. Because what are you going to do, give up on connectivity, throw away all of your apple devices, or go all the way in on the apple koolaid?

Don't even get me started on the quality of their overpriced crap, or the fact that they've been fighting tooth and nail to keep making ewaste instead of allowing the users to repair and upgrade their devices. Watch any video on the topic from Louis Rossmann.

Tldr

Fuck apple

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've decided that if I have to be in an ecosystem, it'll be Apple's. I currently have an iPhone, a Apple Watch, and I use the Airpods Pro daily.

I'm a programmer, and an engineer. I love to tinker with stuff. electrical, mechanical, software. Most of the time. But as I get older (now 26 so not too old, but old enough to remember my mom's tiny blue Nokia as the first cell phone in the house) and busier with life, I've realized that there's some stuff I want to just work. I don't care if I can customize it, I don't care if I have to spend a few minutes getting used to a new layout change that was "forced" on me.. For me, my phone isn't something to fool around with, hack, or mod out the wazoo. It's a business tool. My watch helps me keep track of my health, and all I have to do is put it on and keep it charged. The Airpods are so seamless to use it's silly. For this part of my life (phone, watch/health, listening), I want the absolute lowest amount of friction.

I can also defer software updates as long as I like, which is more than I can say for say Windows. I used the same OS from 2016 to 2020 because I didn't want to update to the new layouts. My iPhone would ask me to update every so often, but I'd just hit cancel and that'd be it until the next major update.

Apple is also a hardware company to begin with, as opposed to other companies with ecosystems, so with that I at least feel like they care a little bit less about making money off my data because they're already making money off me buying the hardware and iCloud.

I do think apple's new ARM chips are neat. Other than that, it's been so long since I last used anything made by Apple that I can't say I have much of an opinion on them. My opinion on mobile phones in general is that I have a pick between two ecosystems (android or iOS), both of which have their own significant issues for me personally. I want a third serious competitor in that space more than anything.

I do think people outside the tech field should look into FOSS stuff, but not necessarily that they should drop everything they're doing and install linux (unless you really want to, in which case try it out in a vm, or backup all your files and go for it lol). Tbh unless you've got issues with your current setup, just keep using what you're using as long as it makes you happy. Odds are you already use some open source stuff, since a ton of libraries/components used by various programs are open source. There's a ton of FOSS applications that are cross platform, so you could always try those out on MacOS or iOS.

Just had a lunch conversation today as well and a colleague's iPhone got stolen. I mentioned how the problem of being able to do everything on the phone makes it a single point of failure (back in the day when I traveled I needed internet cafés to login into my brokerage account to sell off some stock. Now I just do it with my phone.). We discussed a bit more how he was stuck and frustrated as all things are done with the phone now (Uber, 2-factor authentication etc.).

But, it was an iPhone, so Apple allowed him to completely shut down and erase his old phone together with all payment info and all other personal info. And then just enter his Apple ID on his new phone (paid by the insurance) and he was back in the game.

If I had my Fairphone stolen, I'd have to somehow recover some parts of my data from my personal backup and the installation process of any new device would take some time. Also, who knows what the thief could've done with my phone?

So yeah, I'm completely opposed to my device being controlled by a corporation to the point they can lock, erase and move all data (including app data) somewhere else, but I do see the advantages.

I just can't stand being patronized.
When I by hardware, it should be mine. At Apple it seems they see hardware as a service

They everything is so well integrated and the performance per watt of their m series CPUs are genuinely impressive. But for me, their hatred of open source, their unrivalled lobbying against right to repair while green washing about how much they care about the environment, preaching privacy while collecting similar amounts of data as Microsoft and Google (but generally keeping it for themselves and their contractors), and the extreme restrictions they impose on their platforms (especially iOS) means I would never spend money on one.

Ethical consumption is nearly impossible to actually achieve which is why the best way to solve corporate bad practices is a healthy dose of regulation and government. It never hurts to, if you can, avoid doing business with certain bad actors if you'd like but often times you're trading one bad actor for another in a different way.

Personally though I'm not a fan of Apple products. They can be well made and their silicon is incredible. Very fast and energy efficient and for a few years it was far ahead of other arm offerings and in terms of efficiency is still ahead of mobile x86 offerings(though the gap isnt that gigantic anymore it does still offer far better single core performance per watt at low levels). Their software manages to be well designed and whether I agree with it or not manages to get certain features in the mainstream.

That said I prefer the more open way of doing things. Like for example take moving files into and out of an iphone. Pre-airdrop you had to use all kinds of syncing software in order to move files out whereas on android I could just plug it in and navigate my files like a usb. Post airdrop, well airdrop only works on apple products as a means of keeping you locked into the ecosystem. I dont think a good chunk of the way they do things is necessarily better, and they rarely do things first, and worst of all when they do it's often a proprietary way that is not compatible with other devices and OS.

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.

First of all, people who look for hypocrisy are dorks. Cant stand em. Second off i got an ipad recently and their ecosystem is terrible. Only being allowed to install things from their app store is terrible and makes a terrible trade of cusomization/usability for security. Open source is my preference because it prevents IPOification(yknow, like reddit's doing)

I think your colleague used an excellent example. Just like COVID vaccination Patente can be considered not good for public interests, the same applies for the FOSS mentality regarding Apple ecosystem.

While I can understand, that Apple products interface very well with each other, it's also true, that it's not hard to get these things working without a walled garden. Just like ActivityPub is an essential standard for Lemmy/Kbin.social and the Fediverse as a whole, there are also standards for all kinds of connections between devices.

The problem is, that corporations like Microsoft and Apple can earn more by making it walled so that people have to decide between compatibility and comfort. Unfortunately, such a dichotomy is false and completely artificial. It only exists solely to optimise the profits of Apple.

I personally have never used an Apple product. When I see the price tag and what I get for it - and see, that I'm put into a small safety box, I don't feel attracted to it. I want things to be simple and under my control. I hate using windows as I feel, how less it's under my control. It's true, that some things like Cortana (Desktop AI on windows) aren't available on Linux, but for now I can well live without it.

At the same time, I also believe in FOSS and also think that it's huge, that anyone in the world can get s flexible versatile OS simply with an internet connection.

I may also be biased, as I'm a software engineer.

Your friend is right about open source as an idea and companies like Apple being antithetical to that idea. However, unless you have the time and determination to make a hobby out of it, just keep using whatever tech works for you. I say this as a Linux and Android user who really dislikes Apple's walled garden. Your choices as an individual consumer will only significantly matter to you.

I'll admit I'm not the biggest FOSS evangelist, so this comes with a grain of salt. From a right to repair standpoint, I don't care for Apple's policies at all. But from a security and (perhaps counterintuitively) user experience standpoint, I agree with Apple's walled garden approach, locked down OS, and single app store. We see the alternatives in Android, and we see how much worse its security is.