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Comment by yawaworht1978 | Hacker News Reader

yawaworht1978

Apple should be applauded for this. Their revenue does not depend on software to clandestinely steal and sell users data. One day, we will look back at history and see facebook similar as to how people view myspace now (junkyard of software). Good on Apple not selling devices with a facebook backdoor in them.

I know apple probably has deals with malicious governments regarding data access, but at least they are standing up to FB and exposing their vulnerable points where it hurts badly, Zuckerberg has no clothes.

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Between this privacy fight and the form factor of the iPhone Mini, there's a 90% chance my next phone will be an iPhone after more than a decade on Android. I'm done with this ad-sponsored trash ecosystem.

Not that I blame you if you want a premium experience out of the box, but I've gone to Graphene and am quite happy.

https://grapheneos.org/faq

Even my SSO works well enough. Some notifications rely on Google Play Services though, but I find I don't really miss those apps anyway.

the problem here is that every single one of these alternate OSs requires advanced knowledge. Granted, it's not difficult to flash your phone via a USB cable + web interface but consider that the average smartphone user isn't even interested in removing bloatware like facebook.

The advanced knowledge i'm referring to is to first know that GrapheneOS exists, know how to enable OEM unlocking, know how to select the correct factory image and so on.

People don't care and cannot be expected to care. Apple, as much as i dislike several of their practices, provide a phone that works when you need it to. AFAIK, the iphone's primary purpose as a phone - has never had an incident where a software bug prevented someone from placing a call.

Graphene is still based on AOSP, right? I'm still hoping for something like postmarketOS where it does not use a android base.

Apple are also assholes to users in places (no own software, no simple customization, absurd seeming prices, extremely limited and proprietary connectivity) ... but they also protect them like nobody else and are unusually reasonable in places, like with their software update policy.

It's a reason I keep thinking about replacing my current phone with a used iPhone X, though the 12 mini would be nicer for the screen size.

> no simple customization

What do you mean by this, exactly? Not being funny, just don't understand this as a con.

What would you like to customise, and why? How is being unable to do so harmful to users?

Genuine questions, because I can't think of much I'd like to customise. Personally, I like not having options because it keeps things simple.

Apple isn't perfect, I'll admit that all day long. But, frankly, the "absurd prices" argument just doesn't hold water to me. I paid almost $3000 for the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on--eight years ago. Meanwhile, everyone I know that has had PC's have gone through at least two replacements during that time. A little over $300/year for a computer is a bargain. I pay three times more for Internet access!

I think you will find most people with PCs replace them because they think they need to. My friend just replaced his 12yo asus laptop which he had to keep plugged in to work as the battery no longer held a charge.

People with apple products tend to keep better care of the products than the latter too.

> most people with PCs replace them because they think they need to

Why is this important. Are you saying that PC users are stupider than Mac users or something? The end result is that PC users go through more hardware than Macs. I consider myself pretty decent with computers and use both. My five year old MacBook Air runs fine, I’ve gone through two PC laptops (that were always bigger) and they don’t tend to survive windows updates. I’ve even churned through yearly chrome books that seem to be made out of paper mache or something.

Perhaps people are trainable to do the right thing. But it’s been decades, maybe we think about why this training fails on aggregate.

In the meantime, my personal experience of cost/year being cheaper with Mac vs PC stands for me.

> In the meantime, my personal experience of cost/year being cheaper with Mac vs PC stands for me.

My personal experience is my all my laptops last. People have problems with macs. People have problems with PCs. Doesn’t mean any are better than the other. But people with pc laptops will more often update their laptop for next to no gain over what they already had.

Anecdotal, but i just bought the iPhone 12 mini, and i absolutely love it.

I'm worried the iPhone mini will be canned next update cycle. I wish I was in a position to buy one, but I only got an iPhone X in Jan 2020 to replace my dying iPhone SE with great reluctance. It's too soon for me to replace, as it works perfectly and I can't justify the cost or the waste. I just hope there's a mini iPhone in 2 or 3 years when I need to upgrade.

I waited a long time for a new small iPhone and eventually got to the point where I had to buy a new phone, because my SE lasted about 15 minutes & I needed to carry around battery packs just to use it.

I got an iPhone 12 mini (my first iPhone since the original) I’m also worried they won’t keep the form factor around. It hasn’t performed well in the market. I like the size, but apparently most people prefer the larger size and battery life.

Seems like people think it will, and there will be a mini 13: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/02/15/iphone-13-mini-expected...

My hope is that Apple realizes they created the apparent scarce demand by not having the mini format for so long. They need to keep the format over several years so the demand can materialize as people finally upgrade their old 5S and SE devices now that there's a viable iPhone for them. But those same people are clearly patient and are not in a collective rush to go out and buy new phones, it will take several years of availability and their old devices succumbing to age or physical damage.

Apple released a $400 to $550 iPhone SE in Apr 2020 after years of not having an updated small phone option, so I imagine many who really wanted a smaller phone jumped on that. And then 6 months later they came out with 12 mini, so I wouldn’t expect a size able amount of demand for the 12 mini would have been sucked up by the new SE.

The SE is fantastic as it’s much cheaper and works well. I switched from an XS and years of latest models and forgot how much I love thumb reader over face.

Apple Pay in particular is better with thumb reader instead of the tap, look at, tap again buggy process.

FaceID is great for me (and my aging parents), but not for some use cases (wearing masks, or starting usage while in pocket).

I could really get behind having both (esp if I could combined).

Masks will be solved if the user is wearing a Watch after the next update. Like the Mac itself, the Watch can unlock an iPhone.

There was a rumor floating around that Apple was going to stick the reader behind the screen. Having both would be really awesome.

The pricing is killing it, and Apple probably knew it would, but they don't want to cannibalize margins here. There really isn't a competitive product, so they have no incentive to lower prices.

I know there have been reports of low sales of the mini but I'm hoping that Apple continues to make new ones for at least 1-2 more cycles before giving up. The mini isn't for me (I use a Max) but with the recent release of the SE2 I have to assume some people just weren't ready to upgrade (like you). One thing Apple needs to understand is just because a product line isn't a smashing success doesn't mean it's not needed to provide options for all their customers.

Similar to how they let the Mac line languish for a while because it wasn't their top seller without realizing if they sleep on that segment it will hurt the iPhone in the long run.

Yeah because of exactly these two reasons, I switched to iPhone Mini. Love it so far. Now working on removing Google and Facebook dependencies from rest of my life.

I've been on Android for a decade as well but just got an iPad mini. The one thing I still cannot figure out how to do on iOS is block ads at the system level. Android has lots of apps that act as a VPN that block ads/trackers via DNS. It blocks ads in the browser, but also in apps.

I can't find the equivalent on iOS. All my searches lead to ad blockers using Safari's content blocking, but the VPN-style ad blockers appear to violate Apple's terms, and so aren't in the app store. I've also seen recommendations to use Pi hole on my network, which is fine until I leave the house.

If anyone has recommendations for system-wide VPN/DNS-based blockers for iOS, please share. That's the last real thing keeping me on Android.

You could set your DNS server IP address to one of AdGuard's public DNS servers that are configured to operate like a PiHole without installing anything.

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-dns/overview.html

DNScloak and an ad blocking hosts file, such as the one here: https://github.com/BlackJack8/iOSAdblockList would be another option.

I use https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id691121579 but the UI is very basic - it doesn't come with any filter lists, you need to point it at a hosts list like https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BlackJack8/iOSAdblockList/... manually. It's not compatible with other VPNs at the same time and it displays as a VPN in the top bar. Not ideal but

I use NextDNS [1] and I’m very happy with it so far. It works on the DNS level. So far for our entire home we’ve never gone above the free level once, but I’m happy to pay as soon as we do.

[1]: https://nextdns.io/

I'm moving to Apple after being a long time iPhone hater. With how insidious Google is getting with Android they should be paying me to use my flagship phone, not me paying roughly the same amount of an iPhone. I do everything I can to not feed into the (free*) services with the cost being sucking down more data about me than I know about myself.

Yeah that's a no from me, mate:

https://www.timetoplayfair.com/timeline/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robpegoraro/2020/10/15/apple-to...

And so many others. Apple phone users weren't allowed by Apple to have Spotify as their default music program until recently.

I've never used anything but spotify on my iphones for years and this has never been an issue for me - i wouldn't have known or cared until reading these links.

This is true, but in practice on an iPhone the "default" music app didn't make a difference for me. I always had Spotify running (not necessarily playing, just the app open in the background) so when I pressed play it always played Spotify rather than Apple Music.

Then Apple is bad and Android is bad too. So the ethical choice is to buy neither. I'm not being facetious. I'm considering moving to pure AOSP based, Linux based, or just foregoing a smartphone entirely.

There are ads all over the App Store FYI

I moved to iOS for the specific reason of getting the Apple watch because of some heart issues I was having. Did it a year ago. I wasn't thrilled, but I was sick of the Android adware/malware problem (every time I installed an ad-supported app I got malware within a week or two).

How do I feel now? I absolutely love this ecosystem. I don't fear OS updates like I used to with Android. I don't fear my device will be stranded without updates. The UI is clean. The 11 is as fast today as when I got it. It seamlessly works the watch and my Bose headphones. BT was always finicky with the Android phones I had.

And there's the privacy angle.

The m1 is honestly selling me to move back to apple stuff again. Also I'm sick of trash process handling on Android where apps just stop running because some other one is sucking down the ram in the background. I could have every app opened on my iphone even on 1gb with an SE and no issues noticed whatsoever. I really think apple is delivering an upswing they need to after the whole trash 12 in macbooks and butterfly switches.

...so you want to move to an ecosystem where Apple gets to decide what you can and cannot run on your own device?

Having to jailbreak to side-load apps that aren't on an approved storefront is not acceptable.

Sure, I don't have a problem with that. I don't sideload on Android either.

It's already like myspace. Facebook is giving me super trashy friend suggestions of random foreign women with slightly suggestive pictures, and aside from my demographic I can't think of anything I've personally done on or off the internet which would make them good friend suggestions.

> I can't think of anything I've personally done on or off the internet which would make them good friend suggestions.

Being born a male a few decades ago

Have you tried?

Instagram would do this to my discovery feeds. Every month or so I’d mark the photos with sexy women as something I don’t want to see, but they’d inevitably come back. I figure I lingered too long at a photo that featured an attractive woman. Deleted Instagram after this annoyed me too much.

Sometimes I wonder if maybe Facebook’s algorithm is amazing and these people could become best friends. But I tried this a few times and they all sucked.

I suspect it’s as stupid as ranking all members based on some dumb algorithm like “25 year olds like females, this is a female” and just shoveling garbage.

Years ago Facebook just kept recommending people I hated over and over. I wish they would have a mode of “you’re good, we can’t think of anyone else you like.”

It’s like going into a store and the salesperson says “this is perfect for you” and they are just showing you every item in their store.

I would assume even trying to click on these profiles just once shows more “engagement“ and that’s the only thing companies like this “understand”.

One of my coworkers shared an interesting thought with me the other day.

Apple is positioning itself as The Privacy Company today, but they've benefited immensely from the attention economy over the last 15 years.

They would not have sold as many millions of iPhones, iPods (heck, even Macbooks) in the last decade, if Instagram & Facebook weren't there to suck people in to their platform (clearly, the same is true for Android). Now that the iDevices are a self-sustaining status symbol with mass adoption and institutionally-ingrained utility outside of social media, Apple no longer needs to trade user privacy to build their moat, and they can pretend that they've been on the user's side all along.

Don't get me wrong, Apple's motions here are very good. But the entire mobile computing industry was bootstrapped with addiction. Facebook and its ilk might have been the perpetrators, but they were not the only beneficiaries.

I doubt the iPhone's long-term success was dictated by Facebook et al whoring out user data. There are plenty of useful apps that don't hinge on violating the privacy of users.

I think there is also another part to it. The smart phone market has so many options for users, and there is a limit to camera improvements they can make. For many people (including me) privacy can be another reason to chose IPhone over Pixel. With so many options differences like this matter.

I think it’s really the only true difference they can have with Android.

Google can’t provide privacy that users want as it would bankrupt them. Apple can. Other than that, they can both do the same hardware, software, apps, etc.

I’m surprised it took them this long to really start driving it home. I think they were either trying to figure out if monetarily they wanted to start selling data. Or the buying public finally started caring.

Instagram was created by 10 people, and it was already good enough at that stage to get hypergrowth.

The truth is that all the huge advertising revenue is just a plus for the investors, the apps would have been created anyways, and then network effects take care of the content.

> They would not have sold as many millions of iPhones, iPods (heck, even Macbooks) in the last decade, if Instagram & Facebook weren't there to suck people in to their platform

I really don’t see the logic in this.

It’s pretty obvious these devices were useful for many things - messaging and the web would have been enough to guarantee growth.

I think you have the causality the wrong way round.

People only use Facebook so much because the iPhone put it in their pocket rather than on their desk.

> [FB revenue model] depend[s] on software to clandestinely steal and sell users data

Isn't it opt-in by using their platform? Or is your argument that targeted ads are not common knowledge to Facebook users? I likely wouldn't use Facebook or Google etc. if I had to pay cash; fine with paying with personal data; but for people who aren't fine with that, they shouldn't use it.

I realize that any attempt to discuss this is inviting downvotes, but I just ask for a quick comment if you do choose to downvote. I try to be very open minded.

Opt in can be reasonably be interpreted to mean opt in not bundled with other services in the gdpr day and age.

Separately, opt in implies informed consent. Most users have no clue what data Facebook is capturing. It's not informed.

The real problem here, and what Apple is getting at, is lack of consent. The willingness or not to "pay" with personal data is meaningless if there's no awareness. Sure, tech-savvy people are aware and can make informed decisions... but my grandma is not aware that Facebook is tracking her. And most non-techy people are like that: I closed all my Facebook accounts last year and people were surprised. I had to explain it to them! I can't wait to see their reaction when I tell them I closed my Google account as well.

The iPhone update doesn't even immediately forbid tracking, it just requests apps to ask for permission. That simple change pushed Facebook to buy newspaper, radio and TV ads to try to get people to reject the update. Think about it: they feel threatened by user awareness.

In that case, Apple's pending change would have no effect on you.

The dialog pops up and you give your consent for the FB app to track whatever it wants, because you're fine with that.

Other users similarly are allowed to make their own choice as to whether they accept that trade off.

> Isn't it opt-in by using their platform?

I don't think this is an entirely fair argument unless it is exceedingly clear what you are opting in to. The fact that FB (and others) are so resistant to being more transparent about this is in itself informative.

A lot of people would rather have Myspace be the dominant social network it once was.

If it was dominant, the ads would come sooner or later. MySpace is only thought of sympathetically today because News Corp acquired it early and let it rot. Facebook didn't start out with ads, it introduced them in 2008 or later. By that time MySpace was well into its death throes.

I wonder if it’s intentional that Facebook products were omitted from Apple’s list of apps to download for new iPhone users:

https://m.imgur.com/yT14ZVS

> I know apple probably has deals with malicious governments regarding data access

Would love to see some evidence of that. That's quite an accusation and it should be taken seriously.

I remember that years ago they had a page like "we will delete this page if we are forced to give out data under the so and so act of the USA because we can't tell you explicitly". Does anyone remember more details?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

Very nice, thanks! So Apple's disappeared in Sept. 2014. I also found their privacy report for anyone who's interested: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/report-pdf.html

It's common sense they wouldn't be able to do business in China without it?

they dropped plans to e2e encrypt icloud backups because of the FBI: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

Don't forget that ~5% of Apple's revenue is a payment from Google to be default search engine.

I still haven't heard anything about a privacy consent screen regarding the default Google search box.

Can't fix the whole world all at once, but Apple is not uncompromising in their privacy stance by any means.

I don’t think this is applicable. While Google is the default search, safari blocks tracking from Google like all other sites.

Now if Apple exempted Google from Adblock and cross site cookies that would be a different story.

A Google search on an iPhone and a Google search on an android produces very different data gathered by Google.

What would the privacy screen regarding the default Google search box say?

Yes. Apple has its own problems though. The only reason it can do this is that it has a generally authoritarian behavior wrt app access (see Fortnite), as with closed standards for accessory connection, etc. This is a company that uses platform-exclusive APIs as a cudgel for compliance.

I applaud the fight in that it hopefully makes Facebook weaker but I'm not cheering for Apple having this power either. I'd rather wish for their greed to cause these two to destroy each other.

This seems like it might be a perfect time for some company or startup with a different business model to swoop in and displace facebook.

do you have any ideas?

> Apple should be applauded for this.

Sadly there is some truth to that. In a better world it would be regarded as the absolute, bare minimum.

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