Personally, I found myself frustrated with Apple before this announcement. That was an odd experience because I normally find Apple devices to be frustration free. It only bothered me a little that iOS devices are so locked down, but not enough to actually do something about it. I liked everything else about the ecosystem. The thing that kept me hooked were first and foremost Apple's trackpads and display's. After that, an operating system that seemed to stay out of your way but still managed to protect you from doing anything really stupid. I even liked the keyboard on the MacBook.
Then, I bought a 2019 MacBook Air. One with the new keyboard design. It failed in six months and required three separate trips to the Apple store to get fixed. One day I couldn't get anything to load for about an hour. It turns out Apple's binary signing servers were down and that caused my self installed binaries to fail to load. I felt I had graduated from that sort of nannying by then.
Right around the time Big Sur became available my MBA refused to use my external display. It had worked perfectly for a year prior. Some searching revealed many users resolved their display issues after updating their OS. That seemed more like a coincidence but I had unplugged and plugged everything in at least twenty times by this point. I was ready to try anything. I upgraded to Big Sur and my monitor connected again. I always found it odd my system destabilized when that update became available. Probably a coincidence though.
iOS 14 killed the battery life on my iPhone 6s. It's an old phone, but I bought it new in 2019. I can get pretty reasonable battery life if I turn low power mode on, but it turns off automatically when the phone is "sufficiently charged", and I don't receive it to be much better than the battery life I got before iOS 14.
Recently, I have noticed my Magic Trackpad is much more "glitchy". The cursor jumps around the screen, for example. That was really the thing that always held me back from jumping ship. I really like the trackpad. A lot. At lead I did.
That's a long way to say already felt Apple was going backwards, not forwards. Still, Apple is pretty good. I'm afraid to pick something that I might find worse.
You have to give up a lot if you want to leave the major closed ecosystems (Apple, Window, and Android). In a way you are making yourself a digital second class citizen. You can even see the way the major close source ecosystems try to make you a second class citizen on their platform for choosing another platform. MS Office alternatives for a long time, and maybe still are, never quite fully comparable with the genuine article. If you are an Android user and all of your friends use Apple your friends get a crappy experience compared to the experience they have with others using iMessage. You're practically a burden to communicate with.
If you want to have privacy, I believe you must accept becoming a true second class citizen, or go to extreme lengths to maintain you privacy (and maybe still be a second class citizen anyway). I understand everyone is questioning what Apple is doing, but we should be questioning all of the privacy invasion we are forced to accept to be first class citizens in our society.
You must give up some privacy or accept a degree of second class personhood for the following (in the USA).
- Driver's License: Picture, address, physical description (including weight), and signature. It is very impractical to go with out a driver's license in most of the United States.
- Credit Score: This example is actually unreasonable because you can't actually opt out of having a credit score. You are also punished for not participating with a lower credit score.
- Bank Account: You need to provide personal info to open a bank account. It isn't easy to function without one, and you will pay more money to have access to the money you are paid via payroll check.
- Job: You need to provide a lot of information to have a job (legally) in the United States.
And today:
- Internet and all it includes: You must give up your privacy in almost every way. Where you travel, what food you eat, what you like to read, what you like to listen to, who you are friends with. Most of this was happily volunteered in the past, but to enjoy the benefits of things like Google Maps, Netflix, and Spotify, you need to give up your privacy. It is pretty impractical to replace these and things like them with something that is not more of the same.
To even get started:
- Linux PC/Laptop
- Linux smartphone
To be really be privacy conscious:
- CDs, DVDs/BlueRay, ideally purchased with cash, instead of Spotify, Netflix, or their many variants.
- Standalone GPS unit with pre-purchased maps instead of Apple/Google maps.
- No credit cards. Bank cards are also suboptimal from a privacy perspective.
To be really, really privacy conscious:
- No driver's license
- No car
- No phone
- No bank account
- No (legal) job
- No land
- Don't register to vote
- Only buy with cash
With Apple, and with everything else, we all have to decide how much of our privacy we are willing to give up in exchange for first class citizenship in our society. We all have to decide how much friction we are willing to accept in exchange for privacy. The deck is stacked against those who prefer privacy in many ways.
Personally, all things considered I am ready to move on form Apple and accept more friction. I might even go as far as giving up Spotify and Google Maps for the alternatives I've mentioned. I don't actually have a credit card so I'm already a second class citizen of the consumer finance world, but that might have to change in the future. I think that's about as far as I feel I can go.