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Comment by mactavish88 | Hacker News Reader

Totally. Which is why I’d pay over $300 for a dumb phone like the Mudita Pure with its FreeRTOS-based, open source OS.

Call me stupid, but I’d be far happier without Apple or Google in my life, and am willing to pay the price for that in terms of inconvenience. I’m way happier without Microsoft, that’s for sure.

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The stuff microsoft got hated for in the 90s is now standard operating procedure for giant tech companies. Not to defend MS, but perhaps 'create a monopoly and then agressively expand sideways into other areas to extinguish competitors" is the default behaviour of these behemoths and it wasn't anything specific about MS apart from them being the first one.

Not for nothing, it seems that various governing bodies are slowly waking up to the idea some of those giants have really gotten a little too big, so there is a chance of some real action similar to action taken on MS.

Smacking down the first one was supposed to signal to the others that this is not how society accepts them to behave.

I wonder where we got off track.

When was the smack down?

> I wonder where we got off track.

We stopped enforcing the law against large companies. :(

Apple's behavior today on iOS is clearly worse than 90's era Microsoft Windows, but we had a semi-functional FTC back then, and we mostly don't today.

The main difference is that in the 90s, the US still had real physical activity underlying its economy, and pretty impressive at that. You smack Microsoft, but who cares - there's still a wide industrial base, hundreds of thousands of small to medium enterprises, global monopoly on entertainment, semiconductor supremacy, high-end aircraft and car manufacturing, etc.

That's gone - industry got outsourced, the gap between Intel and TSMC is growing every year, Boeing's reputation will unlikely to ever recover, Hollywood is a joke, oil and gas extraction is perceived as villains, journalism in terminal decline, finance and pharma pure rent seeking. Software is the only thing left where Americans can say with a straight face that they're proud of it - hence the unwillingness to taint the crown jewels

As a next step, you could order a phone from e solutions, or slap their system on one of the supported phones. You don't lose too much convenience-wise (I think) compared to a normal Android, but you're one step away from the Google ecosystem.

Why not go to a GNU/Linux phone instead? (Librem 5 or Pinephone.)

Pinephone is considered enthusiast/experimental. Librem has a 52 week wait and is overpriced. The solution should be Calyx, but they've decided the solution requires paying a bribe to Google in the form of buying a Pixel - talk about missing the point, and missing your target market right out of the gate.

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