Let's assume they do eventually flip their brand on its head and turn on the users.
While waiting for them to latch you down tight, you could have already been enjoying the most consumer-centric and privacy-conscious mainstream mobile OS since 2007.
While waiting for them to latch you down tight, you could have already been enjoying the most consumer-centric and privacy-conscious mainstream mobile OS since 2007.
Chinese customers don't need to wait. Apple flipped sometime in 2017 and gave up all user emails, photos, messages, etc. to the CCP to stay in the market.
People complain about TikTok spying for China, but Apple is one of the biggest CCP spies around. That runs counter to the brand headspace they keep investing in though.
People have this expectation because other companies have done this.
For example, Google employees revolted when dragonfly was leaked, and got the CCP search-spying project killed. It's weird to think that Google cared more about user privacy than profits than Apple does, but that's how weird the branding works here.
Apple was revealed to be a participant in 2013; there is no reason to believe they are not a part of it now.
Just because Apple is playing nice at the moment, there is no reason not to force them, and all the other players to have a legal requirement of playing nice. I mean, the hog that is fattened for slaughter thinks its life is great, right up until its not.
If it's a benevolent dictatorship, it's undeniably been a good one to me over nearly half my life. If they ever do turn, I can always just leave. But what is and/or was my alternative? The less-benevolent dictatorships of Google or Microsoft? Spending inordinate amounts of time and effort making a hodgepodge of various Linux devices work together (often unsuccessfully)? I'll pass.
The question could be less if Apple should be trusted, and more if phone makers in general should be allowed to be dictators.
Say I make the Avocado Phone:
- my entire shtick is that "you can only run apps we make, and we vet the source code of every one of the few thousand third-party apps we allow on our device. We will pay you $10,000 if you get compromised using our phone"
- Of course, to achieve this, the phone can't be susceptible to "informed" evil maid attacks (as in, say the hotel's cameras capture you entering your passcode and Avocado ID Password) that replace your OS with an identical one preloaded with Malware. This means that, even as a user, you literally can't load any other software onto the bootloader or OS that would touch the operating system.
- it also takes every opportunity to prevent third-party apps from gaining access they don't need, which includes disabling JIT compilation (ruling out third-party browser engines, unless they want to use a slow javascript interpreter).
At what point does my phone turn from a product that services the security-conscious crowd with a completely bulletproof device, into something that people want to be able to preload software onto, because they didn't realize that security comes at a price? Is it when I sell enough? Is selling 10 million a year enough to where my market presence becomes a problem? 100 million a year? Why would people buy it if the government forces it to be 'open' at the cost of invalidating its entire use-case of being a secure device?
First part is, fundamentally these devices are sold. You could eschew the very notion of property and make it a pure rental, but it’s not the point we are now.
The second part is, as you point out, your idea is completely valid until your service becomes life critical, a huge portion of the country’s population relies on it day to day, you killed any competitor that had a significantly different value proposition and it would have catastrophic consequences if you were to screw it up badly. Basically you became part of the infra. Is it 100 million units ? It’s up to your regulators to decide.
In any case, I don’t see how using Apple products is at odds with supporting better privacy laws. If anything, they are perfectly aligned since it demonstrates a $2 trillion alternative to surveillance capitalism.
the fact you believe this is true today is most telling, I do not find them to be "consumer-centric" they have very draconian policies and if your use of the device fits in their narrow band of use cases then it is find, if it does not you are SOL
0: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.move...
For instance if you've been on iOS for a few years and bought a healthy amount of music, those are virtually gone after moving to android. You can mitigate that by either
- forever keep paying Apple through an Apple Music subscription
- somewhat extract the tracks and DRM free them (tracks were DRM free when bought from the Mac, but not when bought on iOS last time I tinkered with it). Of course Apple will make as hard as they can to block this route.
Same for movies and books, and for games/apps as well if they don't have a multi OS pricing scheme.
Switching cost is not just time spent to get used to, more often than not it"s a non significant amount of money lost in the process.
Same deal the other way round of course: Google is more diligent on exposing their content on iOS, but there will stil be paid games and apps to be lost in the process.
This has to be satire.