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Comment by richwater | Hacker News Reader

Frankly, I can't imagine a reason not to buy an iPhone instead of whatever Android device happens to be around besides ideological differences.

The customer experience is so vastly superior to these bloatware filled, borderline spyware Samsung/Xiamoi/OnePlus devices.

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I realize this makes me sound black-pilled, but mobile platforms (Apple included) are so user-hostile with regard to privacy I’m not even sure the battle is worth fighting.

IMO it’s better to just hold your nose, limit what you use your phone for as much as you can, and do everything important/sensitive on a computer that you have root access on.

God I wish I did anything interesting enough to merit that level of concern.

People are always unconcerned until their data leaks, then it turns out that the stuff they considered uninteresting was actually something they'd rather have kept private.

At that point I think my challenge is to not have anything you’d rather be private on a platform you don’t actually have control over, or why have it on a phone in the first place.

One of the most private things your phone knows about you is where you are at any given time. It's completely possible to design phones and cellular networks in such a way that they don't reveal that information to third parties, but we haven't, and that's bad.

I suppose that’s the other side of this. There’s a kind of privacy-as-ideology black hole that I’ve seen people get sucked into, even if in actuality they have nothing and do nothing actually illegal/immoral/sensitive.

Taking the time to install a custom ROM, run only FOSS apps, or find workarounds for needed apps, etc only to spend 90% of your time watching YouTube just doesn’t seem like a gain.

> Taking the time to install a custom ROM, run only FOSS apps, or find workarounds for needed apps, etc only to spend 90% of your time watching YouTube just doesn’t seem like a gain.

Think of it as reserving the right. Rights not exercised are lost. Retaining the ability to do something is valuable whether you need it right now or not. You may need it later.

That’s something I haven’t considered, although for me I would choose the route of forgoing a smart phone altogether if the ability to exercise that right was lost.

Why would that be less inconvenient than having a smartphone with open source software on it?

For my purposes there’s nothing that I can do on a FOSS smartphone that I can’t do more comfortably on my FOSS desktop.

Portability and the capacity to take pictures aside, but I also don’t go anywhere and my wife takes plenty of pictures of our kids anyway (backed up to my self-hosted NextCloud :^) ).

can you expand on "user-hostile with regard to privacy"? I genuinely thought Apple is a lot more private than Samsung

In some ways yes, in others, no.

I enjoyed this discussion on Apple’s less-than-stellar privacy situation. Sources are in the video description.

https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=nQ9LR8homt4

I'm not buying after the client scanning debacle. That they would even come up with something like troubles me greatly, and I was tempted to ditch Android at that point.

You prefer totally non-transparent cloud scanning that allows for ad hoc, warrantless, untraceable, personally-targeted scans from anyone who can threaten a big company?

I saw client-side scanning as much more transparent and limited. Yes, there could be abuses, but there is not a single possible abuse worse than what is already happening every day with cloud-side scanning.

I don't want any of my data scanned which is why I don't tend to store it in the cloud. If Apple rolled out client side scanning what's to prevent them from extending it to all data on the device, regardless of whether it's synced to iCloud?

Apple has made it clear that they won't move forward with client side scanning after feedback from researchers and customers. Instead, they added optional E2EE for iCloud. It's not perfect yet but significantly better than most other cloud providers.

Just proposing the idea is enough to dissuade them from using their products for anything personal. More importantly though, unlike Android it's much harder to use Apple without using cloud, and the cloud is just someone else's computer. Not your computer, not your data. There is also no freedom on iOS to install things you want without permission from Apple.

Google does cloud side scanning and owns Android. What’s to stop them from scanning your local files?

Hint: nothing technical

> You prefer totally non-transparent cloud scanning that allows for ad hoc, warrantless, untraceable, personally-targeted scans from anyone who can threaten a big company?

If the choice is between that and having my devices being used by others against me, then absolutely yes. The cloud is someone else's computer. Their machines, their rules. But it should also be "my machines, my rules".

What Samsung did is actually more of an Apple move.

Total control, even the source shop of your phone.

Parent isn’t talking about control.

Their comment is off-topic, but correct.

Parent says his prison is prettier, I say they his prison was the first of its kind and others start to copy it.

In his prison only warden snoops in your stuff, in Samsung other inmates too.

And yet it is Samsung that we are talking about and that did the "move". Not Apple.

“No true Samsung”

Most of the world simply can't afford an iPhone.

If Apple releases mid-tier phone after this, they will win the market for sure.

Isn't an iPhone SE pretty mid-tier?

$429 MSRP for the SE (3rd) vs $250 MSRP for a Moto G 5G 2023.

There's certainly arguments to be had about comparisons, and maybe better pricing with careful shopping and hoop jumping, but Apple simply doesn't address the wide global market of people with limited means, and it shows in their global market share.

You forgot the other reason. I don't want an IPhone because I prefer to actually own my device (and because Android is overall more secure and I personally care about this).

> I prefer to actually own my device

What do you mean by that? Its an odd take in an article about Android users learning they don't own their device.

> and because Android is overall more secure and I personally care about this

citation?

You can flash android phone with another OS that won't spy on you. And you cannot do this with iPhone.

The security of Android vs Apple keep ping-ponging back and forth for which is considered more secure against programmatic exploits.

Apple has new iPhones for sale at various price points all the way down to the very affordable iPhone SE.

The iPhone SE still starts at 3x the price of a low-tier Samsung smartphone.

Example from Poland:

https://mediamarkt.pl/telefony-i-smartfony/smartfon-apple-ip...

https://mediamarkt.pl/telefony-i-smartfony/smartfon-samsung-...

And unlike said Samsung, it will last for 2-3 more years.

You get what you pay for.

More practically, supply chains are finite. No single company, even as big as Apple, can make enough units for everyone.

Mostly people buy Android because it’s cheaper (for non-flagship devices). In so many areas of our world today we have two-tiered experiences, one for the moderately wealthy and a different one for the poors.

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