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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

I've asked similar questions before and am usually told that this is how Apple does things and it's what makes their users happy. It's in fact why they love and choose Apple. They trust Apple to make the right decisions, and this is in fact a big part of the value add of their products. This is much related to the walled garden approach. For example, ask about why sideloading should remain not an option at all, rather than something like Android where you can enable it if you want to but "Grandma" isn't going to accidentally do it. Apple users actively don't want that capability. It doesn't make sense to me, but that's because "I'm not their target market."

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I have to agree with this sentiment, I read it here on HN 'power' users more than once. Although most Apple users have no clue about what we discuss here, the part about actively wanting it is simply not true en masse.

Needless to say that's not for me and I will probably keep sporting Androids (in my case I am happy with Samsung's top ultra offerings) since I actually use those added features, ie saving 500 bucks on proper expensive variometer for paragliding and instead hooking it up via OTG cable with basic one with good sensor but without display, for 10% of the price... needless to say relevant app isn't on play store neither. And so on.

But we certainly have choice on the market. I just wish Apple would properly focus on user security and shielding them from the worst of internet, and less on milking advertising, what I see so far didn't convince me it isn't just sophisticated marketing and not much more. You already pay premium on the device, its a proper spit in the face to be so visibly milked more and more, thats pure corporate greed.

What I mean - my wife with iphone pops up browser, I pop up mine with firefox and ublock origin. Internet is utterly useless and horrible place on her phone, while completely fine on mine (plus I get youtube ads blocking as a bonus)

Do your wife a favor and get her Wipr[0].

Sure it’s $1.99 but we support indie developers here on HN don’t we?

It’s a set it and forget it type of deal, no more ads in Safari.

0: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wipr/id1030595027

Thank you for this useful info

> my wife with iphone pops up browser, I pop up mine with firefox and ublock origin. Internet is utterly useless and horrible place on her phone, while completely fine on mine (plus I get youtube ads blocking as a bonus)

I recently set up NextDNS on my iPhone and browsing the web has become much more usable (previously, I would get webpage crashes!). Something to look into in addition to or instead of Wipr.

> Apple users actively don't want that capability

That's a self-fulfilling property, with cause and effect going as much in the other direction: people who want that capability don't become Apple users. If you want openness, you don't pick Apple.

It’s not that I trust Apple, it’s that I trust Apple infinitely more than I trust the largest spy network on earth and existing without a smartphone today is difficult.

If you need a smartphone, you can choose between a company that has some missteps, or a demonstrably evil spy network. I know who I am choosing.

Thanks, your position certainly makes sense to me regarding a Pixel phone with the stock software on it, but much less so when considering options like GrapheneOS or any of the Androids made by other non-Google companies (like OnePlus, etc). That's the point at which usually "user experience" or "I'm already in the Apple ecosystem" usually come to fore-front as the reason.

I don't really trust of those big companies, which is where GrapheneOS really shines. Open source, lots of enhanced privacy controls, but also as much of the Google ecosystem as the user wants. If you maximally distrust everyone, you can roll with pure FOSS. If you're somewhere in the middle like most people, you can pick and choose the pieces that are worth it to you (Google's Pixel Camera app is a common one for example). Graphene OS is also trivial to install now thanks to the web installer, so pretty much anybody who can load a web page, plug in a USB cable, and follow the explicit instructions to unlock the bootloader (which is stuff like, "open settings" -> "click about", etc) can do it.

Where do I buy a GrapheneOS phone from a manufacturer that tests the entire package and releases updates?

I’ve done the “just buy unlocked hardware and install this or that” in the past. My phone ended up taking up way more of my time than I’m willing to let it and my life has only gotten busier since.

This mentality is fascinating to me. In a sense, nobody owns an Apple device. It's more like renting: the landlord keeps a bunch of doors locked and has strict rules, but the place comes pre-furnished and includes millennial-grade amenities.

I can see the appeal if you don't particularly care about owning a device, but it blows my mind that people become so dedicated to this way of living.

It's unlikely that if you have a mobile phone, the landlord doesn't keep some doors locked.

At minimum - even if you're running de-Googled Android - the baseband blob has high levels of access and you have no control over it.

I'm not saying Apple isn't worse with this, but the illusion of phone ownership spreads a lot further.

Baseband blobs are isolated with IOMMU (at least on GrapheneOS https://grapheneos.org/faq#baseband-isolation, but maybe that's also true for stock Pixels idk) and Google spends a lot of effort on baseband security: https://security.googleblog.com/2023/12/hardening-cellular-b...

Not to get too philosophical, but the entire concept of ownership per se is always a social contract that's being renegotiated continuously by society. Almost every country in the world has limits on the things you can own, to give just one example.

I do see the value of having autonomy over the devices I conduct my digital life on (whether owned or rented, for that matter!), but I'm not sure if the concept of physical ownership is the right model here.

How my personal data is being processed in other people's and the government's systems is just as relevant to me, and conversely, I'm fine with some opaque blobs of other people running on my hardware, as long as they're properly sandboxed (i.e. can't phone home freely or access any of my data that's none of their business), and I see the mutual benefit in them.

I think you greatly overestimate how big of a deal this lack of user choice is to most people.

Nobody needs to be dedicated to a lack of choice/freedom for Apple's business model to work.

Being begrudgingly ok with it works just as well, just like they don’t price their products at “oh wow, that’s a steal, I’ll take one as a spare”, but rather somewhere close to “oh wow, but I guess I don’t buy this every day, and maybe with an installment plan…”

I think the renting analogy is a decent one and I’m on the other side of this, so let me give you my perspective.

When you own a home, you are 100% liable and responsible. If anything breaks, it’s an unexpected demand on my time and/or an unexpected expense. When you rent, you just call the landlord and say “shit’s broke” and it’s no longer your responsibility. I don’t have the mental bandwidth these days for the unexpected demands the house places on me.

This is _exactly_ the experience I had with Android versus iPhone.

I bought the original Android Dev Phone 1. Still have it somewhere. Moved to a Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, couple of OnePlus phones, etc. Used the stock Android, Cyanogenmod, LineageOS, and others. Did all sorts of fun stuff.

Then my life got busier and busier and busier and I found myself sitting up late one night dicking with fixing something on my phone again and just was like nope, this is not how I need or want to be spending my time. My life has only gotten busier since. I don’t have time for suddenly finding out one day that the last update that I installed broke the microphone on my phone and I can no longer use it as a phone.

Using the iPhone is having a landlord. If it breaks, it’s just broken. Not only do I not need to feel responsible for fixing it, I couldn’t if I wanted to. It takes up no space in my head.

So the fact that Apple (1) generally doesn’t release terribly broken software; (2) supports their devices with updates for a long time; and (3) is vaguely respectful of privacy and security makes the iPhone an obvious winner for me.

Even just making sideloading _available_ is going to shift the space my phone sits in my head. It’s no longer going to be “it works or it doesn’t, if it works and you don’t like how it works that sucks nothing to do about it so you may as well forget about it”. It’s going to be a constant “this is vaguely annoying I bet I could find a replacement dialer that _does_ allow you to search your call history…”. I’ll literally pay a premium for someone to take options away from me rather than have yet another place I need to exercise my self control.

I already spend all day with needy computers fixing and improving and such. Having a dumb appliance that lets me not do that is what I _want_.

> I’ll literally pay a premium for someone to take options away from me rather than have yet another place I need to exercise my self control.

Thank you, this makes a lot of sense to me! I'm still on the other side of it personally, but I can genuinely understand this position. So many times these sorts of discussions are so pointless as they go back and forth with things like "you don't have to enable that option if you don't want to" and people saying "somehow I'll have to" with these weird hypotheticals that seems ludicrous, but yours is a solid argument.

Yeah just start with the assumption that “this is an appliance” in my world and most of the rest probably makes sense.

From my point of view and use case, right now the market has two options:

1. A smart toaster with WiFi and Bluetooth that runs modified Linux and uses this functionality to both offer you automatic bread ordering and also spy on your daily toasting habits. But if you don’t like being spied on you can also run aftermarket ToastOS which works on most toasters (though it’s maintained by volunteers and sometimes you update and try and make toast but it never pops and lights a fire in your kitchen). Or…

2. A relatively dumb toaster with a lever and thermocouple. It cannot run custom toast programs. It always makes toast to the exact same darkness regardless of if you want it lighter or darker. If it stops working you throw it out and get a new one because the whole case is glued shut and it’s unrepairable.

Also in this not-so-hypothetical-hypothetical I have literally zero hours in a day to spend on things but a whole big pile of dollarbucks. Also I’m a techie with ADHD and if there’s a piece of broken or annoying technology in front of me I _can_ fix, I will fix.

I’ll pay you extra to solve my toasting problem for me with your dumb appliance so I can get back to migrating workloads off of my EKS cluster on to the bare metal k3s cluster that’s heating up my utility room or rebuilding my garage doors or whatever it is I need to be doing today.

I love that your analogy hit me so hard that I came to question my iPhone SE. I think the main issue for me is that I have not found a better alternative elsewhere. There are some interesting locked down and privacy focused variants of Android, but I am not sure I could use them with the banking and personal ID apps that are almost "required" unless I have to jump through additional hoops daily.

But thought provoking analogy - and thanks for that!

It doesn't work for everything, but many banks will have a website you can use just fine from the phone's browser. If you're trying to do full payments with the phone that won't work of course, but if you get a physical credit card/debit card you can (usually) do everything else with the mobile site. This is what I do for my Graphene OS phone

You’re missing a probably sizable fraction of Apple users that don’t love this, but also don’t hate it enough to switch to something else for that reason alone.

It’s very similar to political parties: I have yet to find one that I 100% align with in all things, yet I still vote.

I have long decided my strategy should be "pick the least worst". Much less frustrating if you look at it like an engineering optimisation task.

Oh I do want this functionality from them and I already actually do get it on MacOS, where grandma or my mom can use the App Store while I can still get an installer dmg with „this app was downloaded from internet do you trust it yadda yadda” warning. They’ret capable of doing it, they just don’t because AppStore makes a lot of nasty monopoly $.

> this is how Apple does things and it's what makes their users happy

I would be shocked if many of these "surveillance loopholes" aren't silently mandated by government agencies around the world.

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