Apple's product is its users. All of the privacy changes are not to protect the privacy of their users, it's to ensure that there are no ways to access Apple device users without Apple being the middleman.
There's no way to do this, even if you pay all the fees push notifications won't work unless you publish to the app store and that will get rejected for being a duplicate.
That being said, I don’t think Apple’s privacy stance is all hot air, they publish plenty of white papers on their infrastructure. I mostly think they’re greedy and don’t mind harming the user and developer experience to ensure they get their cut from every transaction that occurs inside their ecosystem.
Their cloud storage product even has on-device encryption. Nobody else offers that, and in fact AFAIK Google and some of the others even have it listed as against their ToS. They're also working on privacy-respecting AI services and on-device AI as a first class citizen, which is different from any other company. All other AI products are designed for maximum privacy invasion.
Google, Microsoft, and the entire mobile app ecosystem are all actively hostile to user privacy and seek to undermine it as a primary mission and policy.
The iPhone does everything I want a phone to do, but that's not much: web, a few apps, turn by turn directions, texting, e-mail, etc.
That being said: For the vast majority of people, their phone is their primary computing device.
I grew up with the open Internet starting in the 1990s. I feel like a lot of people haven't wrapped their heads around just how hostile and riddled with scams and hustler bullshit it's become. The mobile ecosystem is the worst, possibly even more user-hostile than the web. The potential for privacy invasion is a lot higher too since people carry their phones around.
The Internet today is a "dark forest." Any platform made for technically unsophisticated people must be locked down like military hardware for operation in a theater of war. The iPhone is actually not locked down enough to protect most users' privacy.
In fact OSX let everyone just download and run binaries and even that didn't have this problem. That's not a hypothetical situation, literally everyone used computers that way until recently.
There's a long tail of people who will manage to blow their devices up regardless but maybe they shouldn't be using computers unaided. It's very frustrating to make literally everyone else's lives harder just for them.
That's extremely hyperbolic. Not every Android phone got infested immediately with malware, despite shipping out of the box with the ability to sideload apps. I don't think the platform would have survived if that were the case.
> The Internet today is a "dark forest." Any platform made for technically unsophisticated people must be locked down like military hardware for operation in a theater of war.
That's quite a bleak outlook. One seemingly founded in fear without any faith in free software and the communities around it.
Sure, a person needs to learn some caution in installing and running software, but there aren't monsters around every single corner. There are communities that do a lot of work, without expectation of compensation, to provide safe, trustworthy software.
The internet is _not_ a dark forest. It is a place with people of many stripes and intentions. Some are dangerous, but shooting first and asking questions later is _not_ the way to navigate this wondrous thing humanity has built.
The reality of my actual behavior these days is that my primary device is an iPhone. All the stuff I do that actually matters in my personal life (not work) takes place there.
“Real” computers are worse at or totally incapable of doing a lot of what it does for me (I don’t want to use a laptop for turn-by-turn directions or to hail an Uber or whatever, to call out just a couple examples) and its lack of “real” computing capabilities are somewhere between irrelevant-to and beneficial-for what I need it to do and how I need it to operate.
I use Windows and Linux for play but nothing that matters happens there. If every computing device I own except my phone stopped working, I would have no actual need whatsoever to replace them, and nothing bad or even inconvenient would happen. (Exception for my work MacBook, but I don’t own that)
You're of course free to define things as you wish personally (and I'm not necessarily disagreeing with yout), but it should be noted that we start getting into the realm of:
Given how many services are off-device I'm not sure how accurate that is.
If I'm running a Framework laptop with Linux, I can have very little privacy if I'm using Metabook and Gmail for socializing.
The issue anytime this thread comes up are binary statements like the above. There's a lot more nuance here where privacy changes are likely both. When ATT came out it was good for the user, but also poked FB in the eye which I'm sure Apple enjoyed.
Apple protecting user privacy for selfish reasons is a wonderful thing. It means they are going to keep doing it for as long as they can manage until the legislators step in.
It's amazing how successful they are at virtue signaling about privacy while selling your traffic to Google, the progenitor and linchpin of surveillance capitalism, for tens of billions of dollars. Laundering the reputation through the slightest bit of indirection is all it takes.
> All of the privacy changes are not to protect the privacy of their users…
This is reductionist, and multiple things can be true at the same time. There’s no doubt that Apple has realized privacy is a competitive advantage, and as a customer, it’s one of the reasons I give them money.
Even if you could lay bare the deepest desires and true motives of everyone involved, the result of those motives is a product that is more private and more secure than most alternatives.
To boil this down to “this is only about lock-in” completely sidesteps a myriad of other factors in play.
Editing to add: I'm not saying Apple is blameless here or that their advertising goals and other business deals shouldn't be scrutinized. I'm not even saying that I buy their privacy marketing, but there is an objective difference between their current model and the companies that exist purely on the basis of selling customer data. I find it really problematic to equate them with the behavior of the Metas and Alphabets of the industry.
Anyone trying to sell something to an Apple user. And you are right that I'm being reductionist, Apple clearly makes significant profit from the devices themselves, but that revenue is not growing. The revenue that is growing is "services", "app store", and "advertising" revenue.
Apple's $20 billion a year deal with Google to be the default search engine accounts for at least 10% of its entire market capitalization. That's just revenue from one company and that's just to be the default search engine.
Google is buying search traffic from Apple, not user dossiers. To conflate the two is a category error. Even when you consider Apple’s advertising business, it cannot be argued in good faith that they are behaving in the same way most large advertising-driven companies are operating. Selling ads is not by itself enough to make the claim that “users are the product”, and to whatever extent they are, the ad business is secondary and coexists with their core business of selling hardware and services. This remains a meaningful distinction for people who want to buy products not fully predicated on selling their private details.
The reductionist take removes all context and makes it impossible to have a substantive discussion about these finer points, and reductionism in general is against site guidelines.
This is your personal definition that suits your argument. I'm not going to get into a debate about semantics.
I've never heard anyone use it to describe Apple's approach to ads or search agreements until this comment thread. I'm not excited about debating semantics, but there's a lot of conceptual weight attached to the phrase that can't be ignored here.
- [0]: https://techland.time.com/2010/10/15/facebook-youre-not-the-...
- [1]: https://x.com/timoreilly/status/22823381903
- [2]: https://x.com/jaketapper/status/976473447374221313
- [3]: https://bryanalexander.org/digital-literacy/you-are-the-prod...
- [4]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/ello-...
- [5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvZYwaQlJsg (1973)
Huh? Apple's market capitalization is $3.44 trillion as of today, and the unit of market cap is not dollars per year, so you're conflating categories here.
If you mean yearly revenue, $20 billion is 5% of Apple's 2023 revenue. Compare that to Meta, where ad revenue is like, 98% of their ~$135 billion revenue in 2023. These are different categories of companies, no matter how you slice it. You're fighting the wrong enemy here.