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Apple is the only big tech company left that even pretends to care about privacy and does even a half-assed job of it. If they're doing it in part for self-interested reasons, that's fine. It's better than nothing.

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.

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Freedom to run the software you choose on your own device is the only way to have actual privacy. What you have right now is just a centralized store of all your data on Apple's servers.

> Freedom to run the software you choose on your own device is the only way to have actual privacy.

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.

Well... yes, one does have to make good decisions and be intentional about using private software even on open platforms. But at least with open platforms, one has the choice to do so without a corporation being able to unilaterally wipe something away from that platform, or impose terms on that software due to market capture.

iOS and macOS are not the same product. If you want a real computer you have to get a Mac, which is why I do not own an iPad. IMHO if you can't run anything you want on it it's not a real computer, it's a "console." This is how I think of phones.

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.

> IMHO if you can't run anything you want on it it's not a real computer, it's a "console." This is how I think of phones.

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:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

I'm like you and my primary device is my laptop.

That being said: For the vast majority of people, their phone is their primary computing device.

These people are generally not technically knowledgeable at all. If you opened up the phone so it could run any software, all of them would instantly become infested with malware that would massively invade everyone's privacy and probably steal their credit cards and scam them.

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.

> If you opened up the phone so it could run any software, all of them would instantly become infested with malware that would massively invade everyone's privacy and probably steal their credit cards and scam 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.

This isn't a problem on Linux because there's a careful community oriented path for users who may not understand what they're doing without cutting things off from knowledgeable users.

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.

This is the thing that a lot of software minded folk don’t get. And I’m one of them

I’m a programmer by trade who grew up on DOS and early Macintosh computers and ran Gentoo on my main machine for a bunch of years. I’ve done sysadmin work and Internet system architecture and blah blah blah.

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)

Sure. And maybe where we end up is the iPhone hardware is open to install other OSes on.

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