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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

I feel bad for the guy and all the Apple users constantly sharing stories of being mistreated and abused. Stop giving these companies your money and consent.

I'm basically numb to it at this point though. Every few days we read on this site small permutations of the same story. Sometimes people here get a little extra backchannel support, but that's a token prize for the jester who made a king chuckle.

Then a few more days go by and everyone upvotes a new iWidget to oblivion because it has 0.1 new gigablahs or takes up a milliblah less of some bullshit nobody was asking for.

All while we collectively virtue signal that people are spending too much time and relying on technology too much.

Well, it's almost Monday let's see what new bullshit convinces everyone to keep getting fucked and pay for the privilege.

I basically have turned into this guy: https://youtu.be/8AyVh1_vWYQ

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> I feel bad for the guy and all the Apple users constantly sharing stories of being mistreated and abused. Stop giving these companies your money and consent.

Here's a challenge: walk into a store and attempt to buy a smartphone that is not iPhone or Android.

This is the situation that consumers face. Some alternatives exist, but most consumers are completely unaware of them, because the alternatives have no advertising budget or retail presence.

I think it's quite similar to the political duopoly. Third parties exist, but they have no advertising budget, and moreover, in a Catch-22 situation, they get little or no news coverage, precisely because they have no advertising budget, and thus the news media considers them "not viable." That's a self-fulfilling prophesy. Actually the same situation exists in tech: Apple and Google get huge amounts of free news coverage in addition to their paid advertising. The media appears to feel no obligation to help people escape from duopolies; guess who pays for their advertising...

Yes, the phone market is bad. But, you know you don't have to do everything in a phone, right?

Want to take pictures? Use a camera. If it somehow auto updates your photos are still on an SD card.

I get convenience has led everyone to expect their phone to do everything for them, but it's not working. When you're in a pinch you will go to a 7-Eleven and grab food, but everyone would agree that buying everything there instead of real groceries is a terrible strategy. Just because something is convenient doesn't mean it's good.

> I get convenience has led everyone to expect their phone to do everything for them, but it's not working.

It's mostly working, though. For every story of someone experencing a severe problem, there are millions of non-stories of people not experiencing the problem.

Inconveniencing yourself every day just to avoid the rare situation is not necessarily a great life strategy. Furthermore, most consumers are not as aware of these problem cases as we are. They don't expect the worst until it's too late.

Admittedly, failing to back up is just dumb, and everyone should know that by now. On the other hand, nobody should be expecting that a software update will kill their passcode.

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