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Comment by MerelyMortal | Hacker News Reader

It's helping show people that "they have always been pretty anti-consumer".

Almost all of the digs at Apple have been things that apply industry wide and it is an interesting observation. There was one recently worded something like "EU to require Apple to update phones for 7 years" but if you look at the actual proposal, it applies to all phone makers and Apple is the only one anywhere close to compliant to this proposal.

Other scandals like Samsung disabling the cameras when unlocking the boot loader go practically unnoticed. Almost everything said about Apple is true and I don't dispute that, but people seem to believe that Apple is the only one using questionable labor, gluing in batteries, or applying software restrictions when it's basically industry standard right now.

I don't know I feel Apple really got worse than the competition. It started with "You are holding it wrong.", horrible keyboards, "you need to use USB-C for everything, except our iphones come with lighting + old USB cables", to charge your mouse you need to plugin the cable on the bottom etc. That's kind of standard.

Yet, the recent moves: Snitch Software that works against the user with a worldwide localization network + no care about security at all.

I mean after Pegasus hit the news, Apple announced their picture scanning initiative. They didn't acknowledge or try to fix their horrible bounty program (compared to Microsoft and Google) and waited for a non-profit (awesome Citizen Lab) to find and fix their bug ... (a 0 click in iMessage)

That's not industry standard for me.

This is sort of more of the same as what I was saying. Android phones have horrible hardware flaws and they don't gain much attention. At the same time as "You are holding it wrong" Nexus 5x phones where bricking due to bad NAND chips. Nexus 6P phones where crashing due to battery issues similar to the iphone but they did not throttle the phone and left it to crash. Samsung had phones that would explode in to fireballs. Samsung's flip phones crack at the fold and are extremely expensive to fix. Google Photos has been doing the exact same image scanning for the whole lifetime of the product and no one noticed or cared.

All OEMs have had hardware issues or scandals but they are all quickly forgotten while any fault on an iPhone becomes memorialized forever. They were all real faults but they weren't ever any worse than the rest, only more news worthy.

There are an endless

Apple should have fixed these things with their iron grip on their production line. They shouldn't have had malfunctioning GPUs or CPU's shorting because they're too close to the display's power line, and they certainly shouldn't have dragged out the USB-C transition on iPhone so long. But they have, and it's always the same bullshit excuses that nobody wants to hear from the most powerful company in the world. These devices start to lose their 'magic' once you understand how the sausage is made (and at what cost), so I think criticism of them is perfectly warranted. Imagine how silly you'd look 15 years ago if you tried arguing that Microsoft didn't have a browser monopoly, or even today if you tried defending Facebook for 'trying their hardest'. It's all lip-service when your company is thousands of people large.

yes, aggree with you on the hardware.

yet, what's new for me is the combination of not caring about security, scanning on your phone (not in the cloud) and implementing a world wide localization network.

the road to hell is plastered with good intentions ...

>scanning on your phone (not in the cloud)

The scanning only touches photos which are stored on iCloud. Yes it does it on your phone but the reality is the same on iCloud or Google Photos. Both Apple and Google can push out changes live to every phone without warning, so what they may do in the future doesn't really matter. Only what they claim to be doing now. This is actually a more privacy friendly approach because it would be compatible with encrypted cloud storage.

again the scanning is implemented on the phone. That's what matters for me. I have some code on my device that works as snitch against me. That might just be a feeling and irrational, yet I really don't want that.

I know how it works. I don't use google photos. I don't WANT to use icloud ... Maybe I'm just too stupid, yet I enabled iCloud several times by accident due to updates/new devices. That won't happen with my grapheneOS nexus5 :)

If you care about privacy and security, you need to leave iOS as quickly as you can ... 2 days ago: https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5gan4/apple-still-investiga...

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/all-seeing-i

That’s because you pay more attention to news relating to Apple.

As someone with little general interest in the smartphone market, the digs seem to be pretty widespread nowadays. Samsung did indeed take flack for disabling the camera. Complains about the Play Store and Google anticompetitive behaviors are common and Apple is often in the press due to their high profile legal battle with Epic.

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