My life is so much better being in the Apple ecosystem.
Some of it was unintentional, but now its iPhone, Macbook Pro, Apple Watch, Airpods Pro, and IOT devices that use Homekit. I have an iPad but I use it the least.
Pre-Intel I used to make fun of "Apple fanboys". But aside from the niche and incompatibilities of the PowerPC architecture back then, that turned out to be a lot of other immaturities I had and was raised with.
I also used to use Android, but the "look how many advanced, poorly integrated and under maintained things I can do by myself" concept didn't stay appealing for very long.
This is a non-sequitur. There is nothing stopping Apple from doing things in an open manner - it's purely cultural. The fact that they don't is why I do not buy for a second that they can be trusted with privacy, whether they care or not.
The quality of Apple's ecosystem is because of the centralized effort put into it and them owning the stack, not because the end result is walled-in.
When someone tells me Apple really cares about user privacy, I point them to how Apple has been deliberately crippling their wares to actually spy better on their users. Some of the recent events include:
- Crippled macOS Mojave+ to let Apple know every app you open (in the name of malware protection, but sent unencrypted over the internet).
- Crippled macOS Big Sur to allow any Apple whitelisted software to bypass any user application firewall blocks and some VPN apps.
- Even ios, that has a whole lot of "do you give app permissions" for loads of stuff, leaves a glaring wide hole open as it doesn't let the user to allow or block an app from connecting to the internet (on WiFi).
iOS devices have had a file system users can at least save and retrieve from for years now.
The mobile app landscape has changed from the gold rush early last decade, and I rarely install anybody's. I empathize with the developers still trying to make it there, but its not a user's problem.
The protocols that Apple chooses to promulgate work really well.
Flagship games work really well.
The garden has gotten really big, I can't see the walls anymore but little bad gets in.
Computers do what I want them to, here. They don't do what I want them to do outside of here. For context, I jump into a Windows instance, or routinely put compute instances in the cloud.
If all that works for you, that's mostly fine, and for the most part I don't think you should feel like you have to defend yourself. But two things:
1) Not all of us are like that. Admittedly I'm very far in the other camp: I run Linux as a desktop OS, and have done so for most of the past 20 years. For much of that I even ran Linux on Apple hardware (because I really did love their hardware), but a few years ago finally gave up due to the increasing frequency of undocumented things that don't work. But there are many of us (less extreme than I am, who would otherwise be content to run macOS and iOS) who absolutely do not buy in to a world where they don't truly own their devices.
2) There's a pervasive worry around here that Apple's approach will catch on, the end result being that full control over your own hardware and software will be a near impossibility. (Or, you'll be able to have it, but then be denied access to things like streaming media, and government and financial apps, a trade off people shouldn't have to make.) I think that's a very real possibility in the longer term, and I think the end result of that is total surveillance and a world where corporations decide what we're allowed to do with technology. And I think for this reason there can be a bit of hostility toward people such as yourself who are happy in the Apple walled garden and seem unconcerned about the future implications of this kind of computing model.
As an aside, I also reject the idea that it's necessary that the user give up agency over their devices in order to be protected from malware. A walled garden -- no matter how far away the walls are -- is not a requirement to keep bad stuff out.
Some of it was unintentional, but now its iPhone, Macbook Pro, Apple Watch, Airpods Pro, and IOT devices that use Homekit. I have an iPad but I use it the least.
Pre-Intel I used to make fun of "Apple fanboys". But aside from the niche and incompatibilities of the PowerPC architecture back then, that turned out to be a lot of other immaturities I had and was raised with.
I also used to use Android, but the "look how many advanced, poorly integrated and under maintained things I can do by myself" concept didn't stay appealing for very long.