This mentality is fascinating to me. In a sense, nobody owns an Apple device. It's more like renting: the landlord keeps a bunch of doors locked and has strict rules, but the place comes pre-furnished and includes millennial-grade amenities.
I can see the appeal if you don't particularly care about owning a device, but it blows my mind that people become so dedicated to this way of living.
Not to get too philosophical, but the entire concept of ownership per se is always a social contract that's being renegotiated continuously by society. Almost every country in the world has limits on the things you can own, to give just one example.
I do see the value of having autonomy over the devices I conduct my digital life on (whether owned or rented, for that matter!), but I'm not sure if the concept of physical ownership is the right model here.
How my personal data is being processed in other people's and the government's systems is just as relevant to me, and conversely, I'm fine with some opaque blobs of other people running on my hardware, as long as they're properly sandboxed (i.e. can't phone home freely or access any of my data that's none of their business), and I see the mutual benefit in them.
I think the renting analogy is a decent one and I’m on the other side of this, so let me give you my perspective.
When you own a home, you are 100% liable and responsible. If anything breaks, it’s an unexpected demand on my time and/or an unexpected expense. When you rent, you just call the landlord and say “shit’s broke” and it’s no longer your responsibility. I don’t have the mental bandwidth these days for the unexpected demands the house places on me.
This is _exactly_ the experience I had with Android versus iPhone.
I bought the original Android Dev Phone 1. Still have it somewhere. Moved to a Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, couple of OnePlus phones, etc. Used the stock Android, Cyanogenmod, LineageOS, and others. Did all sorts of fun stuff.
Then my life got busier and busier and busier and I found myself sitting up late one night dicking with fixing something on my phone again and just was like nope, this is not how I need or want to be spending my time. My life has only gotten busier since. I don’t have time for suddenly finding out one day that the last update that I installed broke the microphone on my phone and I can no longer use it as a phone.
Using the iPhone is having a landlord. If it breaks, it’s just broken. Not only do I not need to feel responsible for fixing it, I couldn’t if I wanted to. It takes up no space in my head.
So the fact that Apple (1) generally doesn’t release terribly broken software; (2) supports their devices with updates for a long time; and (3) is vaguely respectful of privacy and security makes the iPhone an obvious winner for me.
Even just making sideloading _available_ is going to shift the space my phone sits in my head. It’s no longer going to be “it works or it doesn’t, if it works and you don’t like how it works that sucks nothing to do about it so you may as well forget about it”. It’s going to be a constant “this is vaguely annoying I bet I could find a replacement dialer that _does_ allow you to search your call history…”. I’ll literally pay a premium for someone to take options away from me rather than have yet another place I need to exercise my self control.
I already spend all day with needy computers fixing and improving and such. Having a dumb appliance that lets me not do that is what I _want_.
> I’ll literally pay a premium for someone to take options away from me rather than have yet another place I need to exercise my self control.
Thank you, this makes a lot of sense to me! I'm still on the other side of it personally, but I can genuinely understand this position. So many times these sorts of discussions are so pointless as they go back and forth with things like "you don't have to enable that option if you don't want to" and people saying "somehow I'll have to" with these weird hypotheticals that seems ludicrous, but yours is a solid argument.
Yeah just start with the assumption that “this is an appliance” in my world and most of the rest probably makes sense.
From my point of view and use case, right now the market has two options:
1. A smart toaster with WiFi and Bluetooth that runs modified Linux and uses this functionality to both offer you automatic bread ordering and also spy on your daily toasting habits. But if you don’t like being spied on you can also run aftermarket ToastOS which works on most toasters (though it’s maintained by volunteers and sometimes you update and try and make toast but it never pops and lights a fire in your kitchen). Or…
2. A relatively dumb toaster with a lever and thermocouple. It cannot run custom toast programs. It always makes toast to the exact same darkness regardless of if you want it lighter or darker. If it stops working you throw it out and get a new one because the whole case is glued shut and it’s unrepairable.
Also in this not-so-hypothetical-hypothetical I have literally zero hours in a day to spend on things but a whole big pile of dollarbucks. Also I’m a techie with ADHD and if there’s a piece of broken or annoying technology in front of me I _can_ fix, I will fix.
I’ll pay you extra to solve my toasting problem for me with your dumb appliance so I can get back to migrating workloads off of my EKS cluster on to the bare metal k3s cluster that’s heating up my utility room or rebuilding my garage doors or whatever it is I need to be doing today.
I love that your analogy hit me so hard that I came to question my iPhone SE. I think the main issue for me is that I have not found a better alternative elsewhere. There are some interesting locked down and privacy focused variants of Android, but I am not sure I could use them with the banking and personal ID apps that are almost "required" unless I have to jump through additional hoops daily.
But thought provoking analogy - and thanks for that!
It doesn't work for everything, but many banks will have a website you can use just fine from the phone's browser. If you're trying to do full payments with the phone that won't work of course, but if you get a physical credit card/debit card you can (usually) do everything else with the mobile site. This is what I do for my Graphene OS phone
I think you greatly overestimate how big of a deal this lack of user choice is to most people.
Nobody needs to be dedicated to a lack of choice/freedom for Apple's business model to work.
Being begrudgingly ok with it works just as well, just like they don’t price their products at “oh wow, that’s a steal, I’ll take one as a spare”, but rather somewhere close to “oh wow, but I guess I don’t buy this every day, and maybe with an installment plan…”
I can see the appeal if you don't particularly care about owning a device, but it blows my mind that people become so dedicated to this way of living.