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Apple is like that because people are hellbent on giving Apple money despite them being so user hostile.
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I’ve never found them user hostile. They just sell appliances that do a thing.

If you don’t want that thing don’t buy it. If you do want that thing, it dies it pretty well.

I don’t have an iPad. My wife uses her, a lot.

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If there were 5 million options and you could hyper specify exactly the product you want, that would be a valid argument.

I buy an iPhone because the combined product is ultimately the best option, that doesn’t mean I agree with every single thing. If there was “iPhone but you can sideload apps” I’d buy that instead.

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Car analogy time. Users would be angry if your car could only run on Apple fuel, and drive on Apple roads, and were speed-limited based on what Apple thinks is safe.

The fact that we think this is normal for phones is crazy. And the longer we wait the more Apple fuel stations and Apple roads there will be, until there is no way back.

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Personally I don’t want a world where the government regulates and decides who is allowed to sell phone apps based on safety regulations. That system makes sense for gasoline though. I do want to be able to install phone apps freely though.
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Eh, I'm not convinced by the analogy. Phones don't run on fuel (and you can recharge a phone with any electricity supply), iPhones will run on more or less any phone network (which is as close as I can think for the road equivalent).

The speed limit analogy I can sort of see if I squint and I think highlights the reason people buy Apple: they want simplicity in their life. They don't want to monitor the speed limit for every road they drive down, they just want to know that if they're driving they're doing so at the recommended speed and won't end up getting a ticket (or crash!) because of an unnecessary choice (speeding).

Of course if we extend the analogy further: if it's a car then the automobile industry is dominated by just two car manufacturers and they both exercise a level of control over what you can and cannot do with the car. And people need cars, so they make a choice between two unoptimal choices.

I was an Android enthusiast, bought a Nexus One the day it came out. Then a Nexus 4, then a 5. Did custom ROMs, the lot. Ended up switching to Apple for simplicity around messaging and FaceTime with family/friends. I haven't ever looked back, I can't say there's anything I miss. Except the notification system maybe.

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Well, Windows is even worse when it comes to user hostility with constant security issues, advertising, AI, snooping, shit like the Global Device Identifier (GDID), shit like the ACPI Windows Platform Binary Table (WPBT) that allows your BIOS manufacturer (or someone with physical access...) to force Windows to silently execute stuff as root...

And Linux to this day still mostly does not get energy efficiency right, partially because manufacturers only test their crap hardware and ACPI tables against Windows.

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That's because of two reasons:

- normal people are morons when it comes to computers

- developers can extract money from those morons by using Apple's platform

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