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Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

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Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#201

Post by neverminder »

Desktop - Ubuntu 20.04. Everything works and my requirements are quite advanced - bunch of games on Steam, pro level audio production studio just to mention a few things.

Laptop - Dell Precision 7750, Xeon CPU, 64 GB RAM, bought with Ubuntu pre-installed. Beast of a laptop, superior thermals, wipes the floor with a mac.

Phone - Google Pixel. I consider that a lesser evil choice to Apple's walled garden. It's rooted, I don't see any ads, etc.

Tablet - Google Pixel Slate. High end tablet with 16 GB RAM running Chrome OS which supports native linux apps for a while now.

These were all more or less state of the art devices at the time of buying, I have absolutely no need whatsoever to to even think about Apple or Microsoft.

Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#202

Post by randomdata »

scoopertrooper wrote: post #144
randomdata wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think people are just getting a little too worked up over this whole thing. They aren't, but the blame is misguided. This isn't a problem with Apple. What is Apple going to do if they do detect something identified as CSAM on your device? Refuse to sell you another? Oh well. The real worry is what other parties will do if they get ahold of the information. That is what needs to be fixed. Apple is exposing the und…

Apple have said what they're going to do. If the number of hash hits reaches 30, then they'll scale the image down and send it off to their manual review team. If they confirm it's CP, then they call the police.

Exactly. They're not going do much of anything. It is what happens after the final step outlined that actually concerns people, and that is where the real problem lies. Apple is simply exposing the problem; or perhaps more accurately bringing the problem we all understand exists into the limelight. Had Apple not implemented this feature, or implemented it differently (scanning server-side, for example), the problem would still be there.

Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#203

Post by rvz »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #95
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can get my photos scanned against a CSAM database... or I can have Google tracking my location constantly That's a false dichotomy. There are competitors offering various levels of maturity and functionality. Jolla exists, PinePhone, Xiaomi, Librem 5, dumb phones, POTS landline, no phone... And yes, Linux on the desktop is also a valid choice . It most likely won't track you either.

There's a reason why that's 98%+ of the market. There is a dichotomy between the two camps in the smartphone market, everyone else is fringe. On the fringe, good luck using banking apps, transit apps, vehicle rental apps, or other apps increasingly necessary and useful. I don't think you know what you are talking about when you mentioned Xiaomi as an option. That would be among the dumbest options you could possibly…

> Linux on the desktop is a valid choice, but as I said above, don't tell me to switch to it, it's just not practical in my life.

For Desktop, if I have to choose between macOS CSAM spyware of paying users or the Linux ecosystem and its tiny userbase of unpaid users I would go for using and targeting the paid users since they are the ones paying the bills and thats where the money is.

For smartphone alternatives, the phones themselves are still immature as well as the Linux phone software ecosystem which is again still light years behind. If they can't even run the same Android apps on modern Android devices, then it is close to no chance.

If they don't hurry up, Google Fuchsia will steam-roll them silently.

> I've tried over a dozen distributions since 2011 and probably over fifty releases of them, and Linux isn't there.

Likewise, with the GUI software I'm writing, 'Defining Linux support' is something that is not worth doing given that there are tons of distros out there and by selecting one or two distro's there will always be an endless amount of people asking to support X distro or Y distro.

Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#204

Post by merpnderp »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #108
carnitas wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple hashes all of your photos offline and then pinky promises to only check the hashes against the official on phone database when the user initiated an upload. The problem isn’t about wackos it’s about governments forcing Apple to do things with this new weapon

Every other cloud storage provider has implemented scanning since 2011-2013.

I haven't seen a single person concerned about Apple scanning photos in iCloud. The problem is entirely that the scan is happening on your personal phone with apparently some janky implementation that in one week has already shown to have serious flaws.

Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#205

Post by dmantis »

imwillofficial wrote: post #184
system16 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's less about privacy and more about what the invading actor will/can actually do. People are less concerned about the Chinese government's reach vs. the NSA or other three letter agencies in the US. I suppose if you are important enough to the Chinese government whatever they have on you could be used as blackmail, but most 'regular' people don't fall into that category.

> People are less concerned about the Chinese government's reach vs. the NSA Wait what? You’re 180 degrees wrong.

He is right. US has complete power over people on their soil and basically in Europe and Asia as well. They do a LOT of extraditions of other countries citizens when they go traveling or to business trips from their citizenship countries.

China, on the other hand, does not seem to give a single f* about foreigners, only about their own citizens. Most people are not so are not really endangered even if chinese spyers do know what they handle on their phones. So in battle between US spyers/China spyers I'd better give my data to Chinese, if I don't have a choice not to share my data at all.

China, as well, don't try to make extraterritorial laws (like financial regulations), so it's harder to even be targeted by CCP if your are a foreigner.

Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#206

Post by vbezhenar »

I'm waiting for Macbook 16" announce and then I'll decide whether to move to Apple ecosystem or to stay at PC and migrate to android.

My PC future plans would be:

Smartphone: Google Pixel, optionally with AOSP, but I'm not sure.

Laptop: most powerful Dell Precision with Fedora Linux. It should have Nvidia GPU. I'll install Windows in KVM and with GPU passthrough I'll be able to play some games.

Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#207

Post by dont__panic »

zepto wrote: post #141
jrockway wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's using my electricity and my silicon to call the cops on me. We have no idea what hashes they're checking images against; we can't see the raw data, and we can't see the hashes, and we can't see what they're sending to their servers. There is no technical reason why this needs to exist. If they want to scan iCloud photos for something, they can do that on their servers. iCloud is not end-to-end encrypted. Law…

> iCloud is not end-to-end encrypted Yet. Have you considered that this might be a necessary precursor to making iCloud e2e?

If the goal was to make iCloud e2e, why not release both features at the same time so people can see that they're codependent (in Apple's eyes)? Without any kind of announcment or promise of e2e iCloud, we're just speculating for possible reasons why this might be OK. Might as well guess that this is going to allow Apple to give us free iCloud storage, too, while we're coming up with wishlist features.

Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#208

Post by bengale »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #91
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #26

To be honest... None. It's a choice. You might wholly disagree, but recent events aren't enough to get me to switch yet, because I think the competition has too many tradeoffs. I can get my photos scanned against a CSAM database... or I can have Google tracking my location constantly regardless of what they say (as they've been proven to be misleading in the past)... or I can use a Linux phone and say goodbye to batt…

I'm reasonably confident that Google listens to every conversation I have within earshot of my phone. It isn't uncommon to find things in my news feed that are related to things I have no interest in but a friend or coworker had just mentioned to me in passing.

Yeah I can't decide on this one. Part of me thinks this can't be happening, and that someone would have realised. But there's been a couple of occasions that go beyond the "creepy coincidence" ads to something that I was speaking with my wife about that day and neither of us had put into the internet, suddenly we get ads for it.

Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#209

Post by NationalPark »

nicce wrote: post #158
NationalPark wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conspiracy that never dies. I think it's so sticky because people feel very uncomfortable when they realize how much Google knows about you without having to listen.

It is not conspiracy. There is literally an option on your Google account to stop using mic for collecting data. On older accounts, it is enabled by default.

Are you referring to the voice assistant telemetry? That's not passively recorded according to Google, but if you have evidence to the contrary I can think of a number of news outlets (and prosecutors in 2 party consent states) that would love to have it.

Re: Ask HN: What Apple alternatives are you switching to?

#210

Post by alpaca128 »

cfeduke wrote: post #120
sjaak wrote: post #24

I'm thinking of getting one of these: https://frame.work/ Any people here with experience with one?

I had tried configuring one a couple of weeks ago, but the website was having problems. I haven't owned a PC laptop in several years - the last one I tried was a System76 with an abysmal keyboard. Turns out I need to type to have a functional laptop! I ordered one of these Framework machines today, should ship in September. Seems promising. I am hoping that things just work after I install Linux on it and I can get d…

> I am hoping that things just work after I install Linux on it

Apparently Linux runs everything out of the box except the fingerprint reader. It's still unknown whether there'll be an official fix and when.

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