11–20 of 83 posts
Turns out, you need to also convince a whole lot of people to vote with you to have an impact. And then you have the whole group of people who would rather put up with Apple's annoyances than switch to something unfamiliar and annoying in its own ways.
Voting with your wallet is only step 1.
It's not good enough now to vote with your wallet, you need to vote with your time and wallet.
This argument is tired when at the end of the day, demand for some products is more or less inelastic and the majority of consumers consume them because all the alternatives are equally enshittified.
For example I moved off cloud services for my media in favour of fixing up a $25 BDP-CX960 400-disc bluray player with a few bucks in parts and a few weekends. When someone complains to me about modern tech, I can't in earnest recommend it though because its not easy. But I can write about it or tell them about it to expose them to the mindset more. Articles like this help IMO.
I haven't purchased an Apple product for myself since the classic iPod over 20 years ago, yet nothing has changed. Turns out, you need to also convince a whole lot of people to vote with you to have an impact. And then you have the whole group of people who would rather put up with Apple's annoyances than switch to something unfamiliar and annoying in its own ways. Voting with your wallet is only step 1.
Vote with your vote! Our system is dysfunctional in the united states, but if you look at the political unity behind something like blocking datacenter construction and how much of a headache it's causing for big tech, it's clear we still can have an effect. Most of the problem with big tech are solvable through existing anti-trust institutions IF we actually empower them. Things got bad because we stopped enforcing the rules; the rules used to work.
There is a puzzle piece missing from this article and others like it, which I think is crucial but often overlooked. It's not enough to "vote with your wallet", you also need to make it very public and very clear "why" you're casting that vote at all. Otherwise execs are typically more than happy to infer a completely wrong "why", and are very happy to not understand the real reasons, because a) either the real reaso…
I haven't purchased an Apple product for myself since the classic iPod over 20 years ago, yet nothing has changed. Turns out, you need to also convince a whole lot of people to vote with you to have an impact. And then you have the whole group of people who would rather put up with Apple's annoyances than switch to something unfamiliar and annoying in its own ways. Voting with your wallet is only step 1.
3D printers
Torrent clients
Unlicensed radios
DJI drones
Custom firmware
(FOSS in general)
So far AI has democratised SaaS based products. I’ve vibe coded many niche web apps that is very specific for my use case rather than paying for a generic service. However, I cannot do that with iOS. I practically cannot install and keep on using an app that I created without any interruption on the phone that I paid more than 1k$ to buy.