Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

Don’t forget that option C) “none of the above”, is no longer viable since we’ve reorganized the world around the smartphone. The analog alternatives for basic, vital life transactions are dwindling or eliminated in many circumstances.

When you make the mistake of voting with your wallet, you play a game you are bound to lose. There are people with billions of dollars that can outvote basically anyone with an opinion about this. And most people buying consumer products are not treating it like a vote, they are treating it like a purchase of a thing they need, and the monopolistic autocrat of trade that is Apple happens to be very good at producing those things. The base of their power are people who don't care, or people who cannot afford to care (i.e. they need the hardware no matter how bad Tim Apple pisses them off).

The advantage of voting with your actual votes is that there is no malapportionment: one vote is one vote. You don't get more votes by being richer. Your vote is not conditional upon buying a product.

And to be clear, I'm writing this on my Framework laptop which I deliberately bought because I like the concept and I didn't want to deal with Apple's nonsense. I grinned and bore several years of Intel mediocrity, broken sleep, a fingerprint reader that only works half the time, and an increasingly unreliable[1] trackpad until I could buy a new motherboard[0] that gave this thing reasonable amounts of battery life. I have voted with my wallet, I just don't think it's actually good for any political change.

In contrast, the EU managed to get Apple to piss its pants multiple times, and has done way more for rolling back Apple's monopoly than a handful of turncoats ever could.

Does it look silly that Theo is using Apple while complaining about Apple? Yes.

Would Theo chucking all that Apple tech out the bin to be politically consistent do anything? No.

also

> In it, Theo spends an hour ranting about how terrible the experience of developing apps for the iPhone/iPad is, how Apple takes 30% of all app store and in app purchases, how awful Xcode is as a development environment and how even as a developer you have to get Apple's approval to run your own app on your own device. And how you need a second device (MacBook) to build an app for your target device (iPad) because Apple won't allow you to build the app straight on the iPad itself. And a lot more.

The funny thing is, basically all of these have been Apple edicts from day 1. Xcode was never good. But what I find really galling about all this is that Apple actually does have a way to build apps on iPad... if you're willing to totally marry yourself to Swift and SwiftUI. When Apple announced real app development on Swift Playgrounds, I assumed more improvements and capabilities would follow, but Swift Playgrounds is such a low-tier priority for Apple they can barely even keep it up to date with the iOS SDK - it wasn't until months after iPadOS 26 where you could actually build apps to work on Liquid Glass. Then again, that's symbolic of basically everything Apple does with the iPad: it's an aspirational computer, something that exists mainly for Apple to dream of a world where all work can fit inside nice containerized and locked-down workflows and nobody ever needs to go off the golden path.

[0] Intel Core Ultra Series 3 specifically, as a friend of mine informed me it could idle better than the AMD one, even though the AMD had better peak perf.

[1] The diving board mechanism on my Framework 13 has worn to the point where the activation point does NOT coincide with the click anymore, and it's also developed a significant keybounce problem. I have to click multiple times and really reef on the trackpad to get it to register. I've also damaged the bottom cover... so I'm really just waiting for the battery to cack out before I just buy a 13 Pro bottom upgrade kit and replace all of it.

There is still a subset of people who still think Apple's 30% is a religious tithe to keep the App Barbarians out rather than an usurious tax, but those people got a lot quieter once Tim Cook started bribing Trump with shiny plaques.

One other issue with antitrust action against Apple is that, strictly speaking, Apple did nothing (legally) wrong. The mistake we made was in the 1970s when we decided to grant the protections of creative expression to computer code[1]. Apple's argument - which, so far, courts have been willing to accept without issue - is that they are allowed to charge whatever they want for their work. It is very difficult (though not impossible) to argue that Apple deciding to bill developers for the OS instead of users is anticompetitive - in fact, Epic's lawsuit failed specifically on those grounds.

Anyway, you should probably bug your politicians to sponsor OAMA, or whatever new bill is being introduced to replace OAMA. The solution to Apple has to be legislated, not litigated.

Aside from that, the rest of Big Tech is significantly more vulnerable to antitrust than Apple is. Breaking up Facebook would actually be way more consequential than you think. Basically all of Facebook's apps were things bought specifically to destroy competition. They control the political narrative in every country in ways most newsmedia would only dream of[2]. There's a book you ought to read - Careless People - written by an ex-Facebook exec that Mark Zuckerberg is currently trying to sue into the ground.

[0] "Super apps" and third-party Apple Watch pairing

[1] To be clear, I do NOT believe code should be considered expression and I have far less qualms about AI slop code than I do AI slop art.

[2] This is also why Elon Musk bought Twitter - although, in that case, he was a lot less successful than Zuck was.

[3] To be clear, if any DOJ attempted to sue Apple over the 30% today, it'd probably fail at the pleading stage.