You’re 100% correct, but I will point out that the iPhone hasn’t really seen any significant design changes since the 11 - arguably the X. That was seven years ago. The same thing has been happening with their Macbook lineup where only just recently have they made major product design changes to replace their 10+ year old designs. The new Macbook Pros were a welcome breath of fresh air and indicated a shift in a new, positive direction for their Mac platform. *

The iPhone needs a similar refresh, imho.

*for the hardware, at least. They’ve made some questionable software choices for MacOS such as iPhone-ifying the settings menu.

It’s an LG G8. One of the few phones that has a high quality DAC and amplifier in it. It sounds amazing with a good set of earphones and has plenty of options to tweak to your liking.

I wanted a dedicated DAP such as one made by Fiio, but they are astronomically expensive. My LG G8 was $200 after tax and a Fiio M11S is $700 before tax. I could bargain hunt for a better price but the G8 would always be cheaper. And because it’s a phone, it has more features and power than most dedicated music players (many of them are powered by ancient chips and struggle to do basic tasks) I just stick a large SD card into it and put it into airplane mode if I’m not using a streaming service.

I likely will when my contract expires. But for now it is what I have.

The iPhone is stagnating really badly. This is yet another generation of overpriced, oversized, and overpowered glass slabs that bring nothing new of substance to the table. If anything, the interesting stuff is in iOS18 but that’s not saying much because iOS is kneecapped by its own limitations.

I got a 14 pro on sale a while ago and it’s simultaneously vastly overpowered for what I use it for and also frustratingly useless. All of that horsepower and tech… just sitting there doing nothing 97% of the time. It has 1tb of storage which is almost completely empty because you can’t use iPhones as storage. You can’t even drag-n-drop music onto them. I use an LG phone as my music player because it has both a headphone jack and allows me to simply drop my FLAC albums onto it.

There are ways to properly educate people on customer rights, privacy, right-to-repair, and ownership.

And then there is whatever annoying slop you just spewed out here. If you actually care about this and want to make a difference - do better.

I switched to an iPhone after having many similar hangups with Android devices over the years. Biggest for me was how little update/software support Android phones got. I think they’re better these days (or so I hope) but they had awful support for years. Buying a brand new Android phone and only getting 1 OS update and 2 years of security updates was not uncommon and I have several old Android phones in a drawer that succumbed to that fate.

My experiences with iOS have largely been positive but I do have some issues which annoy me constantly:

1. Apple’s ecosystem is great and is so polished and tightly integrated, but trying to do anything outside of that ecosystem is incredibly painful. You are actively punished when trying to do anything outside Apple’s box. Even something as simple as transferring music files from your PC to your phone is frustrating at best and impossible at worst.

2. Every. Goddamn. App. is a subscription. The app store is almost completely useless and I practically never use it. I’m not joking when I say that the vast majority of downloadable apps are subscription-based, and usually a WEEKLY subscription instead of monthly. Sorry, but I’m not paying $5/week for a goddamn calculator or weather app. This means that using an iPhone can be very frustrating if the stock apps don’t suit your needs. This reason alone is enough to make me want to jump ship again sometimes.

3. iCloud sucks. No other way to word this, really. It’s a relic of bygone times and Apple really needs to overhaul it and make it more useful in the modern day. Everything from the clunky, Fisherprice UI to the base storage which barely has enough gigabytes to hold a single fart. On one hand upgraded storage is only a few bucks a month. On the other hand I’m goddamn tired of subscriptions.

With AWD I’d be more concerned with the fuel consumption.

Not that I am aware of. Though one time someone made a Facebook account using my email. I was able to log in by requesting a password reset, then I posted a status message (or whatever) that said “Get your own goddamn email” and then changed to the password to gibberish and filed a account deletion request.

Capitalism is all about short-term profit. These sorts of long-term questions and concerns are not things shareholders and investors think or care about.

Further proof of this: Climate change.

Grass is green, water is wet, the sky is blue, and privacy settings don’t do anything.

I’ve had to cave and use some services (for work reasons) that I’d swore I would never use. No matter how much we value privacy and look for alternative software/services when possible - we still have to eat and pay bills.

If you are in the same boat and you must use services like that, then my advice would be to keep it strictly business. Keep your personal details and personal social connections to a minimum unless where it would be otherwise beneficial for work purposes.

For the kind of work I have been doing I have not needed to hand over any psd files. Photoshop is(was) only a small step in my workflow and the main thing I get hired for is 3D modelling services. Regardless, I still work with NDA’d content and Adobe’s terms are invasive as hell.

Just cancelled my Adobe sub. Even if I was comfortable with how they use my data (and I am most assuredly fucking not) I’m also uncomfortable with them helping themselves to the NDA’d projects I do for clients. I trialed Affinity Photo and it meets 98% of my needs and is on sale 50% off right now. Bite my ass, Adobe.

Welp, there goes my morning. Now I have to spend a few hours unfucking everything.

Never trusting this app ever again.

Lack of proper disposal facilities and/or fees for using said facilities. Easier to dump something in a lake or in the bushes than driving 40 minutes across town to a special facility and paying $30+ to dispose of it properly.

This is disabled if you turn off telemetry in the settings, which users should already be doing anyway. I don’t see this as any worse than what they already do.

Fair point.

Holy crap. They actually found a way to do it worse than Apple. Congrats, that’s quite an achievement.

Pubic hair is much, much thicker.

A lot of lists for private alternative email services start and and with Proton, seemingly. Services like Posteo, Mailbox, Hushmail, Fastmail, etc are frequently overlooked. It’s a shame because many of these other services are great and Proton is one of the most expensive and not suitable for everyone. I’ve been with Posteo for years and I have nothing but praise for it.