Apple’s ad network gets ‘preferential access to users’ data’ vs Facebook, Google

I had a very brief stint working on mobile ads in 2011, so I have some vague familiarity with the sausage factory and its implications for user privacy on mobile devices, and this is par for the course for Apple. A big part of their marketing strategy is duping people into thinking they're pro-user, when they're one of the most aggressively anti-user companies I can think of. What's really impressive is how successful the reality distortion field has been in nominally technical fora (HN included, though it's gotten much better in the last few years).

Apple may be certainly far from perfect when it comes to favoring their own software, but to say the company as a whole is aggressively "anti-user" is just hogwash.

Updates they have made to Safari, the App Store, and iOS generally have made millions of people more conscious of how applications they use every day consume and interact with their personal information. They've inspired other companies like Google to follow suit, and are having a huge impact on the targeted advertising industry.

Give credit where it is due.

Check into their ads data policy sometime - it's much, much, worse than the incumbents. but it's buried on the 3rd page of a PDF so they just got praise for releasing the PDF when it came out, only a few noticed

I wish anyone, anyone else would make competing operating systems & accompanying software suites that performed as well and required as little unproductive horseshit to keep working properly, and in fact worked as hard to make my life easier through useful integrations (little things, like auto-fill auth code from a text message—god, so nice).

I don't like them but any time I use something else I feel like I've made a big mistake, saving a little money at the cost of a ton of time. I didn't realize how much time I burned screwing with bad operating systems until I became a Mac, and later iOS, user. Please, someone compete with them. Anyone. Please. I don't want to be stuck with only one option for non-shit computing.

[EDIT] example: my dad gets a Chromebook. Great, these things are mostly aimed at non-tech folks, kids, and old people. And it's a relatively "small" OS in terms of what it does. Surely when I go to set it up for him I'll find it has accessibility features a least close to the quality of Mac and iOS. LOL nope, they suck. Seriously, I'm begging anyone out there who wants to try to compete with Apple, do it. Please. No-one is.

This is evidence of the reality distortion field.

It's like when they made the argument why Netflix/Spotify should pay them 30% of the proceeds of all sales because it's good for consumers and people actually bought it.

That's odd, because my operating system, available software repositories, and desktop environment are all pretty great.

Mine are too, if I devote a lot of time to futzing with them and tolerate a lot of nice-to-have features being absent or a pain to get working. Stripped-down Linux in something like dwm or i3 is really nice but you have to baby it to get it to a good place—that is, building up from a minimal distro is much easier to get to a pleasantly-working and predictable system than stripping down a big one—and then hope you don't need it to do something you didn't anticipate on short notice. KDE is OK as long as you don't do much with it (luckily, "not doing much with it" describes web dev pretty well, so far as what I need that's not server-features which are indeed more convenient and usable on Linux than macOS).

Desktop's a collection of locally-not-exactly-optimum-but-tolerable-but-actually-bad-if-you-zoom-out tech like systemd, pulseaudio, and Wayland (and xorg, for that matter) all of which could be good but kinda aren't.

Basically Linux is sort-of fine if I can carefully control the environment I use it in and don't care about nice to have features or its rough edges, mostly relating to display and audio stuff. Win10 is surprisingly OKish but is spyware and its built-in or related suite of productivity programs are worse than what macOS offers, for my purposes (I don't need interop with Office).

A lot of what I like about macOS I didn't realize I was missing my first 17ish years of using Windows and 10ish years of using Linux. Now other operating systems may have some very nice things (tiling wms! and... I struggle to think of another thing, actually) but fall down hard on a11y, not-unpleasant settings interfaces, associated software suite quality (god, Preview is good), and a bunch of little things that I didn't realize I was missing before.

Again: for the love of god, someone with capital please compete with macOS. You don't have to clone them, but care about battery life, performance, and holistic UX half as much as they do, and undercut them on price and/or freedom, and I'm there.

For the record my work machine right now is KDE on Debian in a VM on Windows because Linux (well, xorg and Wayland) hates my hardware and crashes ~hourly if I don't put it in a safe widdle VM away from all that mean ol' real hardware. My favorite distros are Gentoo and my new love, Void. I did the Linux-on-a-Thinkpad (gentoo, even!) thing in the early 00s. Windows user since 3.1. I honest-to-god think I was blind to how much time I was losing to my OS before I had to use a Mac for iOS dev. It's... a lot. That stuff feels like work, but man, it's not.

[EDIT] yes I know claiming two high-touch (though Void isn't, actually) distros as my favorites may seem hypocritical and a probable source of my issues but aside from a brief golden age in the first 2-3 years of Ubuntu when they were basically Debian with a nicer installer and less-obtuse defaults (like making any browser other than Firefox the default on a Linux desktop in '08) I've not experienced the heavier, batteries-included distros being less work than the lighter ones, unless you get incredibly lucky and the reports that your hardware works turn out to be actually true and not technically true, and the stars align, and you never plug anything new in. Plus they usually perform really poorly.

[EDIT EDIT] oh I thought of a second nice thing other operating systems have: ZFS.

Except that isn't how it works. Both Netflix and Spotify had app versions which support in-app purchase and only the sign-ups in-app resulted in Apple getting a cut.

The problem both of these companies had was that the option to sign up in-app and have Apple manage the subscription was more popular than they hoped.