> This all took me very much by surprise coz almost everything that was revolutionary about the iPhone... I was already doing all of that while it was announced.

I remember my friends and my tech fiend cousin sneering at the iPhone when it was launched for this reason. I got heckled for “overpaying” for an inferior product when they learned I bought an iPhone.

Yet my actual phone computing experience was mostly better than theirs with a few notable lags (copy and paste). They had a different idea of what the iPhone was like than my actual experience and they refused to believe anything else.

It was like they lived in a world where your phone choice was your identity. They saw themselves as being at the top of the phone ecosystem and having made the right choice. They simply would not allow any other phone to be good because it was an attack on the narrative at the core of their identity.

At the time I just didn’t care. My iPhone worked well and I wasn’t interested in endless playing with all the customizations and changes they were doing on their phones. It got the job done and I liked how it worked.

I think self hosting is similar: The people drawn to it think their setup is the pinnacle of computing, but many of them have been so out of the loop on modern cloud services that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to use a cloud service that works well. They’re stuck believing it’s all useless eye candy on an inferior product.

I even see the same thing when I use Mastodon. The whole federation thing is a massive drag. Having to do the dance to follow someone on a different server gets old. I miss being able to one click follow someone and not have to pay attention to what site I’m on. Yet bring it up to fediverse fans and many will scoff at the idea that it’s a hassle at all. They might argue it’s a small price to pay. So many refuse to admit that it’s not a good experience. Situations like this run deep in every self-hosted or distributed project I’ve seen. They cater to people who enjoy fiddling with projects and debugging things.

It doesn't have to be difficult to self-host. Like another commenter said, in a diffe world that could be the default. iCloud gives apps an API to sync. The backend doesn't have to be a data center, it could be a time capsule in your living room. You could connect using a private wireguard lan. The protocol could even be built out to support redundant time capsules in case one failed.

But my parents wouldn't want to pay $500 for the hardware, and companies don't want to give up the monthly fees.