Yep, Tesla was my first thought as well.

> the most reliable signal american tech companies send is that they are primarily concerned with building a surveillance state

Sagacious point. With emphasising. This is how non-European web business look to everyone.

As a wise man once said, “Anything + computer = computer.”

Those terms of service used to be "you should keep your eyes on the road, we are not responsible if you have a crash while playing with your satnav/entertainment system" and "you're responsible for where you drive, so we are not responsible if the satnav tells you to drive off a cliff or into a closed road".

But now that we've trained users that they'll need to click accept on the screen, we can sneak any conditions we want in there about how we collect and use their data...

There is unsurprisingly an extensive account at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_system_fires,_...

At least historically Apple would also have to run slower, while still costing much more than Windows. If a part gave you trouble you'd be forced to buy parts from the dealership and they'd sometimes tell you that you needed a new car when the same part on Windows could be repaired or replaced cheaply by any repair shop. You'd only be able to drive the Apple car on a handful of toll roads, although they were well paved while windows cars could be driven all over the place for free, even off-road if necessary, although that often resulted in flat tires making a triple A membership necessary and leading to a common misconception that apple was immune to flats.

10 years ago I’d have agreed. Today it’s a shitty 3-series.

I think the hate for Microsoft is more based on its popularity rather than Apple being "better". Both have dubious business practices. Ads in the start menu? Apple constantly pushes iCloud and related subscriptions. Market abuse? Apple is well known to remake and then block competing apps from competitors. Stability? Everyone knows the spinning beachball of death but acts like it never happens. User unfriendly? Apple constanly modifies its hardware to hurt independent repair outlets.

I don't have that rosy 50's Chevy picture, it's more like a luxury coupe with a tighly locked hood. Sleek, desirable, you pay through the nose for every upgrade, and don't attempt to fix it yourself.

Not people who like their work trucks.

More like you press a button and self-shifts a la Transformer into an F16 or even an interdimensional shifting UFO visiting *BSD cousins.

Roads? In my daily computing I don't use roads. I just shift between portals (IRC/Bitlbee, Gopher, Gemini, AWK/TCL/Lisp, SLRN+mbsync+msmtp...)

Depends very much on the choice of the endless combinations something linux-based enables.

I didn't have it crap on me ever, since about two years, by choice of a so called 'rolling' gamer distro.

Looks very nice and comfy to me with KDE Plasma, and its Breeze (light) style, which is "automagically" applied to apps written for other toolkits/DEs like GTK/Gnome. Everything of what I do(mostly just browsing, some LibreOffice, remoting into other systems) is running ultrasmooth without lag, or stuttering, while almost always some music plays via YT in the background, without resorting to solutions which would pipe that via yt-dlp into mpv. It isn't necessary for me. On obsolete systems with Kaby Lake Core i5/7t :-) The only thing which could be called special or unusual about them, is that they have 32GB RAM. That may help, too. Oh, and the BIOS/UEFI/Firmware, from Lenovo.

Just don't buy crap.

When I was a kid, to start my dad's truck, you had to pull the ckoke, pump the gas a couple of times, start the engine, then slowly push the choke back in. That's a more obscure procedure than driving a car with a manual transmission these days.