Same. The fact they're shoving AI into it and expanding it to providers who don't have privacy as a guiding principle is a key reason I'm sitting on a 14 Pro still, and why I'm exploring local alternatives with Home Assistant.

Besides, we just need to set verbal timers and control music. We don't need a full-blown verbal Oracle.

No. "You have to unlock your iphone first" is such a hindrance to using Siri for anything more than setting timers and alarms. If you're doing anything that involves gloves or a mask or getting your hands messy, like in a kitchen or something, it is just so frustrating. How about making a toggle so I can choose to be slightly less locked down for Siri, and I take full responsibility if I get hacked because of it.

Then a more reasonable response is: “we cannot as effectively monetize all of the data in our advertising platform disguised as another tool entirely unless we disable E2EE and we need to be able to allow not only ourselves but others to invade your privacy even more than we already do because it’s technologically difficult to do so when we encrypt your communications.”

Android was originally enticing because of iOS locking everything down and controlling the ecosystem

"Best" is subjective. But "caring about their users"? Their response to RtR alone shows they care about their margins more than their users.

“But I want my freedom, I want to install whatever I want, bad Apple for locking down my devices away from me.”

They stay rather secure because of all these measures. But they’ll get dismantled, too. Because idiots push idiots in power to weaken Apple’s stance. Useful idiots is the right term.

I’m less impressed with Zuck every time I hear something new about him.

Apple has made incredible progress in the last 20 years, but almost none of that has been a brand new product. It has all been evolving the existing products and on building the world’s best supply chain and rearing incredible market share from Windows. To be clear, AirPods are a much bigger market than Nike shoes. Those, plus Apple Watch, iPad and Vision Pro are new in the last 20 years.

In the past 20 years, the Facebook website has evolved, but all of the other major investments by the company have been acquisitions. Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus. Diem (or whatever that proprietary cryptocurrency was called) and the Metaverse were massive failures. I don’t know what to credit Meta for in the AI era except some of the LLAMA tooling and some open weights LLMs. CZI is doing cool things, but that’s Zuck’s private science company, not part of Meta.

Apple's response to the UK gov asking to see users' iCloud data says enough about where their priorities lie [1]. They do something far worse in China [2].

Don't fool yourself into believing Apple cares about your privacy. They care about money.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgj54eq4vejo

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-st...