Apple’s agreement is that if you trust Apple, their stuff is the best in the business - if Apple is not a weak link, it’s real hard to argue with the design, and the ease of use and UX for the level of security you get is unequal anywhere else. Apple’s side of the bargain is you pay them money, and lots of it.

If you don’t trust Apple, you’re on your own - you can probably recreate all this on a FOSS stack, but you’re gonna have to do it repeatedly for everything, and you’re on the hook for explaining it to everyone you know so they can use it, too. It’s not that you _can’t_ do it yourself, it’s just a whole lot harder than if you accept the bargain and trust Apple.

Whether or not you want to do that is up to you, but I don’t think anyone’s in the dark on what the bargain is.

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vineyardmike 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> you can probably recreate all this on a FOSS stack, but you’re gonna have to do it repeatedly for everything

I’m honestly surprised in the age of vibe-coding we haven’t seen someone try to build out a direct “open walled garden”.

AI could solve the basic coverage on every operating system and screen shape, while the various p2p technologies have gotten really good and when combined with mDNS and maybe an encrypted byo-cloud-storage (eg drive, Dropbox, etc APIs) for async data synching. The nerd side is build a data sync layer, then a variety of apps and products can be built on top of it.

It doesn’t necessarily need to work as well as Apple, nor as rich features, it just needs to support enough devices well enough to allow heterogeneous-platform households or friends to share what they need.

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roughly 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, so this is also why there’s a raft of stuff Apple will never support integrations with. They’ll bill it under security, and they’re not entirely wrong, but it’s also a threat to their core value prop, so you’ll never get open source iMessage, for example.

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halJordan 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Are you kidding me? The absolutely vile vitriol that the members of the open source/modding/FOSS/self-hosting communities have been spitting out for actual years now, against ai and against vibe coding and against the people who use either has been so tremendously effective. And you want to know why someone hasn't used ai to gift you an entire ecosystem? What an incredibly out of touch statement to have to read on this site, where so much of the vitriol lives even today.

	▲	astrange an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Vibe coding hasn't existed for years, has it?

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elictronic 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Please spend tokens recreating Homeassistant. Signed -AI companies.

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j45 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All the trust is just one decisions or change away from current state.

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Barbing 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That’s part of the agreement too. Ternus or next guy/gal messes up one huge thing in any significant way, trust is burned and they’re just another Google.

(They are on watchlist for Apple Maps & other ads…)

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roughly 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And the reason to trust Apple is because they recognize this - they’re not under any illusion about why their products command a premium, and so the security and privacy angle is (or should be) one of the sacred cows inside Apple.

And you’re absolutely right - as soon as they break the value proposition, the value of their package and the price people are willing to pay for it drops in half and they’ve all the sudden gotta compete with Google and Samsung and Huaiwei and the rest of that jungle, and that market sucks.

	▲	j45 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I understand the argument that the lesser of two bad options is the better one. The massive issue in all of this is digital identity. Everyone is a citizen of a private corporation without any rights or access points to their digital identity. Humans rely on our digital identity (email accounts, iCloud, google, etc) for nearly everything. In many ways, it's like the equivalent of using our license or other ID in physical spaces. Except, humans are relying on digital identities provided as digital citizens of corporations (Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc), whereby they do no have teh same recourse that official access points of data do. If at any given time, the majority of the identity providers are generally or ultimately not on the side of the identity holders (human) wrt to their inalienable rights. There's no easy answer for this. Convenience has been used as a massive tradeoff for security for 10-15 years to the point that most people don't know better, or that there were and can be better options. Downplaying the fact that the single change of a few sentences could change for worse the promises any corporation makes (it's not entitled to serve the user's needs first, after all). Security and Privacy in Apple certainly seem to be better, but are not the best they could be. Privacy and security, especially where it comes to protecting people from increasing threats online including AI bots, is not going to come from corporations alone, they haven't been able to build or roll them out while they learn at the expense of people. There's no answer being pointed to, only that Apple being the only vendor with some promises isn't very good at all.

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j45 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are valid arguments to owning your hardware independent of the software that runs on it.

Otherwise you don't really own your hardware.

LLMs will be able to secure (and insecure) more and more hardware as time goes on.

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dd8601fn 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

More than one. The Apple Wallet fiasco, apple maps thing, etc have tested customer perception, before. Even some utter bullshit ones like the battery thing… they still sound like trust violations to dummies.

There’s some resilience, there.

	▲	j45 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Some resilience there for sure, sometimes the products were just plain early... Apple Maps comes to mind when it first came out, it took a while for it to become more.. complete. The new ability to add one's own passes to Apple Wallet is nice though. Long overdue.

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DaiPlusPlus 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> their stuff is the best in the business

And yet, won't let me control my Nest Thermostat

(I'm not saying this is exclusively Apple's fault: the lack of Nest interop is Google's fault, but Apple isn't making it easy for third-parties to build Apple-Google bridges either)

	▲	elictronic 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That's a Nest issue, not an apple one. Google neutered their own API as of 2019, then did even more shenanigans after that. It's a google product, assume it will be killed the moment whoever is actively working it sees a new shiny.
	▲	vineyardmike 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The new nest thermostats can be controlled by Apple Home fwiw (They support Matter protocol)
	▲	FireBeyond 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I find it frustrating that I can’t drive HomeKit externally. I have a large home ecosystem, something in the order of 100 devices, from lights to outlets to motion sensors to security and locks to the garage door, some native and some bridged via HomeBridge. I have a bunch of scenes and automations. But I have, for example, a couple of Brilliant smart wall panels (one gang sized little panels with lighting and other controls) that I have to duplicate because despite the Brilliant being able to expose devices as a bridge to HomeKit I can’t say “Run this Scene” because Apple doesn’t allow external integrations to do so.

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Loquebantur 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You're in the dark yourself already, as you frame the bargain in a simplistic way. You imply, this was just about having "nice stuff" and the lack of short-term alternatives was imposing merely a life-style choice upon you.

The systemic "lack of alternatives" is steering you, you confuse "not knowing alternatives" with the actual absence of alternatives and ignore possible further implications entirely.

The pattern is systemic capture, keeping you sedated about it is part of the scheme.

	▲	roughly 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Do I sound sedated?