Don’t get me wrong here, I love my apple products, wall garden or otherwise, they have served me many years and for creative projects, graphics and video I much prefer to use them, not because I don’t want to get my hands dirty in command lines and linux or to ‘give it a go’ to see if my hardware matches up with what the latest ubuntu can recognise — it just works, and in a real time world where everything is constantly changing, I wanna be 80% productive and 20% admin, I don’t get off on being the master controller.
However, with iOS 14 here and the current trend of “customising” the look of ya new iOS powered device (which mark my words apple with make a video out of to show how customisable they are now when android has been for years) it does ring some alarm bells for me in terms of where we are at in the apple plan and eco system culling they have been slowly doing for years now.
For me that really started coming to the fore when they fucked over that developer who made f.lux — that ended up getting integrated into the actual OS to dim the screen on desktops and a setting on mobile to remove the blue light to save fatigue on the eyes when looking at a screen at night. I guess having an innovative idea eventually just get’s gobbled up and integrated into the machine at a whim when you own the app store and can see the data.
We have certainly turned a corner where being up to date is becoming a moral dilemma in terms of security too — older devices, older chipsets, vulnerabilities, we could be actively partaking in 0 day situations without us knowing about it, the price of hardware, the planet and the cost of staying relevant and up to date and secure — that window has really closed in. The masses will continue to buy cheap and value to appear relevant and up to date not realising that potentially they are part of the problem.
More recently we have the epic/apple spat about pricing, even thou epic has made billions and corners the market with their gaming engine it appears not getting the maximum amount of money from apple frustrates them some what, getting a bunch of developers outraged while another generation of fresh faced app makers will quite happily take whatever they can get in this ever more competitive market place.
It took SO long for apple to allow the level of customising that they have now in iOS 14 and that was only really inspired from an apple that was released on a jailbroken version of the platform prompting them to like enough to bake it in, they were pulling at straws anywhere on the UI front where to go next so it’s a good short term plaster I guess.
Which leads me to the title of this post, companies like https://puri.sm should do very well out of this period of time — hardware that bakes in ethics, morals, protection and security of their sourced chips and chipsets, that’s the kind of movement we need to be getting behind if we want to see real innovation and open source freedoms.
I don’t enjoy seeing a developer spend many years coming up with a great idea for it to be wrapped up with a pretty bow and then no mention of the original developer who came up with the concept instead corporations just rail roading over the top of the innovator who put it in practice, reference and credit the OG always — not this hyped up “stay relevant” by squeezing out the original, you just kill all the developers innovative future projects to come, all they wanted was some milliseconds of fame.
Cheers for Reading,
