I mean, how simple is it? You know the deal, everyone knows the deal, and yet you still buy the damned pig and then complain about it afterwards!?
I mean, sure .. advocating for better behavior from major corporations is a fine thing to do, but it's hard not to view that as hypocritical if you still buy their products. If you care, shop elsewhere. That's the only complaining that really works.
Or you could consider the possibility that all available options on the market have downsides worthy of critique, and you're not helping anything (except maybe corporate interests) by painting people in a bad light for choosing one of them and still voicing that criticism. It's the same logic that says "why don't you leave the country and move somewhere else" if someone criticizes a government, or goes "curious, but you still buy food" when people criticize food companies.
... a "clear alternative" that has downsides too, that someone might very well consider to be equally bad or worse. Which they somehow only could point out as long as they didn't choose it?
I think the thing that irks me about this discussion is mostly the tone. The whiny, entitled, "I demand that Apple makes a device that suits me exactly, and if they don't, they're a bunch of fascist assholes" vibe really annoys me.
There are two things that are genuinely productive: supporting alternative phones (PinePhone, Librem 5, Jolla, OpenMoko, etc) and their software, and lobbying governments to impose regulatory constraints. I'd love to see more people doing them.
There's thread on HN, where father tells a story of child bullied for not having an iPhone and gets bullied himself by HN for being bad father, that doesn't want to buy his son an iPhone.
I don't agree that shopping elsewhere is the only complaining that works. When you publicly complain about a corporate policy, you can raise awareness in others and build a consensus. If enough people agree with you, the company may feel compelled to change course, or sometimes even legislation is enacted. Or a competitor will notice the swell of unmet demand and step in with a better product.
But if all you do is keep to yourself and stop buying, then your protest begins and ends with you. So, certainly not always, but at least sometimes griping and grousing works.
“If you don’t like the country’s politics just move elsewhere”. Switching to another ecosystem is not easy for many very obvious reasons. And honestly this “shop elsewhere” argument reminds me of the early iphone days, when iphones didn’t have i.e. multitasking. There were a lot of the similar “go buy a windows phone then” arguments. iPhones got multitasking at the end of the day, and both groups benefited from it.
I don’t care about openness too much. Though, the ability to side load is nice to have, that’s that. I am not going to swap between ecosystems, I want the ecosystem that I am using to change.
The thing I don’t quite understand - why do you bother? Having the ability to side load doesn’t affect you in any possible way.
Do entertain us with your view of the world of operating systems, please. Windows is not the only OS around, this point is completely irrelevant. Anybody can install anything on Linux/Macos/Android system and the heavens did not fall yet.
> why buy
It does meet my requirements, that’s why. I’ve never said it doesn’t.
If you judge “quality” by “the ability to sideload”, an iPhone is not “quality”. I’m sure you also want user replaceable parts. In that case, why spend thousands on products that don’t meet your needs?