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Vote with your wallet. Fuck them.

You shouldn’t have to use LLMs to run your software.

Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.

> Vote with your wallet.

Apple is too big for that. Hard regulation is the only way out right now. Maybe breaking them up too.

> Apple is too big for that. Hard regulation is the only way out

Apple is not 'too big' for savvy customers to choose differently but all the Mag 7 tech companies are too big for regulation to be a 'way out'. They now all have 'Regulatory Compliance' divisions which are about compliance as much as the 'Ministry of Truth' is about truth. Instead they are filled with highly-paid former regulators, lobbyists and lawyers who use their inside knowledge to avoid, skirt or nullify regulatory impact.

Company strategies are now purposely designed at conception to be almost impossibly difficult to prosecute or enforce. It's been working so well over the last decade that when the size of the prize is big enough, mega-tech corps are increasingly willing to just overtly violate regulations knowing they can fight in court for years until the govt settles for a reduced fine that's less than the profit already made.

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I think that it is necessary a radical political change in the US, akin to a revolution, to be able to pass and enforce meaningful regulation against big tech companies. It's the same as going against the military-industrial complex or big finance. They integrated themselves to this power structure that guarantees their interests come first not only in internal policy, but also in foreign policy. Big tech is a limb of the US empire.
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No it's not. You can vote with your wallet right now. Nothing is stopping you.
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> Apple is too big for that.

I think you're wrong, but even if you're right, why wouldn't you vote with your wallet anyway?

You alone might not hurt Apple much, but it could certainly help whatever upstart competitor you choose to support.

I have not purchased any Apple or Google products in a decade. Straight up ignoring them is a perfectly viable call in the modern world.
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It's not only about driving Apple out of business. If you don't use Apple, you simply don't have to deal with any Apple bullshit. All your Apple-related worries just disappear. And you even have enough money left over to afford a separate non-rooted phone for your bank (in the unlikely event you need one).
I’ll vote with my vote thank you. My table’s manufacturer shouldn’t get a say in what I put on my table, and Apple shouldn’t get a say about my phone either.

These clearly anti-consumer practices should just be illegal.

Which country does this vote happen in?

Last I heard even EU policy was ways off of that target.

Also: EU policy is very shcceptible to political tides. Sure now we love to scream sovereignty from the rooftops but that is guaranteed to change eventually.

> Apple shouldn’t get a say about my phone either.

They operate the factories manufacturing the phones. They have total say about their phones, and you have no say. Your almighty powers within the Linux terminal doesn't extend beyond it.

And my table manufacturer operates the factories that makes it, that doesn't mean we give them the right to dictate how we use it.
Nobody is stopping you from taking apart your iPhone and using AI to reverse engineer it and run custom software. Apple has made it as difficult as they can, but they haven't made it illegal, and they haven't even made it impossible, so from the law's perspective there is nothing to fix here. The law just sees yet another thing that nobody's bothered to do yet. The law wouldn't pass a regulation requiring Apple to make it easier to reverse engineer an iPhone any sooner than it would pass a regulation requiring Coca-Cola to make it easier to reverse engineer their formula.

Note that earlier this year, a YouTuber did reverse engineer the Coca-Cola formula because nothing was actually stopping someone from doing it, all this time. You could be that guy for iPhones.

Nobody dictates how you can use your iPhone either. You can do anything with it physically that you are capable of. Apple will never say a word.

Just like Apple with their products, the table manufacturer decides the exact measurements and materials of the table. You vote with your wallet and purchase the product you prefer, or make your own if you are capable.

> Nobody dictates how you can use your iPhone either ... physically

Come on. You know very well what we're talking about. This whole discussion started about software. Can I can load any app I want? Can I remove any app I want? I can remove their ads from my phone?

No of course not. I can put my app on my phone only if they bless it. I can't sell an app to another iPhone user and have them use it without apple's blessing. I can't remove the ads they keep spamming me for iCloud, or whatever service they release this month.

And please don't tell me it's because I get a license rather than a purchase since that's exactly my point. You wouldn't accept a license agreement for your table, and there would be outrage and major public backlash if any they tried; "Here's your made in china table, you are not allowed to place an American flag on it".

But because it's sprinkled with magic software dust, we have people in comment threads simping for the right of companies to do this to their customers.

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I'll vote with my vote as well, and my vote will not be for candidates who equate computers with tables. Hacking isn't a human right. Go buy a different phone if you don't like Apple's phones. There are a bunch to choose from.
Idk what point you think you're making, but human rights aren't an absolute law of nature, it's something we decide on.

> Hacking isn't a human right.

Hacking is such a loaded term for "the right to use the thing I purchased how I see fit".

> Go buy a different phone if you don't like Apple's phones. There are a bunch to choose from.

This is beside the point (and may not always be true). The ability for the manufacturer of a thing I bought and ostensibly own to tell me how to use my property.

It's really not that hard to understand. The fact that it's a computer doesn't change anything.

I agree with you except that "Hacking isn't a human right" part
This comment made me think that someone should pull an ArtCraft on Android or iOS by making a good linux phone skin, with high performance auto-updating wrappers for various web apps to make them as convenient as mobile native ones. Then we can actually ditch the big corps and bask in our LLM-enabled open source utopia. Hmmmmm.
Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive

I don't expect that to happen, but I do expect Apple et al to spend trillions of tokens hardening their platforms against users and red-teaming to find these sorts of holes before release.

Fair point. The megacorps probably are able to outspend pretty much any grassroots mmovement bar maybe a government led one.
> Vote with your wallet

The loss of your purchase is insignificant compared to the money Apple and Google make from their walled gardens.

Plus what other viable options are there in this duopoly?

Apparently there’s a popular 3rd option in Asia but is there any support for western apps? And how are you going to convince a million other people to switch?

Many Android phones are not unlockable without hacking. They use cryptography to protect the bootloader and to get the unlock code for your own phone first you need to provide them all your information.
Where would you point said wallet? Google isn't far behind Apple on this from, ahead in some ways, and many (all?) of the FOSS Linux powered phones cost even more than iPhones do.
Then maybe you’re onto something here: the hardware is subsidized. Point being that if you want the cheaper, subsidized device, you have to make some compromises.
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> and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.

Running local models is getting -cheaper- every month in spite of rising hardware costs due to intelligence compression innovations like Bonsai2.

I build operating systems for a living using only consumer GPUs at home.

> Vote with your wallet

If that would work, I'd be writing this on my iPhone Mini.

It did work. You're just a very small minority of users, as are most people here.
What is your current phone?
>Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.

The local inference threshold has been crossed already. Its possible to achieve big model like performance through agent harnesses with local models.

There are already open weight models that are quite capable and can use any provider.
> Vote with your wallet. Fuck them.

Easier said than done. Because, "Apple can do no wrong" is the general public perception. Look at any wrongdoing by Apple - whether they were caught slowing down the phones, degrading cameras on purpose or even the lawsuit where they were caught spying on people's voice recordings. There will always be some NPC defending them as if the billion dollar corporation gives a shit about them.

That or "Apple is the only pro-privacy company in the world" despite there being an active lawsuit against them for the exact opposite.

So, I say: Vote with your wallet. Fuck them...and the fanboys.

> degrading cameras on purpose

What's this about? I can't find anything, except some random Reddit posts.

> Vote with your wallet.

But what are the options?

This. The only mainstream alternative is Android, and I'm already "voting with my wallet" against Samsung, Google, and the rest for violating user privacy even more than Apple does.
And while you're at it, make real change happen in the US national elections by voting for a third party! That'll show them!
How are running local ones going to become cost prohibitive? Indications are that Nvidia has been channel stuffing (artificially inflating perceived demand), which suggests massive oversupply of GPUs.
> Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.

If Murican lobbying/corruption tries to snuff AI that threatens the Hutt cartels, China will accelerate it.