I've been using an iPhone for the past 6 months or so, an older iPhone 12 Pro my wife used until she upgraded to the 16 Pro. I can't say too many bad things about the os itself, since it feels like a walled garden android and the software quality is actually worse on IPhone, but it might be the aging chip on it.

I can't wait to go back to Android though, because of all the reasons you mentioned.

Good news would be them strategically repositioning in favor of their mid-90s image. Would be hard, but doable.

Green energy, autonomous devices, openness to tinkering, friendliness, "other companies mess with you and we don't", perhaps some retrofuturism. It wouldn't even be out of character, they sort of hold the window open, with the kind of series on AppleTV they are making, and part of their advertising, and even honestly with their devices being not yet as enshittified.

Just do that for real.

And honestly, Apple is not the worst of these companies. Perhaps they were just worse at baiting.

In general, over years I'm slowly becoming more and more appreciative of Apple. Their advertising is just atrocious and their stuff is very expensive in, eh, pretty outrageous ways (like a charger costing like some devices together with their chargers), but that's pretty open and honest. "We sell you that for our humongous price, we say it's miraculous and magically cool, and it seems like a scam, but you can say no". While with Google and Meta and such they first sell you something looking normal, and then farm and abuse you indefinitely.

So I'd wish for Apple to survive the bubble bursting (for which I hope they don't go the AI way) and become a more general-kind computing company. Maybe hold closer to 50% of personal computing in the world, not the luxury niche they are holding now.

Apple phone** my thinking is not my typing

All these tech giants have their own area where they are the absolute worst, and other areas where they're not as bad as some of the others.

Apple sucks on app store restrictions, but on the desktop OS, the respect user privacy more than Google and MS do. Google is the absolute worst on ads, tracking and using search to leverage their monopoly, but they've also made a ton of cool stuff, including Android. MS makes the worst piece of shit OS and forces everybody to use it while they make it worse, but I'm sure there's also something they do right.

but they’ve also made a ton of cool stuff, including Android.

Symbian and Maemo were better.

Also Nokia was the only non-US company of these.

Yeah, real shame Maemo never got anywhere. I really liked the idea.

So what you're saying is that they're like one of two women in a lesbian Japanese scat film, like, they're going to get paid but where they used to be the woman taking a shit on the other woman's mouth, now they're the ones whose mouths are getting shat on?

I thought this was a really fascinating video, since Apple Explained is one of the biggest Apple-Stans on youtube. He finally realized that his favorite company is wrought with greed, and was willing enough to make a video about it. The content or his ideas don’t necessarily matter; it’s his revelation that’s intriguing.

I'm sure there's also something they do right.

VS code continues to be an amazing product. Of course it's Microsoft so it has a confusing name, there is VS code and VS Code Studio which is a different, and terrible product.

Isn't there supposed to be a phone OS from Mozilla as well. No idea what's happening with that.

VS is itself short for Visual Studio, the first IDE I ever used, and the first MS product I liked. So VS Code Studio means Visual Studio Code Studio.

Why Visual? Because 25 years ago MS was pushing Visual C++, where you would drag and drop visual components together and then figure out where to put the C++ code to make them work.

Yeah I know. Like I said it's a stupid name, one only Microsoft would ever come up with.

Calling it visual studio is redundant now because visual studio code doesn't actually have anything to do with visual studio anymore, it's just an IDE for a load of different languages, none of which necessarily have anything to do with Microsoft or Visual Studio. Yet it still called VS Code.

At this point the VS effectively doesn't really stand for anything.