Comment by thewebguyd
Comment by thewebguyd 5 hours ago
> Everybody and their dog wants you to be part of their eco-system.
And that's the core problem. We stopped making tech and started making walled-garden "ecosystems." Apple is the most egregious, but everyone else is doing it too.
What ever happened to open standards, cross-platform, interoperability?
I never wanted a world where I have to choose all Apple tech, or all Google tech, or All Microsoft, or whatever just to get devices and software that integrate and play nicely together. When I was younger I remember being relatively platform agnostic. I had windows and Linux PCs, they dual booted without Windows killing grub every update, I didn't need to have my kernel signed with Microsoft's key. I had a macbook, an Android phone, wired headphones. My music was local on a network share and I used it with local music players across all my computers.
None of those ever pestered me for an account, or tried to push me to buy more of their "ecosystem," or sell me a subscription to use basic features.
Now everything is a sales funnel. Every app or service wants your email, every device wants an account, everybody is always trying to upsell you on something. We stopped making great tech products a long time ago and are now just extracting rent.
I used to be optimistic about tech. I dreamed of a world of openness and interoperability, not lock-in and ecosystems.
The only problem here is apple. Just don't buy apple products and you're fine. You can have. A windows or Linux pc and use Google sheets or whatever. I don't know whether the office suite is available on Linux but you have options for creating files that are office compatible.
The only problem here is apple, I don't think it seems fair to include MS and Google, they're much less walled than apple is. Maybe they could do better too, but apple is much worse.