Both iPhones and MacBooks (to a lesser extent) rely on US services provided by Apple. They (techically) can execute arbitrary code on your devices if you have auto-update enabled (and probably even if not). They’re almost definitely spying on you, your habits, your decisions etc.
To be fair (as a Samsung Android and MacBook user), so do nearly all phones altogether. On a computer, you can just install Linux to have a Microsoft/Google/Apple-free OS. But nearly all smartphones run Android (if not iOS).
I guess then that we need more Linux phone development.
You can (on most Android phones) run an Android fork that doesn’t have Google services running and gets software and updates from elsewhere, e.g. GrapheneOS. Can’t do that with an iPhone. I get that you’re still ultimately dependent on Google to continue Android development and make security updates, but it’s way less of a dependency. And yes, GNU-ish Linux on phones would be awesome.
Yes and no. You need an unlocked or unlockable bootloader, which is becoming more and more difficult to find. So you’ll need speciality manufacturers, or ones with that feature. For example, in the US, Samsung has had locked bootloaders on all its phones since the Galaxy S7.
Obviously your point is correct (e.g. I have an older, but usable OnePlus 6 with an unlocked bootloader). You just need to be more deliberate when choosing a phone and keeping all of this in mind.
For example, in the US, Samsung has had locked bootloaders on all its phones since the Galaxy S7.
Yikes. While shopping for a new phone last year I was under the impression that at least in the European market they still allow you to unlock the bootloader, even on the latest models. The catch is that there’s pretty much no third-party Android distros that work with the phones, because they don’t release drivers or kernel patches and people have to scrape them from first-party OS images, which sounds horrible.
Getting off US services is probably the more important part.
Both iPhones and MacBooks (to a lesser extent) rely on US services provided by Apple. They (techically) can execute arbitrary code on your devices if you have auto-update enabled (and probably even if not). They’re almost definitely spying on you, your habits, your decisions etc.
To be fair (as a Samsung Android and MacBook user), so do nearly all phones altogether. On a computer, you can just install Linux to have a Microsoft/Google/Apple-free OS. But nearly all smartphones run Android (if not iOS).
I guess then that we need more Linux phone development.
You can (on most Android phones) run an Android fork that doesn’t have Google services running and gets software and updates from elsewhere, e.g. GrapheneOS. Can’t do that with an iPhone. I get that you’re still ultimately dependent on Google to continue Android development and make security updates, but it’s way less of a dependency. And yes, GNU-ish Linux on phones would be awesome.
Yes and no. You need an unlocked or unlockable bootloader, which is becoming more and more difficult to find. So you’ll need speciality manufacturers, or ones with that feature. For example, in the US, Samsung has had locked bootloaders on all its phones since the Galaxy S7.
Obviously your point is correct (e.g. I have an older, but usable OnePlus 6 with an unlocked bootloader). You just need to be more deliberate when choosing a phone and keeping all of this in mind.
Yikes. While shopping for a new phone last year I was under the impression that at least in the European market they still allow you to unlock the bootloader, even on the latest models. The catch is that there’s pretty much no third-party Android distros that work with the phones, because they don’t release drivers or kernel patches and people have to scrape them from first-party OS images, which sounds horrible.