Which leaves the question: where to go? What is the best alternative to apple products?My current working suggestions, but would greatly appreciate others weighing in.
Phone: Pixel with graphene OS Laptop: System 76 laptop or X1 carbon Watch: Garmin variety of some description Cloud storage: probably nextcloud self hosted
I had with me a Garmin with a memstick of the local map. Sadly I'd given it away, I wish I had kept it. I also had with me a non-wifi little camera that could shoot videos. I used the Garmin for direction and map. When I got home I unpacked the camera memsticks. Things were mostly fine.
What's the best alt to Apple product is the wrong question. Apple, or anyone else, has such leverage because it bundled so many functions important to you, convenience is the scaling factor. Maps and navigation on phone is great, iPhone camera is awesome, sharing grocery lists and docs is very handy. Put them all together and Apple becomes dangerous to privacy.
I'm still muddling through, trying to think about this and how I will change my tech using habit.
Eventually anything that connects to a network will be crippled to the point of uselessness unless you submit to constant monitoring. If you try to avoid it you will be guilty until proven innocent by default.
By eventually I mean in 2-3 years.
One is the Librem 5. I think it's $700 maybe?
The other is the Pine phone. I believe it's closer to $250.
Now from what I can tell these are both terrible phones. Really just terrible electronic devices. But they are devices that can connect to modern cell phone infrastructure and are fully open source.
At least the Librem is. Not sure about the hardware on the pinephone. Librem is OSS down to the firmware. Wild.
Not sure if I'm ready to make the jump just yet but a completely hackable phone is super appealing to me.
Circling back to your original question, both companies seem to be shooting for the privacy angle with the phones.
I've actually been seeing a lot of companies popping up lately in the privacy / open source space. It's pretty exciting.
Sailfish OS - https://sailfishos.org/ is the most polished non-android and non-ios alternative currently available in the mobile OS space. You can buy a Sailfish OS license to install it on some specific devices - https://shop.jolla.com/ ... (note though that app support is lacking unless you wish to use Android apps, and that bugs in the OS are fixed slow. End-of-Life cycles are also not clear and specific (support lasts roughly 5-6 years, often highly dependent on the device supported).
Mobile Phone:
- Sony Open Devices (quality hardware, with AOSP, unlocked bootloaders and flashing tools that allow you to install whatever supported mobile OS you want) - https://developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices/.
- Pine Phone - https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ .
- FairPhone - https://www.fairphone.com/en/ .
Desktop OS:
FreeBSD or Linux is good enough for most needs.
Desktop:
Assemble your own with AMD tech.
Laptop: https://frame.work/ is increasingly attractive as a highly repairable and customizable device.
However, there might be singular reasons to have one. For example, Stripe will only allow you to be a client if you have a mobile phone, and I have run into this with other companies as well.
If you absolutely need one, there is a very inexpensive way of doing this. Don't buy an expensive phone for "privacy" (who knows if they are actually hackproof?)
For these unique cases, you get an inexpensive Android phone that you can remove the battery from, and you store the phone in a Faraday bag: (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=faraday+bags). Faraday bags completely block any connection with any electromagnetic signals: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage). Test the Faraday bag and see if it works by trying to call your mobile device while it is in the bag from another phone. And see if you can call another phone from your device while it is in the Faraday bag (call and then quickly put the bag into the back, or just dial the number and put it in the bag and hit where the send button should be).
You only take out the mobile phone in rare instances where you need to absolutely have it, when required to get financial or banking services or whatever you need in those very rare instances.
But other than that, you take out the battery, put it in the Faraday bag, and put it somewhere out of reach, just leave it in one spot, and when you have to use it, use it in the same spot, so that the big companies only see you in one place.
By the way, I see the tracking of your every movement as WAY more egregious, because that does it every second of your life. And then selling your every movement too others. Searching your phone is nasty too. But for me, emails are way rarer than tracking my every move, every second of the day. So I don't have a mobile phone. I just use my VOIP, and if someone wants to reach me, they leave a SMS or voice mail, just like in the olden days. I am not on instant beck and call to no man or woman. You don't like it, you say? Fine, adios. Not my problem.
You have a company and won't hire someone without a mobile phone? Just fine with me, guess I'm not working for you, then. I don't care if you give me a free phone - rejected.
2020/2021 the year that never ends and our technology burns away the last traces of privacy.
None. Apple was never actually the privacy protector it advertised itself to be, but it's still miles ahead of the Android ecosystem (and I say this as a dedicated Galaxy user for the past decade).
Your choice is basically which company you trust more: Apple, or Google. They're both bad for privacy in different ways.
I've been invested in using Protonmail and Tresorit, both tout E2EE storage and being domiciled in Switzerland is a nice plus.
Maybe I'll even take my handheld Fujifilm camera out more. Having sharp photos taken with real optics and not muddled by tons of algorithms sounds refreshing.
I really do enjoy the Apple ecosystem - hardware and software quality are nice, integration between products excellent, seems to last pretty long relative to other tech brands I've owned. I'm just taking an approach over owning where things go off my devices.
Non-smart phone for calls and texts.
Laptop for programs, web browsing, etc.
DSLR for photos and videos
Road atlas (a paper one) for getting places.
GPS is nice, but I don't actually need one, for now.I’m currently on an office365 business plan though not for privacy reasons, but since it came with a terra byte of OneDrive storage I put my pictures there and not into iCloud as I didn’t see a reason to play two cloud platforms a monthly storage fee. Works just fine, and it also worked just fine when I was using g-suite and not office365 ans I imagine it’ll work just fine if you set up your own storage as well.
Everything encrypted before upload, cheap and has dedicated linux client.