The first Mac I used was actually a Macintosh with a black and white screen. I don't remember the exact model. We also had iMac G3 in school and later modern iMacs at work. My wife is also a Mac owner and has worked with them.
I'm no way an Apple expert in any way, shape or form. However. I do know enough about them to know that they're ridiculously locked down to the point that you can barley call yourself an owner of your own system.
With that said. Apple computers are popular, so it's apparently a winning concept for some, but it's not something for me.
I like being given a workflow designed by UX engineers, it means I don't have to think about it and I can just do my work instead of figuring out the best workflow.
And that's perfectly fine, and probably the most sensible thing ad well. However. The user should have the option to do whatever they want to.
My opinion is that computers should stay out of the way as much as possible. It's an appliance.
Exactly! And that's not possible if you have to fight it every time you use it.
Phone numbers are an issue, true, though you can get around that using a burner SIM or even a virtual phone number.
You can't buy any SIM here without providing ID. I believe that's more of a rule than an exception these days, but I don't have any actual numbers to back up my claim.
However. I don't think that anyone requiring extreme privacy would use any phone whatsoever.
Also, contact discovery has been working without exposing your phone number for over a year now.
I trust Signal when it comes to security and privacy.
The phone can be made by anyone. The OS needs to be Android or iOS at some point, which is unfortunate
With the Google Play Services or whatever it's called, which is required for notifications to work.
Remember that they have killed people based on metadata alone.
That said, deGoogled Android has been around for more than a decade, allowing you to use Android in a privacy-friendly way.
It's what I've been using for years. :) GApps has always been optional. Back in the days vanilla Android was even perfectly useable without GApps! It feels like AOSP is basically only a kernel these days.
So if you want, you absolutely can avoid being tied to Google and use Signal.
Yes, but you will have to rely on third party clients, which Signal don't like. That's not a great experience. :/
As you can see, there's a lot more nuance here than "Signal isn't private"; privacy, after all, isn't binary, but rather a gradient.
I guess so. I'm not much of a person of nuances though. I like living in a binary world. :D
The way I see it, Signal sits in a Goldilocks Zone of "private enough" (for most threat models) and "convenient enough" for mainstream adoption.
That is true. Perhaps I'm a bit hard at them, but then again, I'm a binary person. ;)
You're forced to use a phone number and a phone from Google or Apple. Do I have to say more? This is not a claim. It's a fact. Well. Unless something has changed?
I have never whined, but I can see how you wish that would be true. ;)
And, my apologies, if I have somehow hurt your feelings. It was never my intention to do so.
AFAIK. The only security risk with this is that anyone with physical access to your phone could flash a malicious ROM on it.
This shouldn't be an issue for most people. And I'm pretty sure that those who cares about this runs GrapheneOS anyway.