I’m surprised they’re taking that approach rather than pushing the web version.

So can installing a faulty third-party cooling fan, but in the USA, the law requires the warranty provider to prove the fault was caused by improper maintenance or defects in third-party components.

In most situations, even that is giving too much power to the manufacturer. It’s fair for them to flash the original software as part of any diagnostic or service process, but not fair to refuse to repair or replace a product that actually has a hardware defect just because the owner put different software on it.

Agreed. Microsoft proposed something along those lines under the name “Palladium” a couple decades ago and was widely criticized, even in the mainstream press. Apple and Google doing the same thing to our phones barely got a whimper.

Locked in the technical sense of being able to verify the operating system isn’t a bad thing. The problem is when the device owner can’t add signing keys of their choice.

The latter is what GrapheneOS does.

It’s more likely that a fork becomes dominant, making him irrelevant. That’s almost the same thing.

I do review flashlights.

I did not say that they’re not important. I said that they’re hosted services, which traditionally don’t have the same expectation of user control as computers that users own.

It’s fine that he has an opinion. It’s even fine that he’s a fanboy, but important for people evaluating what he says about Apple to know that he has a decades long record of being barely more neutral than the company’s PR department.

By time spent, the iPhone is probably used for media consumption more than anything else, but media consumption is not just entertainment.

A guy who nearly always defends Apple’s controversial decisions. It’s probably not reasonable to treat him as neutral or fair in a dispute between Apple and any other entity.

What’s really rich about Meta and Zuckerberg’s incessant complaining about being restricted by Apple’s rules for third party software on Apple’s platforms is that Meta doesn’t allow third parties any sort of access to their successful platforms.

This is a bit of a false equivalency; “Apple’s” successful platform is a general-purpose computing device owned by the user while Meta’s are hosted services.

These traditionally have different expectations, with game consoles being the exception. Occulus devices seem more like game consoles to me, while iPhones are closer to general-purpose computers with a few weird restrictions. I don’t like either, but I see game consoles as less problematic because their use case isn’t important.

If you’re getting ads for an adblocker, it might be time to get an adblocker (but not that one).

That may be viable for some combinations of finances and lifestyle, but credit scores are used in interactions that don’t involve borrowing money. I’m inclined to believer they shouldn’t be, but I don’t make the rules.