I’m locked in with Apple due to photos, family sharing and everything else. Not sure why exactly, but I’m super bored with iPhones and would love to try out something different for once. But… ecosystem wins, I guess.

@hutaffe I have found that these days, ecosystem doesn't matter nearly as much as it used to. I'm all Apple except for the mobile phone I use for work. I use the Samsung Galaxy more often, and I'm not missing anything.

@gdp how do you handle sharing/exchanging photos with family and friends? Photos and Air Drop are so convenient… that's my biggest fear at the moment. I tried other solutions, e.g. via my Synology in the past and nothing worked as seamlessly.​

@hutaffe I think once you figured out what apps you were going to use you’d be just as bored with any other phone. I don’t know why it seemed to hit people hard this year, but phones have been boring and basically the same for a long time.

@hutaffe I can't imagine being bored with any tech. The iPhone, iPad, etc are all devices I still find amazing in what they are capable of. Perhaps it would help to step back and reframe what it is we have? Or, maybe, it's perfectly healthy to be bored because these devices are, after all, just tools to be used. Are you bored with a hammer or screwdriver? I keep both in mind as a matter of framing and perspective.

@hutaffe Something like Dropbox could fill some of the things Photos does, I guess. But I have another recommendation for things you’d use Airdrop/iMessage for:

I have a «cross-platform family», and I’ve gotten a lot of positives out of the fact that Telegram is a much used chat service. It gets plenty of bad press (often for good reason) for it’s more «social media-like» features — which I never use. But this over-shadows that it’s, with a significant margin, the best chat app for one-to-one and small group chats.

Here are the most relevant features in a «family setting» (in addition to having great clients for every platform):

• You can share unlimited amounts of photos fast. The compression is much less harsh than on other services, and you can also easily send things uncompressed if you want. (Files up to 2 GB.)
• You can also decide how much local space should be used — so if you’ve shared a lot of photos, they can stay in the cloud if you want.
• The UI for looking at previously shared media is very nice.
• You can divide group chats into different «topics» — and these gets separate «media libraries» (and more).

It’s very much like an «iMessage, but better and cross-platform». 👌🏻 (Just like iMessage with regular iCloud backups, it’s not end-to-end encrypted — but I don’t mind that in either case. And it has no ads or tracking!)

@hutaffe That's not anything I ever did much of anyway. But I can always send images in a text message.

@jsonbecker Totally agree… it’s been like this for a few years now, following these things less and less. I think I‘m just tired of this whole industry and the way they present themselves every time. The self-constructed hypetrain, all the „we‘re doing this for the people!“. They’ve been fined a whopping $13nb for tax fraud in Ireland. Hype this up.

@dennyhenke I‘m not bored by the technology itself, but the way it’s presented and the way Apple positions themselves on all fronts. It’s decoupled from reality and becomes more and more off-putting to me. But that‘s true for the whole industry.

@hutaffe Yeah, that’s fair!

I hope that the «France business» gets them to get their shit together… (But I don’t hold high hopes.) Like, I just want a good chat app! Why does the only one that focuses hard on that have to also do a bunch of other crap?

In the meantime, I hope Signal and Matrix gets better. I feel like my future lies there — but at the moment they’re so much worse that I don’t want to push it on family et al, heh.

@hutaffe I hate that they moved to Ireland for low taxes. But IMO they did something Ireland came up with and said was legal and Ireland is actually the guilty party in this. Ireland’s corporate tax was anticompetitive within the EU, which Ireland knew because it used it to create jobs. Apple just domiciled EU profits where it was most advantageous to them according to the laws and government of that country. I think Apple commits far greater sins.

@jsonbecker also agree with everything here 😊 It's just a recent example, and all big tech companies are doing something ugly, while showing the world their biggest, shiny smile. The most ridiculous thing to me here is that even Ireland will appeal the EU ruling… it just shows that the whole system is broken and Apple is not the only one playing that game of course. They might have followed Irish law, but those laws are violating EU law and harming all other countries in the union.

@hutaffe Apple hasn’t really been “fined” and it’s not strictly speaking guilty of “fraud”. The €14 billion is made up of back taxes and some interest. The issues are complex and the judgment is controversial, in part because the European Commission, which had no direct control over Irish taxation policy, grounded its claim instead in competition law and the idea of illegal state aid: the low rate of tax that Apple (and others) paid in Ireland was deemed to give the company an unfair competitive advantage. As a US-based company, Apple ought to have been paying tax on its European profits in the US. It wasn’t taxed on its unrepatriated earnings (at least in part) because the Obama administration and the Republican-controlled Congress couldn’t agree on the appropriate rate to charge. But the Commission obviously couldn’t order the US to tax its own corporate citizens properly, so instead it forced Ireland to accept an embarrassing windfall.

@artkavanagh I don’t really care about the technicalities or legal wording. Fact is that they went above and beyond to form company shell structures to comply with a small country’s law that’s made to make companies not pay any taxes. They paid pennies in other countries, unlike all other companies that operate here… No fair play. I realize that it’s the companies responsibility to pay as little taxes as possible, but especially Apple on their moral high ground can be hold to higher social standards than this. And it’s just one of the reasons I‘m deeply disgusted by all the weird stuff that’s going on in corporate world.