And they released it without a physical version for consoles and stated that’s because it helps them to keep the price higher. Big yikes.

You’re not wrong. But I was just pointing out the validity of talking about the semantics of piracy. I ultimately don’t care what people decide to do, just be aware of what it is you’re doing by blocking ads. Which is most of what Linus was saying.

It’s not like you see the ads that have trackers, they get blocked. So it’s still part of the agreement sort of. And you’re also aware that it’s revenue for them. People assume it’s a moral argument, it’s not. You can pirate from absolutely evil people, but it’s still piracy. That’s why I don’t view it as worth arguing over for the most part. I WANT people to realize that it’s piracy but that they’re actually doing something ethical.

I want to be clear still, piracy isn’t a problem or wrong necessarily. I’m not pushing a corporate narrative by saying this, I’m more concerned about creators and other sites that use ads for revenue such as newspapers. So if you want to “pay” a site without money, don’t pirate their content. That’s all. That’s similar to what Linus has said.

But I think this is somewhat similar to asking you for a ticket at the door for a movie. If the “ticket” is watching the ad and they’re asking you to buy the ticket (with premium) or get it from ads, bypassing the doorman would mean it’s piracy. Doesn’t even matter if the doorman doesn’t try to stop you. Doesn’t matter if they don’t pull you out of the movie.

You being the product is irrelevant to the piracy thing. But it is relevant to the moral thing

Purchasing and pirating don’t have contractural agreements. You don’t have to have a ToS to pirate something.

If DuckDuckGo does block the ad in their browser, they’ve done the work for you. And if they do not but instead Google decides to serve it to you without ads in a browser, it’s not piracy to not have ads.

As long as the intended revenue of the content you’re viewing is being blocked, you’re pretty much pirating it. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it’s just a definitional thing.

It is, yes. It’s a separate conversation of if it should be illegal or immoral to keep your privacy this way. But as long as you are violating the intended method of revenue for the content you’re viewing, that’s piracy to me.

I think most people hear piracy and think it’s immoral or illegal, but there are very valid reasons to pirate content such as game and movie preservation.

I see what you mean but I don’t agree. The deal being made here is obvious and you’re signing up to give them data in exchange for watching a video. You’re also signing up to view their ads. You have an option not to be the product at all. You already have the wheat, but you’re giving the middleman less than what was arranged, not just producing less.

And if you view it as okay to not give them what they’re asking for while getting the content anyways, that’s chill. Just recognize that you’re paying less for the content than they’re asking. This is even more enforced by YouTube and news papers who charge for ad free experiences.

Believe it or not, I think he has a point and isn’t at all a hypocrite. He’d show you how to pirate and torrent stuff (and has before) while also telling you he doesn’t recommend stealing. What he was saying is that the content isn’t meant to be free. The ads pay for the content. So not watching ads means the producer doesn’t get paid. Its a soft form of piracy but he wasn’t telling you what to do about that. He just said “Be aware you’re not giving people anything for their content”. I don’t know why thats controversial, he’s not even suggesting its illegal or even immoral. I never understood the arguments here but I also dont visit twitter

I’ll give them some fairness. When lightning originally launched, it was a great interface for lightweight power delivery and was more sturdy than the deplorable micro USB. I can’t explain just how bad microUSB is. So it made sense. I think USB-C just put in the legwork to be a much better adapter.

Also the giant plot hole missing here is that Apple sits on the USB forum I believe and so has some say in what the billions of devices they produce use to charge. They just can’t make money off of a standard now.

I hadn’t heard this. Good on the EU not letting them squirrel out of this (hopefully)

It makes them a very small amount of money. But they’ve also been rumored to be making iPhones use a “Made for Apple” type of cable for faster charging speeds. I think that would be really dumb but here we are.

I think these are accurate. Siri is better at being summoned and doing quick tasks but I feel like Google has a lot more features.

And for having to tinker less, absolutely true so far

The only reason I chose this phone is because I determined that the interconnected apps and services were more worth it in my social circle. Without that, the value proposition basically becomes even to me.

I guess my thing is that technology is important to me and at some point having tech work better overall even if it’s more expensive is more important to me. Plus a lot of Apple stuff is well made and has great resale value so it becomes more manageable that way.

That is odd. But I can definitely tell you that most of the solutions for casting your phone to a tv never worked for me on android. Smart cast almost never worked for me at all. But I will slightly miss the Dex software which was occasionally useful.

I think the best solution for me was getting an NVIDIA shield and using 3rd party apps anyways. It’s better than casting and works more consistently.

I have devices that already use USB C so now I have to have two cables in the same location where before I only needed one. And also transfer and charging speeds are much slower with lightning. I think my phone takes much longer to charge, especially at lower battery percentages.

Overall, pretty much every device should have USB C by now. Apple only stays this way to further lock people into the ecosystem.

I think it’s less about the speed of the animations and just the consistency of them animating in the OS. I mean, even settings in the menu animate nicely with sliding toggles and page swipe gestures. Those may exist on some android phones or can be added, I don’t know, but I noticed them since my Note definitely did far less animation. I know it’s not for everyone, but the iOS animations seem on the snappier side to me. I also used to remove them on my android phone and I put them back because it caused issues for me with some apps just looking rough when they launched. So yes, YMMV.

And it’s a great point about the specific android OS. So yeah take this as a comparison of OneUI on a 3.5 year old phone compared to an almost 3 year old iPhone. If I was to go back to android, it would not be back to Samsung. Both phones I bought from them were overpriced and aged rather poorly imo.

My objective isn’t to crap all over these phones or a certain OS. Each has their downsides. More my point was that if you switch off of a similar OS or have some of the issues I had and go to an iPhone, what might you expect?

So yeah, blame Samsung but for me it won’t make a difference until someone forces RCS as a standard which may very well bring me back to android. Just thought I’d see what it’s like after nearly a decade since I’ve used an iPhone. The last iPhone I had was an iPhone 5.

Well for photos I’m currently using Google photos to transfer stuff but I’ll be moving away from that pretty soon so im not the person to ask probably. The hope is that I can find an app to either directly transfer photos or have my own cloud storage going forward.

I’d prefer to move away from Google services but it does make backing up photos very easy so there’s that

Apologies, its an exaggeration on the ‘full minute’ part of the spectrum but I have noticed that the assistant is faster by quite a bit. I’ll change that part. While using the assistant and asking it to play music in my car, it would often take up to 30 seconds to get from me finishing saying the prompt, it uploading to google, coming back, and playing the music I want. Siri takes about 10 seconds at most.

I have had many times where the assistant just gave up on me though, especially while driving. It would stop my music when I summoned it for about 20 seconds, appear to be listening, and then tell me that it was sorry and couldn’t complete my request or would say nothing and resume the music. I got so frustrated with the assistant in my car that I stopped using it entirely. Could just be my experience, seems like some people think Auto and the assistant work just fine for them.

I like this kind of input because it displays use cases and problems that I haven’t thought of which is exactly why I made the post, so thanks for saying all this and taking the time for that.

That being said, I’m not trying to fight but I’ll give my perspective of how I feel about the issues you raised as an average user just to provide some context in case anyone is concerned about this stuff.

The keyboard is absolutely something that, if android keyboards are a must for you, you might be upset by. I have yet to customize my keyboard at all so I’m trying the default layout for now. I don’t mind the app bar because it isn’t any worse than the few keyboards I used on android. Swipe to text works fine for me but autocorrect does occasionally get words wrong. Not any worse than my android keyboards though (I’ve tried all the major ones out there too). However, I’m fine with my typing pace on iOS, so that doesn’t bother me. I have a couple UX complaints with it but nothing to make me ditch the phone. Might just take time for me to get comfy.

As for messaging, I noted a lot of what you said in the previous post I made. Not having RCS is their fault, it sucks, but if the EU gets it figured out it may tempt me back to Android. I don’t mind the messaging app so far because it does provide a lot of functionality for socializing that Googles alternatives just don’t have or are done poorly. Not everyone will use the entire messaging app but a lot of the complaints are niche to me. Ive never even heard of AMR files. Also I believe searching for messages is being added but I agree that its absence is rather odd.

Connectivity does suck. Hopefully it will improve on newer models but again, I hardly ever have a reason to connect my phone directly to my PC. I back up all of my photos over wifi so I have no need. In fact, my previous phone was used only a handful of times for file transfer. So it isn’t important to me and I don’t think its important to average users, but its a good note and I hope a switch to USB-C will improve that.

Also your situation with PDFs is odd. I’ve had the opposite experience as I actually took a short vacation the past week with my device. It brought up and stored the event emails, tickets (in the wallet) and maps that I needed for the event pretty easily. I definitely had to open a couple of PDFs but maybe it used my connection. So I’ll say that I’m not sure what thats about but I’d bet an app can solve that problem.

Your last point is a mixed bag. Community support is hard to find but if you’ve ever looked at forums asking google how to fix something its pretty much the exact same thing. Only difference is that a workaround is usually possible but requires a bit more effort. Like uninstalling their default apps for instance. Or changing the per-app notification sound (may be fixed now idk). When I tried to search for those things, all the google responses just said “pound sand, we’ll add it to our totally real feature request list”. Still, adaptability is more an Android thing for sure.

I’ve started to realize that the android platform is wider than I thought when posting my original comments. There were features I wasn’t aware of, had incorrect perceptions of, or had variance based on my specific model of phone and car. Another user here pointed that out to me about their screen layout being different. I’m happy to correct things though if you think that I need to. I’m only human :)