this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Any company that obfuscates all their security practices, refuses to give statistics on security risks and counter measures, and boils their product security down to "Trust us, bro.", doesn't actually give a fuck about your security. They're just the last company who is still able to keeps everything secret so they can make shit up as they go along. Apple's security is a joke and they're just as bad as any other manufacturer on the market, the only difference is they have successfully kept their shit secret for all these years and spent decades convincing people they actually give a fuck about security.
I still remember a few years ago having a conversation with a coworker about her iphone and she bragged about Apple never being hacked and this was right after I had just got done reading an article about a large scale hack on their network. Of course Apple never said a damned thing about it, so I forwarded her the article. IIRC she mumbled something about how the article was probably not accurate. Apple fanatics do some crazy mental gymnastics to justify them spending thousands on a phone thats probably worth about $300 at best(their hardware is on average 1-2 generations behind other devices on the market).
Did you know that most celebrity phone hacks are thru apple accounts?
https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-security-guide.pdf
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/advanced-data-protection-for-icloud-sec973254c5f/web
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/cloudkit/encrypting_user_data
Source? Or should I just "trust you bro"
Did you know that most celebrities own iPhones by a far margin? These aren't the encryption was broken hacks when someone is getting into an iCloud account, these are social engineering hacks. That's what happens when your publicist, your agent, and others have access to your digital accounts so they can get you a new phone quick while you are on the road, grab the photos you took on your phone from your iCloud account to share, etc. More holes in security.
Flagship android phones, barring a few exceptions, are not sold without pre-installed apps that subsidize the cost of the phone.
Do you have an example of a device priced at $300 with competitive hardware to the base iPhone 14, without bloatware subsidizing the cost of the device? I'd accept that generally iPhones are ~$100-200 above the price of devices with competitive hardware, but a current gen iPhone having $300 hardware? The specs are very similar to other devices in similar price ranges
I've owned both Pixels and iPhones before. While each has its pros and cons, I've found that the app sandboxing, default settings, and ability to opt out of telemetry was always better on iPhone. And until google has free, easy-to-use E2E encryption for Android devices and the related cloud services, customer data on Google's servers is more at risk to be stolen/sold for profit/used without explicit user consent.
Not to mention that iPhones are literally best in the world in terms of the SOC. No other phone in the world matches them. Saying "their hardware is on average 1-2 generations behind other devices on the market" shows how wrong that person is.
Yeah tbh I started to write a comparison of phones like the fairphone and the purism librem 5, and even the pixel 7, but they are laughable in comparison to just the base iPhone 14 hardware wise. Sure, one is $150 less, but the Librem is like 1300 dollars by comparison to the iPhone 14’s $800, and they are performing at maybe 1/3 of the A15 Bionic SOC. The pixel 7 doesn’t fair much better by price comparison, and again, it’s making google money by selling user telemetry more actively.
I encourage competition, I don’t think apple should own the market forever. And they haven’t. They almost failed before the first iPod and iPhone. But they’ve come back in terms of their ability to produce powerful silicon. The M series of processors solidifies it.
Competition is good, and when a company is pushing the market and also pushing a real security agenda? It’s a good thing, let the competitors catch up with security, and then work to beat apple at the SOC game.
Apple has been dethroned at silicon before, once PowerPC died, it can (and probably will) happen again.
That’s a good thing.
Let competitors build better E2E encryption and on-device security. The competition of better security is good for everyone.
I would love to see apple be de-throned, but I think until there is a shift on a combined focus of hardware/software/security as a product (and having users pay the premium for that) it won’t happen for awhile
I'm sure stock pixel is bad, but grapheneos (if configured correctly) beats everything.
I won’t disagree with that, it certainly seems to be the most secure OS available for modern smartphones.
My points were purely refuting the commenter I responded to’s weird obsession with “Apple = Bad and Insecure.” We should encourage competition and support efforts to increase security anywhere they occur. Brand tribalism doesn’t help anyone.
Ulefone Armor 21 😉
Perhaps is even better.
How long will that device get major updates? How about security updates? If I break the screen, how long does it take to get another one? What if liquid penetrates the device? Can I take it to a service center? If the service center doesn’t have the parts, will they give me a loaner device while mine is being repaired off-site? Can the off-site repair be done in under a week? How long is the warranty? Can I pay to extend it? What if I lose the device? Is there insurance for that?
That’s if we pretend for a moment that the MediaTek G99 isn’t a quarter of the speed of the A15.
Apple processors outperform flagship android phones on benchmarks every generation. Where are you getting your information?
Sadly it’s tribalism. It’s “apple = bad” so anything mentioned about apple isn’t looked at logically but rather with an “us vs them” mentality. It’s common across the spectrum of thinking critically nowadays, but I felt I had to refute all points because it’s dumb and doesn’t help anyone.
More security is good. Hating on apple because they are convinced that it’s an overpriced conspiracy is stupid. Every tech company deserves some hate, Apple included, but making that your identity instead of thinking critical does nothing to advance the work being done.