The iPad also wasn't Apple's first tablet. The Newton basically sucked and no one liked it. But now there's really no point in buying anything but an iPad if you want a tablet, even if you use an Android phone.

There were a ton of bad MP3 players before the iPod and a bunch of smartphones before the iPhone, except in both cases, some of them were good. You just had to be real savvy to find those diamonds in the rough, because it sure was a rough market.

The problem is, Google is a data services (advertising and marketing) company. The only reason Android even exists is because Google bought it from a hobbyist (Andy Rubin) because they knew they could use it to scrape more data than Gmail alone. Android exists to harvest your data so that Google can collect and sell it.

Meanwhile, Apple is still kind of trying to sell phones like computers. They're pushing performance harder than their rivals, and they want to be a privacy-first company, but they're based in the US, and are licking fascist boots, so it's not a good look. And now Apple is pushing services as well, subscriptions and whatnot. Is it really better than Android? Especially given the shortcomings in app choice (e.g. sideloading) and the broken ass keyboard? I dunno. I'm a Mac guy, I like Apple tech, warts and all. And I still think they protect your privacy. I think, like Mozilla, they collect telemetry so they know how their products are used, but I don't believe they are tracking your activity across apps/the web, building a profile on you, and selling this to advertisers. And they've gone after companies that try to do so on their platform — when CEO Tim Cook came out and said "starting today, we're still going to let Facebook track you across apps and the web, but we're going to make them get your permission first" or something like that. And from then, you had to agree to the tracking. If you said no, the app was stopped from doing it. Apparently it was effective, Facebook ran a huge ad campaign claiming to be a small business and saying Apple was hurting small businesses like them. (They've since found ways around it. Apple has tried to block them. It's a cat-and-mouse game.) Anyway, point is, I don't know how long Apple can keep selling phones like computers. Arguably, they stopped a while ago. And that's a shame. And it's why, as an Apple guy, I'm rooting for Linux phones. Because if Apple won't sell a phone like a computer, well... that's the kind of phone I want. A pocket computer that can call.