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<h1 class="post__title">New iPhone</h1>
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<p>Welp I went ahead and did it AGAIN; I switched to the warm embrace of Apple and purchased an iPhone 14. My current Google Pixel 5a is a nice phone in working order, but its over two years old and so I was feeling the itch to upgrade. I managed to catch a Black Friday promotion for some money off of a new phone and figured, why not?</p>
<p>See there&rsquo;s some backstory here: my growing frustration with Google as a money. It&rsquo;s clear to me that they&rsquo;ve lost their way from their days as a plucky startup, onto a large but loveable tech giant moving the internet forward. Now they&rsquo;ve atrophied into a directionless company that, addicted to the heroin drip of ad money, is not sure what they want.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for consumers, they&rsquo;ve decided to make this lack of identity our problem. Whether its the now very famous <a href="https://killedbygoogle.com/">Killed by Google</a> site which, at the time of writing, boasts an impressive count of 290 products killed. Or perhaps, its the fact that <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-chrome-will-limit-ad-blockers-starting-june-2024/">Chrome begin limiting Ad Blockers by June of 2024</a> presumably as a way to bolster their ad business. If that wasn&rsquo;t bad enough, YouTube itself has become pretty much unusable without sophisticated ad blocking to which <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/21/ad_block_google/">Google has openly admitted its limiting users who use adblockers</a>. Now I am fine paying a couple of dollars a month to remove ads and compensate creators but I am not paying $14/month for it to all go into Sundar Pichai&rsquo;s pocket.</p>
<p>Even further still we have more nastiness emerging on the consumer side such as <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/google-says-bumpy-pixel-8-screens-are-nothing-to-worry-about/">Pixel 8 bumps under the screen of components pushing into the OLED panel</a> which Google exists is not a production defect that will cause problems in the future but anyone who has owned the famous Nexus 6P knows to not trust their hardware claims. We&rsquo;re often always told that the Cloud platform will save us all, so feel free to dump all of your documents onto their storage platform. For a small cost, and permission to scan all of your documents and photos for advertising profiles, you too can access your data anywhere! Unless of course they <a href="https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-drive-users-angry-over-losing-months-of-stored-data/">lose your Google Drive files</a> which at the time of writing is a problem that&rsquo;s still actively developing, and not solved.</p>
<p>They regular meddle in open web standards, trying to use their Chrome majority position to push <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/google_abandons_web_environment_integrity/">onerous web changes that look more like DRM</a> rather than any actual improvement to website security. Or perhaps the fact that Android at least one <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/24/google_privacy_button/">fake toggle that promises to not track you while still doing so</a>. All of these tracking things would perhaps be less egregious if it made their one core product, search, better. All signs point to the opposite as AI-generated content has completely overrun the search engine making it dulled to the point of worthlessness. I switched to a mix of Bing and DuckDuckGo of all things because the former now has a superior image search and the latter has the convenient &ldquo;bang&rdquo; system which allows me to forward my queries to be redirected to specific sites ex. !g for google, !w for wikipedia, !r for reddit.</p>
<p>All of these things combined with more that I did not bother to list influenced my purchase choice: it&rsquo;s not that Apple does NO tracking of users, but it doesn&rsquo;t make up the majority of their business income. I would not personally get in the habit of presuming automatic good faith from them either, but its refreshing that their intentions are clear from the start: &ldquo;Buy into our ecosystem, spend the money, but then you WILL have a positive, coherent experience where your data is tightly controlled within the walled garden&rdquo;. Historically this has not been a deal I have been willing to accept, but the older I get, and the more I expect things to just work, it has become more appealing.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;m hoping the next two years I spend on an iPhone are enough time for Google to decide what kind of company it wants to be. What might help with that soul-search is finding a replacement for Sundar Pichai, but I suspect it could take five or more years to really get them back on track. In the meantime, I am going to try to make the best of my new iPhone and see where this new ecosystem ride takes me. I&rsquo;m currently trying to harmonize it with the rest of my workflow, a topic worthy of its own post.</p>
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