To get a billion from a million you need to do 15% for fifty years, and that ignores inflation. Or 25% for thirty-one years.

These numbers are ludicrous.

Chant “mutually beneficial exchange” all you want but the system and its players have done everything possible to ensure that everyone at the bottom has as little leverage and as few alternatives as humanly possible.

The fact that her detractors have spilt gallons of ink arguing against her point without providing such a counterexample speaks volumes.

This country was founded on the idea that we allow competing opinions and ideologies, even those we find distasteful. If people commit actual crimes, we have processes to deal with that.

This is one of those situations where multiple overlapping incentives all point the same way. In this case, Apple’s incentives align with those of user privacy and security, and so I am willing to give them a lot of leeway. Particularly since they seem to be the only large player taking this approach.

That’s not to say you’re crazy or anything. You do you. But do understand that you almost certainly constitute a nearly irrelevant minority of users of homebrew.

Few here would argue that it’s an outstanding product.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Perplexity, and everyone else in this space are openly brazen about how much of your information they want to consume—however possible—to store in perpetuity and use for whatever future purpose they want.

The CEO argues that their goal is to provide the best possible search, and that they remain impartial to geopolitical issues. Reducing the quality of their product to pick sides on political issues is not a sacrifice they are willing to make.

Whether or not you agree with this take, framing this as being supporters of the war in Ukraine is extremely dishonest.

And to be clear, while I understand their point, I generally don’t agree. All information comes in a political context. Choosing which information to favor is inextricably tied to political context. If I search for flat earth content, do you show the science? Do you show content that favors the flat earth model? Do you focus on the controversy itself? Those are inherently political choices whether or not you want them to be.

If you want evidence that Apple was going to move to USB-C anyway, consider that at no point after 2012 did they invest in improvements to Lightning. They never upgraded the protocol speeds, never pushed higher wattage charging. That’s not the behavior of a company that wants to extend a platform’s life.

When the EU forced the USB-C switch, Apple notably didn’t fight it as hard as people assumed they would. The EU handed them a smooth exit ramp on a platter.

Would it be better if something forced them to? Probably so! But barring that, having them volunteer to be responsible stewards—and prevent others from acting badly here—is potentially one of the best alternatives.