@ddmiller thanks for the courteous, thoughtful and thorough reply.
I don’t trust Google at all, so I guess I’m in the reply group!
Siri I have never used, every update I make sure it’s off, everywhere it’s hiding. I have to check dozens of locations and tap swipe tap swipe tap in Settings. There is also a ‘disable and delete’ button in iCloud Siri storage Settings, and whenever I click it, the spinning icon is there for minutes and minutes so I can never tell if whatever it has on me is deleted or not. Things like this and not being able to delete it and its activities spread over so many Settings makes me very suspicious of what Apple’s up to. If it can be turned ‘off’, why can’t it also not be deleted?
Same with umpteen other Apple Apps and functionalities. The user has to let Apple use GB of storage for something supposedly dormant. If it can’t be deleted, Apple has a reason for it being there that benefits Apple, not the user.
Apple Intel, sure you can find a way to turn it ‘off’, but it’s there eating storage and… doing something (surely ‘anonymised’) for Apple. If I had the patience and a mind for reading legalese I would probably find something in the T&C on that
Excellent examples of Siri usability, I wouldn’t have thought of them! I am also a conventional method searcher, and getting more and more that direction as time goes by. Once our family is fully retired I want to go back to a flip phone.
I have found very few new features or functionalties in updates over several years that I am interested in or use. I need my devices to just sit there and look nice until I need to use them to ‘manually’ do something. I don’t want to talk to them or have them analyse or intelligenceise anything. They should be tools for me, not for the surveillance economy. sigh. ‘nuff said.
For a smart phone, you’re looking at something that runs Linux or runs a de-Googled Android. These are going to severely limit your choice of apps, but the entire OS is open source and community-supported.
Similarly, for desktop/laptop uses, you’re looking at Linux. Use a distribution that has no closed-source components, like Debian and make sure you do not enable closed-source software in its package manager.
To do this, you will want to select a computer with hardware that has good support from the open source community, since some popular components (e.g. NVIDIA GPUs) only work best with closed-source drivers from the manufacturer. If at all possible, avoid hardware that requires closed-source device drivers and computers with closed-source firmware. This is not a 100% achievable goal, but you can come close.
Thank you very much, @Shamino for this considerate reply and links.
I’ll research some more on this but I use my apple devices mostly for email, web browsing, photo taking and handling, RSS reading, .txt note taking, pdf viewing, offline maps and similar. If such apps are out there in Linux open source, fine. Vocabulary and technical knowledge challenges are there, but like anything else, overcoming challenges to reach a worthy goal, is, uh, worthwhile!
Is there a phrase or keyword you can suggest for searching for this kind of computing?
There’s all sorts of backend software that companies, including Apple, run to provide the functionality you do use. For example they use Microsoft Azure cloud storage to provide iCloud. This deal with Google is more akin to that – components they need to build the product we will (or won’t!) use.
I’d say it depends on one’s view of Anthropic’s funding activities and future prospects, as well as if circular deals (Company A invests in Company B, Company B uses proceeds to buy stuff from Company A) are an optimistic or a pessimistic sign in the generative AI space.
Here’s an announcement from this week that looks bullish for Anthropic:
Anthropic PBC is lining up checks of at least a billion dollars from Coatue Management, Singapore’s GIC and Iconiq Capital in its latest financing, according to people familiar with the matter — signaling an investor frenzy buoyed by the artificial intelligence startup’s soaring revenue.
Anthropic’s revenue run rate has more than doubled since last summer, and hit over $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to people familiar with the details, all of whom asked not to be identified discussing private information. The company’s run rate, a metric that projects full-year re
venue from a shorter period, was $4 billion in July of last year.
