I've been using an increasing number of Apple products since 2006 or so, after having used Linux for a decade and Windows from 3.1 through 2000.

If it's a benevolent dictatorship, it's undeniably been a good one to me over nearly half my life. If they ever do turn, I can always just leave. But what is and/or was my alternative? The less-benevolent dictatorships of Google or Microsoft? Spending inordinate amounts of time and effort making a hodgepodge of various Linux devices work together (often unsuccessfully)? I'll pass.

"I'm not worried if the benevolent dictator turns on me because on that day I'll just stop using an iPhone."

Except Apple does not have a police force that will detain you if you try to leave after they institute less-desirable products, and I'm sure they'd lose a lot of money and value if they literally disables data exports.

I used to think Apple could be forced to play nice, and again and again that doesn’t seem to happen. The hammer never fell on their 30%, nor on Safari binding, nor on third party stores. And the funny thing is Google sees that and just goes the same direction, so if tomorrow Apple goes south it’s not like Google would rise as a bastion of vertue.

The question could be less if Apple should be trusted, and more if phone makers in general should be allowed to be dictators.

Why should phone makers not have ultimate control over their devices?

Say I make the Avocado Phone:

- my entire shtick is that "you can only run apps we make, and we vet the source code of every one of the few thousand third-party apps we allow on our device. We will pay you $10,000 if you get compromised using our phone"

- Of course, to achieve this, the phone can't be susceptible to "informed" evil maid attacks (as in, say the hotel's cameras capture you entering your passcode and Avocado ID Password) that replace your OS with an identical one preloaded with Malware. This means that, even as a user, you literally can't load any other software onto the bootloader or OS that would touch the operating system.

- it also takes every opportunity to prevent third-party apps from gaining access they don't need, which includes disabling JIT compilation (ruling out third-party browser engines, unless they want to use a slow javascript interpreter).

At what point does my phone turn from a product that services the security-conscious crowd with a completely bulletproof device, into something that people want to be able to preload software onto, because they didn't realize that security comes at a price? Is it when I sell enough? Is selling 10 million a year enough to where my market presence becomes a problem? 100 million a year? Why would people buy it if the government forces it to be 'open' at the cost of invalidating its entire use-case of being a secure device?

> Why should phone makers not have ultimate control over their devices?

First part is, fundamentally these devices are sold. You could eschew the very notion of property and make it a pure rental, but it’s not the point we are now.

The second part is, as you point out, your idea is completely valid until your service becomes life critical, a huge portion of the country’s population relies on it day to day, you killed any competitor that had a significantly different value proposition and it would have catastrophic consequences if you were to screw it up badly. Basically you became part of the infra. Is it 100 million units ? It’s up to your regulators to decide.

It's an issue not so much because the iPhone is a phone, but because it's a PC, and a much more personal one than any desktop or even laptop.

I think a lot of the privacy-conscious Apple users would wholeheartedly support laws that guarantee better privacy than is currently required. That said, we have to act in the world we live in not the world we want it to be.

In any case, I don’t see how using Apple products is at odds with supporting better privacy laws. If anything, they are perfectly aligned since it demonstrates a $2 trillion alternative to surveillance capitalism.