You may want to reevaluate your views. For the price there always were much better sounding options. Their main selling point is supposed to be convenience, but with all the software glitches it does not seem like they have it anymore.

It may not be too bad for users: a lot of people are simply always logged on, so they’ll not see any difference. What is the current share of Chrome?

I am afraid you are right. Am driving a non-connected old car, and intend to buy a new one without that crap.

I do struggle to understand why the general population is so untroubled with this constant privacy breaching creep (a bit less worried with subs as when it comes to monies, people are a bit more alert). I have a lot of smart friends who click the “agree to everything you want from me” button everywhere, and they see no issue with it.

The definition of rip off may vary. Still, that would be a saner marketing approach, in my view.

As I understand, all the businesses are trying to replicate the IT-born business model of subscription for features. It should not be a thing in the real world, and I hope these managers come to sense, the sooner the better.

The benefit of unified hardware and not having subscriptions can be easily combined: just replace subscriptions with a one-off charge for any feature. Warranty void if enabled not in a dealer shop. I think that would create much less noise than offering a monthly sub. Yes, I know, not great for the quarterly results, but then - so much less hate from your customers. And yes, touch screens in a car should wait until there is a full, proper self-driving capability in place.

Lets be frank, the main reason is that only like 1% of the market has an articulated preference towards free software and privacy. No money to be made equals no product in our cruel world. And of course FOSS, even if it is free to a user (as in you do not have to pay to use it. You do need to spend your time and resources to learn it though, and that is not free already), is by no means free to develop. The time spent on it by devs has to be compensated somehow, enthusiasm is unfortunately not the only fuel our bodies need. And then, for phones, the hardware required is not free as well. And then we need a manufacturer, who would be much more interested in making a billion Android phones than a million of a niche product.

Does Google actively try to stop development of the alternatives? Unlikely, because they don’t have to. They do not make it easier of course, why would they. And they do buy out everything they can, because they can use it to improve their products.

I do not see a good way out of this loop for now. Do you?

Sorry, does it mean that you can use NFC payments with your card anywhere, as it is with G pay/wallet?

I believe the debate is not around storing the data - nobody, to my knowledge, blames Open AI for copy-pasting the internet on their servers. But they are using the data that belongs to everyone to produce a product they sell/intend to sell commercially. Quite a bit more tricky! Extending analogy to us humanses, in order to learn a language we have to buy a book and read it, so we did pay someone for our knowledge we then sell. Did Open AI pay everyone for everything they fed to their skynet? Or maybe they used only “open source” stuff, so now they comply with all the licenses attached, do they?

Hm, not sure if I can agree here. There may be a handful of people like that - but that is not the market worth developing as far as I can see. You would normally either travel, or spend your time in front of 3 screens full of text. Also, having anything on your head for a long time (if you are coding, for example) is tiring. Even simple sunglasses are, not talking about a bulky headset. And, as someone also mentioned, there really must be an excellent screen for your eyes not to bleed after a long session of reading. Never tried this headset, but have serious doubts. Watching a movie is different, but at this price point you are likely getting a royally good home set up, so yet again, travel only. Again, a niche thing.

Then there is some CAD stuff, but cannot comment there. How many people in the world need that, anyway?

This leaves games as a real (though still relatively niche) market, yet to see what Apple has to offer there.

So, as I can see, if Apple wants a new big thing, we are still waiting for a killer app. And a breakthrough in tech, of course.

What kind of people that travel a lot you think may benefit? Genuinely curious. All the guys who do travel can mostly do everything with their phone because they have other guys working for them in the office doing the actual multiple screens stuff. Or maybe these are the only ones I saw in my life on the road )