Technology

they did pay 1000$+ phones just to have ads on it.

They did. Someone at the top has been ruining that experience lately.

"Secret cabal" as in capitalism and its imperatives sure, pretty out in the open though.

Wanting to mention CoMaps and that it was forked from Organic Maps.

The projects aren't very diverged yet so you can still migrate your pins with an easy export/import

Here in Cali I’ve noticed it’s actually better. Google Maps has been ass for the last 4 years for me. Wrong data, it takes me randomly off the freeway only to loop my back and put me right back where I got off. It has completely wrong traffic data, and it has road closures it thinks are still open. When I travel around the bay for work I mostly use Apple Maps.

I do because it currently doesn't have ads

Specifically OSMAnd.

If you don't need traffic data, CoMaps (uses OpenStreet Map data).

If you do need traffic data (understandable) Magic Earth is what I use. It's unfortunately not fully open source, only the map data is from OSM, but I find the navigation good 95% of the time, sometimes you have to make your own judgement for if a route might have bad traffic. At least it's not Google or Apple, and no ads.

I don't do car play, so I have no idea about how that works.

I wish we had better alternatives ~~or that cars all exploded and we went to public transport and walkable cities~~

The thing is, Apple getting worse is coinciding with everything else getting worse, too.

Steve Jobs, for all his other problems, knew how to run a company and held to the idea that they needed to make good products. He kept the prices fairly low for what they were, and they even decreased over time for many of their products. He wouldn’t allow unfinished products to be released which is a big reason why I always laughed at Android people who claimed “first” with their buggy, shitty versions of the reliable thing Apple made a couple years later.

But then for some reason he let Tim Cook, who had been an idiot at Apple for a long time and Job’s knew it, take over. Since then prices have sky-rocketed and the company has started releasing stuff that just isn’t up to the standards they held in the past. He even took power away from the guy who had come up with Apple’s iconic aesthetic.

Whether or not people want to admit, Apple made excellent products and the customers aren’t nearly as stupid as people want to believe. So when shit like this happens we understandably get pissed because, surprise, many of us actually have been paying attention.