Matt Gemmell 🏴Another painful one to write, given my life-long love of Apple.
The world must extricate itself from US big tech: https://mattgemmell.scot/liberty-as-resistance/
Wen@mattgemmell I heartily agree. Our Macs and iPhones are the last things we have that are reliant on US sourced software and services (excepting of course those in the background by others that might provide them to us). Both will be gone in 18 months (the macs are elderly and high end x86 machines) and the phones, well experiments with Sailfish are going very well.
A necessary wrench.
Jason Sadler@mattgemmell Great article. A gentle correction, if I may: Apple doesn’t prohibit 3rd party OSes on M-series Macs. (Although of course they do on iPads so your point mostly still stands.)
According to the Asahi folks, supporting other OSes was an explicit goal of the M-series architecture, and Asahi uses supported mechanisms - it doesn’t do any circumvention. (1/2)
According to the Asahi folks, supporting other OSes was an explicit goal of the M-series architecture, and Asahi uses supported mechanisms - it doesn’t do any circumvention. (1/2)
I think the fair version of this criticism is that Apple provides insufficient documentation on how its SoCs work, so the Asahi folks have to move mountains to reverse engineer drivers and whatnot.
(And I fully agree with ALL of your other criticisms in this piece!) (2/2)
(And I fully agree with ALL of your other criticisms in this piece!) (2/2)
@json Thanks! So I now read in the Asahi FAQ. Duly corrected.
@simonboots@mattgemmell Great writing Matt and I fully agree with you. I feel the same. It’s a long process to break out of the walled garden but not everything has to be done at once. I started moving my email away from iCloud, moved from Notes to Obsidian and from Safari to Firefox. These were the easier moves. The harder ones will be iCloud Photo Library and all the tools that are only available on Mac (DevonThink, OmniFocus, Affinity Suite). I bought a cheap refurbished ThinkPad on eBay, just to see how a Linux-based laptop would feel like. I have to say that Linux has (obviously) come a long way since I last tried to use it on a laptop 20 something years ago so I am definitely interested to keep it going, even just as a secondary laptop for now. One step at a time…
Craig Grannell@mattgemmell on the EU point, I also hope people recognise many of those companies aren’t good by default. Ditching Apple Music for Spotify, for example, would in very real cases be a moral downgrade, given how poorly Spotify treats and pays musicians. (I’m not sure how Deezer is these days. Used to be solid. Still around. Might be worth investigating…)
Simon@mattgemmell With you 100%. I have neither the money nor the time to do a wholesale change, but I’m looking to a future with a phone like fairphone or nothing phone when my 16e dies. With todoist instead of reminders. With proton passwords and 2fa, with Ubuntu or similar. It’ll likely take years but I’m starting now.
@embraboy One step at a time, aye.
@mattgemmell The biggest challenge will be bringing the family on the journey 😬🙄
derlinzer@embraboy I'm in a similar position as you are and im also struggling with some Apple services like iCloud Photos. Problem with Todoist is, that it's another US company.
@derlinzer Ah interesting. I understood it was Danish? Will revisit, thanks for the heads up.
@derlinzer Now investigating superlist
@embraboy you can also take a look at @superproductivity - very rough right now but very promising as well
@mattgemmell another great one. lots to take in, to think about. no simple "ditch 'em all", but naming the cost for that as well.
q: where would you personally draw the line with eg Home Assistant? At the core an open source foundation, with close to ties in form of optional subscription service the US based company Nabu Casa? Or the canadian 1Password that uses AWS? Just curios...
@derlinzer I don’t think there’s a single answer. AWS is a big hidden liability. I think that underlying data sovereignty is much more important than hardware and subscriptions?
@mattgemmell There never is. when taking usage of AWS (even when instances are in EU) into consideration for non-US companies as well, it gets really really narrow to find usable alternatives.
Mark Kristensson@mattgemmell My wife just handed me her macbook and incredulously asked me "WTF is this???" pointing to an upgrade prompt in Pages asking her to subscribe. It's gonna take years, but my family is now gonna start de-appling our lives
Stella C 🇨🇦@mkristensson @mattgemmell I am following you both for advice on this
@SCampbell @mkristensson Well there was just a new release of LibreOffice that supports Markdown too…
@mattgemmell @mkristensson I use Libre & I'm happy with it. Downloaded Proton Mail & Tuta mail & testing them to replace gmail. Getting away from iCloud will be my challenge.
@SCampbell Yup, getting away from iCloud is gonna take me a long time. I tried Proton mail and absolutely despised their app(s) so I'm using Fastmail now.
@mkristensson Did not hear of that one. I'll check it out
@mkristensson @SCampbell another longtime @fastmail user here! I don't understand the hype with Proton. 1) it supports no standards like caldav, imap, etc. 2) what good is my sent mail encrypted when it's still stored unencrypted on the receiving end (unless also Proton user)? 3) is bad apps i presume from your comment ;-)
@derlinzer @mkristensson @fastmail Fastmail has servers based mainly in US. Looking for an EU option
@mattgemmell Ohhh, good to know. I think most of my word processing needs are really formatting needs, so Obsidian should work for most of my uses. However, for my spreadsheets....
🇨🇦@mattgemmell
I very much appreciate this article. I have a similar Apple footprint and a love for their “it just works” feature list. (Although I could argue that Apples recent design choices have not been as good their track record so they are being carried by nostalgic momentum)
I accept the challenge. This year 2026 will be the year of minimizing my big-tech footprint.
I can buy a mini-pc with Linux on it and use the Mac mini just for games that I never play anyway.
Do I really need to cloud host my photos? Probably not. The world is full of photos and nobody has to have 24/7 99.9999% uptime to see mine. Storing them on the cloud for sharing was convenient for backup, but there are other ways to accomplish that.
Minimizing will not end in zero but by the end of the year I will have alternatives for everything but my phone and tablet.
@notveryhandsome Got a particular machine in mind?
@mattgemmell
I have a 2011 MacBook Pro. Might as well run Ubuntu.
But I would get a small box pc and stick it behind my monitor. I need a big monitor for when I bring my work laptop home, so I just switch inputs on a usb hub and everything works.
I would enjoy recommendations for that.
The Mac mini is a) for steam games b) Adobe products that I have to ween off of and c) general computing which can be on anything.
Max Mellman@mattgemmell thanks for writing this, Matt. A solid reminder of the importance of transferable, open formats.