do I leave the Apple walled garden (again)?
I wrote a post yesterday clunkily titled: retroactive big data analysis of YOU with AI.
TL;DR; entities collect data about you; data is mostly collected through your phone; in 5 years, data analysis with AI will be extremely easy and realtime; maybe you should think about stemming your data sources sooner rather than later.
This post continues some practical thoughts I had about switching away from the Apple walled garden, back to GrapheneOS.
Smartwatch Support
I've thought more about why I haven't switched back to GrapheneOS. I missed one crucial point yesterday, the Apple Watch. I use my Apple Watch a lot, for running every day, listening to podcasts/music on long walks so I don't have to take my phone, for navigation, for timers, for flashlight etc.
I understand you can use Garmin watches with GrapheneOS, but the UI/UX on Garmin makes me wanna rip my hair out. It's the same with Samsung anything; that leaves me with the Pixel watch as my only option, should I choose to use a smartwatch at all.
The Pixel watch looks nice and seems to work well, though its battery is not as good as my Apple Watch Ultra. It does seem that you can set it up, but you need sandboxed Google Play services and to grant extensive permissions to Google services, which may defeat the entire point of switching to GrapheneOS. I need to look into this more.
Software as a Lifestyle and where do I fit?
I read an interesting blog recently, here on Bearblog, about "how software became a lifestyle brand". Though most of the points are obvious in hindsight, they are well organised in that post, I recommend you go read it.
The question is: Do I subscribe to the sleek "It just works and works really well" lifestyle of Apple? or the roll-up-your-sleeves don't mind a little extra effort for the principle lifestyle of GrapheneOS/Linux?
The problem is that seemingly I fit into both attitudes depending on the day. I can understand having a macOS machine and a Linux machine, but having both an iOS and Graphene device might be counterintuitive. Food for thought.