Frankly I don’t trust any of them and try to utilise best practices regardless. Google is in a slightly different market than Apple’s walled garden in terms of the products and functionality that it offers and it’s nice to have the choice. I’m not keen on Apple’s lock-in but again that’s just me.
Looking at it a little differently - all the information that subscribers post to this site show that there’s a lot of implicit trust in those running it, the forum software, the security of devices people are using to access it, and so on. There’s a certain level of implied trust in Apple or Google as well and perhaps a recognition that there’s no such thing as a risk-free world.
One person’s lock-in is another person’s integration. Apple has succeeded in seamless interoperability across their devices, as Jobs, a dedicated advocate of simplicity, would have wanted.
If you want to see lock-in look at MS attempts to ram their AI bullshit down users’ throats, at a 30% hike PA for MS 365 users, and no doubt a discounted but still ludicrous uplift for corporate hostages. We pay, the end users, for their stupid punt on so called AI?
Were I still in harness I would be working hard on an offering that liberated companies, small and large, from the MS stranglehold. It’d be a winner
This is an open forum, every thing we post is visible to anyone on the internet. Caveat emptor, so to speak.
One is an innovator in the H/W, S/W and services arenas for decades, the other is a data scraping parasite that makes all its money out of advertising.
Agree and there’s other things to like - such as the extended life they offer to older hardware.
Personally I like the customisability of Android and it’s extensibility and found iPhones/iPads a tad too restrictive for what I’ve wanted to do with them over the years. They also don’t play as well in the corporate arena with restricted application software availability and integration with non-Apple products.
Google has also demonstrated innovation in its own way over the years and has been happy to contribute to FOSS (eg Chromium and all it’s derivatives as one example and contributions from Google engineers to Linux kernel development) but has also been very cut-throat in killing products that it decided no longer fit its own vision. As for the data scraping parasite quote well someone has to pay for all these “free” services that millions of people use. There’s a lot of hot air about Google’s actions but no real data to back up claims that individuals are suffering as a result.
I now have gmail.
I live in Luxembourg and I used a local email that was linked to my broadband,
What a fool I was.
Years late they announced that the email would be shut down although all their other services would continue.
I moved to gmail 5 years ago but I am still haunted by the old email and my bad decision.
We’ve all done it! Years ago I lost a perfectly good domain name because I had not updated the admin email after I moved my email away from my ISP’s mail system… When renewal time for the domain came around I could not renew it because I would have needed the old email address to confirm my identity!
The market for internet and email has changed so much - you could properly say “evolved” - that few could have predicted the sort of service we get today.
Some excellent suggestions on this thread, which I wished I’d had when leaving work, (I used the work email address and mobile for everything) to move to France. I have just totted up the organisations I have dealings with (tax offices, pension companies, utilities, investment firms etc) - it comes to 74!
I was daunted by the scale of the task of changing email and physical addresses of that number, and decided to limit my changes to a maximum of 3 a day, chipping away until all were changed. I deliberately created two separate emails, one with Gmail the other Outlook in case one or the other started mucking me around (Microsoft - as if!). I also endorse SuePJs advice to parallel run previous and current emails for 2-3 months to see whether organisations have processed the changes or not.
I also very much agree with the suggestion that you should do all this in the UK. Even being quite organised, I still managed to forget about updating contacts with some key UK organisations that didn’t like the fact that both my email, mobile number, physical address and country was changing simultaneously…
