One of the reasons I never buy apple products. They seem to control everything and cannot support such a company

How do you get around it though? Genuinely asking. I guess you try to source your own parts outside of controlling companies and only work on open source OS's and software run by super transparent groups? It just seems like a ton of work for something that might not even be viable. I don't know how I could possibly operate outside of apple, microsoft, google, etc. all of which have massive ethical issues.

To be very clear I'm not saying "it's hopeless why bother you're wrong" etc. I'm just curious what your solution(s) is. I'd love to decouple myself from these groups as much as I can over time.

For instance, even though I hate google with a passion, I got this $150 android tablet and I've been using https://github.com/t184256/nix-on-droid to access pretty much the same tools that I use on my Linux desktop. I have the same setup on my Android phone.

I was at the university library the other day, surrounded by windows machines (I'm no fan of Microsoft either), and I wanted a big screen and keyboard, so I ran https://github.com/yudai/gotty on my phone and used a browser on the windows box to access the nix-enabled shell on my phone, which had everything I need, configured how I like it.

Other times I'll use a google cloud shell, clone my nix config, and have the same experience there.

Sure, I'm relying on Google and Microsoft in some capacity here and there, but I've reduced my reliance on software that they wrote to the point where they're pretty much just a dumb pipe between me and the hardware. They might be able to break my workflow, but that's about the limit of their control.

Unlike Apple, they'd rather attempt to control me in other ways so they don't break my workflow. They're ok with failing a certain percentage of the time, after all they're still getting my money. Apple doesn't seem to be able to let go to that degree.