I wish it’s not a sponsored video as well but FWIW I looked hard into this half a year ago and decided that ASUS is probably still the best lineup in terms of being consumer friendly and privacy focused.

For example, eero requires an internet connection to use which to me is anti-privacy and very anti-Apple, which has usually focused on making their products workable without mandatory internet connections (e.g. no mandatory iCloud signins unlike Windows 11, etc).

ASUS routers also allow you to mix-and-match routers of different models for use in a mesh network whereas a lot of the other mesh routers require you to use only from the same lineup, which means you have to replace all your routers wholesale if you later on want to get new routers.

(I’m not sponsored by ASUS. Just summarizing what I concluded on when upgrading routers for my parents)

The thing is, even if the Sunbird app was properly implemented, it would still be a security nightmare because you are relaying people’s iMessage messages on random Mac minis. The messages have to exist in plain text on the server before it’s re-encrypted to be sent to the user. An attacker or malicious admin could easily find a way to log those messages. So no amount of due diligence by Nothing is really necessary here. The entire idea is bad.

But then, if Nothing or the Sunbird developers were actually competent to begin with they would probably have realized that this was a terrible idea and wouldn’t have gone down this path.

I think outside of iMessage, Apple just gets the US market, which isn’t a surprise I guess because Apple is an American company. The way they advertise their phones and design their features feel like they are all optimized for the US market first. A lot of new features like Apple Card and redesigned Apple Maps always come to US markets while other big markets have to wait a long time before Apple brings them over.

There are other small things like the heavily app-focused design, which favors a lot of different apps that each does one thing and one thing well. This is different from how a lot of emerging markets have superapps (e.g. WeChat) that will dominate your daily life. A quick example: iOS has built-in non-customizable QR code scanning (either as a quick action from Control Center, or automatically from the camera app). This is useful let’s say you want to scan a restaurant menu or an URL link. But let’s say you live in China, most of the QRs codes you see are usually WeChat / Alipay links that you have to open the specific app and scan the code from there, making a built-in OS feature completely useless.

And of course iMessage itself is also a uniquely N American thing because a lot of other countries moved organically to other apps like WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat and so on.

The iPhones are also priced expensive enough (Apple doesn’t do price differentiation across markets) that in a lot of lower income countries they are just too expensive compared to lower-priced Android devices, whereas in US, the general income level is high enough that they are affordable (but still expensive) to a lot of folks.

I do wonder about the specific markets like Japan, since iPhones are also really popular there, and I wonder what Apple is doing specifically right there comparatively? (iPhones are popular everywhere but I feel that in Japan specifically it’s even more popular. Maybe because of a lack of good local competition?)