Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change
Ranked #1 on Hacker News with 39 points and 21 comments.
August 09, 2026 Categories Reading time: 4 minutes
Recently, someone on Mastodon shared this video titled " Apple Changed... " by a guy named Theo who I'd never heard of, but according to his website he's a guy who "builds things". Apps, presumably. I had nothing better to do (sleepless night...) and I enjoy a good Apple bashing, so I watched the video. In it, Theo spends an hour ranting about how terrible the experience of developing apps for the iPhone/iPad is, how Apple takes 30% of all app store and in app purchases, how awful Xcode is as a development environment and how even as a developer you have to get Apple's approval to run your own app on your own device. And how you need a second device (MacBook) to build an app for your target device (iPad) because Apple won't allow you to build the app straight on the iPad itself. And a lot more.
I'm not an iOS developer (thank god), but I'm of course aware of Apple's restrictive policies when it comes to approving and running apps on their devices, and I have no doubt that everything he says in the video is true, and that it's really an abysmal experience developing for iOS, and that as a developer (and I'd argue as an Apple user, too) you're essentially trapped in an abusive relationship from which there seems to be no escape.
But as I watched this video I kept thinking, this guy is so rightfully angry and pissed off at Apple... and yet he's sitting in front of a brand new MacBook, a brand new iPhone and a brand new iPad.
He correctly points out towards the end of the video that the only thing that matters to Tim Cook is making more money for Apple. There's literally nothing else he cares about. Not your user experience, not the environment, and also not the mental health of children and teenagers using these devices, as much as he tries to pretend that he does. The only metric that matters to Apple is "number on spreadsheet go up". And so yes, Theo might make an hour long video about everything that he thinks sucks at Apple, and he may be right about all of it.
But he still gave them thousands of Dollars.