If you prepare for a case like this then it's easy. If you get caught off guard (like I imagine most people will) it's hard.
I have an unhealthy habit of switching between FOSS and Apple a few times a year (don't ask) and generally it is pretty easy. The most annoying thing to me is Photos export, especially if you don't have access to a Mac. You can't download your whole library from the online environment, there's a 1000 image limit per shot.
edit: Also I have not found a good way to export from Apple Notes so I have a habit of typing into .md files from the terminal.
edit2: Gave it a search and tried Exporter. Duh. Works great!
Actually an anecdote on switching, my father in law bought an iPhone in a pawn shop. It was logged in with someone else’s iCloud account. He just used that until he dropped dead. We had no idea until I had to clean his phone out. My mother doesn’t even know what iCloud is. Literally total ignorance must be the default for everyone these days.
I’ve done the random switch thing as well as a test case. But to Microsoft. It took me a day to export all photos from Photos.app and into OneDrive and that was with a Mac (105Gb). And of course you lose all the edits you did if you export the originals.
"Even though I paid for this home (laptop) and have all my things in it, I can totally buy another from another realtor if the current locks me out. So joke's on them, it's not exactly a walled garden"
We can all use hyperbole and carefully pick our narratives when we want.
Example: I can live in this nice comfy condo for a sky high fee (Apple) or I can live in a rickety old shed I have to keep fixing for free so I don’t have to pay the ground rent (Linux).
I’d rather live in the condo even if the lease runs out one day.
I'm not saying it was a bad analogy, just that it's easy to create analogies to create a narrative based on your own perception. Obviously the point was missed.
In this case, their analogy seems to be based on reality.
The key point of their analogy is that buying another condo isn't a good solution to someone locking you out of the one you paid for, just like buying a new phone isn't a good solution to Apple locking you out of your phone that you paid for.
Your complaint with their analogy seems to boil down to "they used an analogy", without actually addressing the point above. Try to focus on the point instead.
Yeah, I never understood this whole "you're locked in, you can't get out of their ecosystem."
This has always been BS. I've switched from Apple to PC to Linux back to PC to Apple back to PC and then Android etc etc. It's actually quite simple. At the moment I'm using Apple stuff, but there's nothing holding me here other than just me being here.
Where is the button to copy your photos from apple to google? Until something like that exists normal people are 100% locked in.
They may not even own a laptop with sufficient storage to download all their photos to. If all they have is one, maybe two, phones with limited storage they're totally fucked. Just like Google & Apple designed it.
And it's not like these services make it easy to bulk download/upload your photos, either.
Suppose Walmart has a monopoly in California and Target has a monopoly in Florida. Anybody in California can shop at Target, they just have to go to Florida. "I've switched from California to Florida and then back, it's actually quite simple."
But if you're in California and you need some batteries, even if flying to Florida to buy them from Target is possible, even if you used to live in Florida and might move back there next year, even if you have the money to buy the $300 plane ticket, it's still prohibitively expensive to do it solely to avoid a $5 markup on batteries. Then the two stores don't really have to compete, and you get stuck paying the monopoly price for everything. That's what it means to be locked in.
> You buy different stuff, copy your data across and sell the original stuff.
You buy a different house, move your stuff across and sell the original house. How is it a crappy analogy?
The issue is that the cost of moving removes your choice from individual decisions because they all have to be made together. If you want iMessage then you have to sell your Android and get an iPhone. If you want F-Droid then you have to sell your iPhone and get an Android. What if you want both? This isn't because the free software community would be unwilling to set up a store/repository for iOS, it isn't because no Android messaging app would be willing to interoperate with iMessage, it's because you're locked in to one platform or the other at any given time and have to make all your choices together.
Someone who wants to provide an app store that charges lower fees would have to convince everyone to switch to their platform instead of only convincing people to switch to their store.
The reason they make it that way instead of being able to choose what you run on your device independent of the kind of device is in order to lock you in.
(I have tested this - always have an exit strategy)