I became the lab rat. Three weeks ago, I put away my trusty MacBook to discover if the technically powerful 11” M4 iPad Pro could handle everything this solo pastor’s jack-of-all-trades work demands — writing, video editing, programming, system administration, the whole enchilada. A year ago, the answer was clearly “no.” Now, I wasn’t so sure.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the wrongheadedness of the Department of Justice’s antitrust witch hunt against Apple. One reason amongst the many deserves its own consideration.

The Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Apple is one of the worst calamities to hit computer privacy in recent memory. If we want to understand where this could very well take us, we don’t need a hypothetical future horrible privacy mess, we need only look at Zoom video conferencing software.

My good friend and fellow OFB writer Dennis E. Powell and I met years ago on a group that championed Free/Open Source software, much for the same sorts of reasons he advocates for his new phone configuration over Apple’s offerings. OFB itself was founded, in fact, to promote such open software, especially Linux, so why would I defend locked down systems from Apple? That’s a story that started 19 years ago, before the iPhone even existed.