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The first thing I do when I reinstall macOS is to disable most of the ”features”, services, and apps Apple added over the last decade. I can’t imagine how cluttered my digital life would be if I’d depend on all those useless toys Apple stuffed into the OS and abandons a few years later (looking at you, Dashboard).

My initial wish for Apple was to make macOS as bulletproof, lightweight, and bug-free as possible. But now I just want to use Linux on my M1 MacBook because of all the bullshit that’s going on in the US right now. It’s only a matter of time until the Trump administration will start to dismantle the American technology sector, beginning with the softening of encryption and the death of Advanced Data Protection I currently rely on on iCloud. Mark my words.

Like I’ve said in a couple of comments before in other threads, I’d love to switch to Asahi but without native disk encryption I just can’t. If my laptop gets stolen, all my files would be visible to the thief, and that’s a risk I’m not willing to make.

Could that become a problem with any electronic product made by US companies? If their government demands Apple, Google & Co. to remotely brick computers, phones, and tablets for whatever reason, why should I bother buying them in the first place?

Many US companies operate via subsidiaries and manufacture their products in Asia. But that doesn’t matter if the main business is based in the US. The current US government, its seemingly random tariffs, and their plans to cut their country off the rest of the world make it hard for me to invest my money and energy into products from the US if I’m not sure if in a year from now I still will get support for them as a customer from Europe.

I’m with you on this one. I’d be fine with Apple opening up their ecosystem in a safe and careful way to other companies but only if the security stays, at least, at the same level - and if I’m able to turn off these options in the settings.

I’d love to try out their products, but as an European it could become a problem in the near future that they’re an US-based company.

Hot take: If the US and EU secret services stop sharing any intel with each other, wouldn’t it be smarter for Europeans to use American services now more than ever? Because even if they’ll get their hands on your nudes, tax docs, or pirated movies, what could they even do with it? If you use an European company on the other hand and some local government wants to fuck you up, it’s much more easier to get their dirty hands onto you, your family, and your friends.

I thought the whole point of this post is to get away from US clouds. So why should I choose Cloudflare and Azure in the end?

Every failure of once-famous Web 2.0 platforms proves that websites are products of their time - temporary and ultimately irrelevant. Each generation has its own favorite services, apps, and channels, all destined to fade away. Some collapse due to mismanagement, enshittification, bad design choices, censorship, or simply because users move on. Digg is as much a relic of the past as MySpace, and no amount of money, marketing, or exaggerated "superpowers" can change that - especially when they're partnering with a platform that is itself dying a slow, painful death.

Thank you. My first two steps will be to switch over my computer from macOS to Asahi Fedora Remix and make myself comfortable with finding alternatives to the iCloud service, maybe an encrypted NextCloud hosted on some non-US server provider. I know that Fedora is also US-based but it's the best Linux distro that's currently available for Macs and as soon as i'm getting used to the OS I'll be able to look for other distros and hardware.

Thank you for your real-life insights and recommendations. I’ll consolidate your points one by one. My main challenge is balancing independence with mobility, especially if my lifestyle changes drastically. For example, relying on a homelab wouldn’t be feasible for me. Instead, I prefer to depend on a single laptop and phone while keeping everything else in the cloud. But I’ll check out all the options, thanks.