They are definitely both pretty terrible, pick your poison I guess. Apple will gouge your eyes out with overpriced hardware and Alphabet (Google) will spy and you and sell your data. I don’t like either, but faced with the choice I’d rather pay more for my phone and avoid Google’s surveillance capitalism empire as much as possible. If you don’t mind advertisements and privacy isn’t important Google is probably a better choice.

Ended my donations to Signal after discovering they choose Google Hosting Services over open source and privacy respecting alternatives.

It’s surprising that teenagers are uncomfortable using a surveillance device created by the largest advertising company in the world. Our friends at Alphabet Inc simply want to monitor everything you search for and all your communication because they care and want to keep you safe.

Better to De-Google sooner rather than later imho and it’s fairly safe to assume corporate greed will continue to send it’s products and services deeper into the abyss. I think using alternatives now will make life easier in the future as Google becomes less useful with each passing day. Also, just using Google gives them access to personal data to harvest and ad revenue. I think we should try to be conscientious consumers whenever possible and use less evil alternatives. I don’t want to support Google’s enshitification of the Internet, censorship, anti-competitive practices, etc…

In my experience the suffering of losing a romantic love is less intense the second time, but the falling in love and passion can also be less intense and take longer to build up as you’re more guarded with your heart after being heartbroken before.