Most anti-google move: buy a second hand pixel, they receive no revenue on the device which is (assumed) already highly subsidized by google so that they can profit off users' data, then you use their subsidized hardware without running their spyware OS. Google only loses money in this scenario, it is a great protest.
Have you seen those prices? I don't think the devices need subsidising at all. How else could competitors, who aren't selling off your data, offer it for cheaper?
That depends on (1) which one you pick and (2) whether you keep the stock OS
Given that there exist vendors like Fairphone/Murena that sell lower-performant hardware at much lower price points, it seems to me that the expensive but decent hardware (like Google's flagship) might be priced appropriately as well
Other competitors (that do track you, like Samsung) have similar price points for their high-end hardware and are again much cheaper for slower hardware. If selling data is so essential, they wouldn't allow removing the tracking. (Samsung may be a bad example because they removed it last summer, but root popularity has been diminishing since early android days anyway so I can't imagine it's a big factor for them)
I see it as a necessity, because the Google phone is the only one worth it if you care about security.
The problem is not GrapheneOS, but rather that phone manufacturers other than Google don't care. Now if there were millions of GrapheneOS users, it would start becoming interesting for other phone manufacturers to care.
My point being that I buy Pixel in order to give more weight to GrapheneOS, in the hope that other manufacturers will eventually realise that.
Besides the already mentioned point of getting one refurbished, Pixels tend to get really cheap towards the end of the yearly cycle. At that point, they were mostly going to make money from you using their ecosystem and then you are sticking it to them by installing GrapheneOS :p (probably they don't care).
E.g. a new Pixel 9a is currently 369 Euro in The Netherlands and 367 Euro in Germany. The Pixel 10a will be released soon, but the 9a will run GrapheneOS just fine (same SoC except modem as the vanilla 9).
Not sure I agree about this, in the UK we have some excellent examples of independent local journalism, for example the Bristol Cable that is funded by readers.
These tech CEOs just want to have to spend as little as possible to maintain their platforms. They don't actually care about freedom of speech beyond that.
Maybe this was the case a few years ago, but I would argue the landscape has changed a lot since then - with many more distro options for Arm64 devices.
As someone who also lives in the UK this surprises me. Almost every restaurant I eat at now takes the liberty of adding a 10% service charge onto every bill. I assume the idea of which is to make it awkward/embarrassing for you to request to have it taken off.
I may have had this happen without realising, but in my head, a tip is something you choose to add on extra, whether for good service or because the workers aren't getting paid properly. If I get a service charge, that's more like just part of the bill that I would pay, though I've only really noticed it as part of online stuff, for example my bank has a £25 service change to send money overseas (for some reason, I can't imagine that the process isn't fully automatic by now)
