I've been using Macs since 1984. I bought a Lisa to do development for the Mac after Steve Jobs came to my university and told us we could buy his weird new computer for half price. Guy Kawasaki mailed me printouts of new sections of Inside Macintosh every month. I've single-handedly bought several hundred Macs (mostly through my employer) over the years, fighting prejudice and bias the whole time about Macs not being "real computers." I had a rack of about 50 XServes at one point that was my lab's private supercomputer.
But I'm about done. Apple has turned into an entity I no longer recognize. They have become--to use Google's word--"evil".
It's bad enough that they can't seem to fix long-standing and new bugs in their operating systems.
It's bad enough that every version of the operating system deprecates or eliminates useful features in favor of shiny useless ones.
It's bad enough that they don't care about developers any more, and cannot be bothered to create sane developer tools or documentation.
It's bad enough that they don't do backward compatibility any more and you are pretty much forced into a newer -- and in most respects worse -- version of MacOS at least once a year, or else you don't get security updates any more.
It's bad enough that the IOS upgrade treadmill is an even worse situation, where if you have an iPhone, you must keep upgrading it constantly, cannot downgrade, and will have to buy new hardware just to stay on the treadmill.
But what I cannot abide is Apple's increasing lockdown of the platform. It's now to the point that they no longer sell general-purpose personal computers. As your article points out, it's not even yours any more and it cannot be made yours.
Apple just sucks now. And I get to say that because I've been their biggest cheerleader for 36 goddamn years.
It's likely that I have purchased my last mac and last iPhone this month. This post marks the end of an era, and a real-life humanscale era, not a computer-time one: 30+ years!
I'll miss it.
EDIT: It's possible that via bputil(1) run from the Recovery partition that the signed system volume checks might be disabled in M1 macOS 11. This means I could remove the plists for certain intrusive/telemetry system services and still boot. I've updated the post, and will write more about it once I have the equipment in hand.
I'm allowed to hope, I've been using macs continuously since I was 4 years old, over 30 years.