Out Of Eden: Leaving The Apple Ecosystem

I was a committed Apple user for nearly a decade. I fully expected to continue being a mostly Apple user for the foreseeable future until my 2013 MacBook Pro began to show its age.

Quite a bit had changed since I bought my MacBook Pro and while I loved many things about my Mac and its OS I’d soured on quite a few other Apple related things. I’ve always loved the ease of use of Apple software: I didn’t have to worry about piecemeal updates of various drivers and programs or viruses until recently. IMessage was great and I loved being able to take my message history wherever I went, answer texts from my laptop (which being a writer I spent a fair amount of time at), and easily share files from my phone to my computer. My iPhone 6 was getting a little long in the tooth, but did all the thing I needed it to with reasonable speed. It was fully paid off and I loved having a loved having a small cellphone bill.

Everything was going swimmingly until the iPhone 7 was announced. Apple removed the headphone jack and as a commuter in New York City and a bit of an audiophile I was not happy about that. I had one or 2 pairs of decently expensive wired headphones and I preferred their sound over Bluetooth ones. I didn’t see any features I couldn’t live without on the 7 or 7 Plus so I’d sit this iteration of iPhones out. Maybe Apple would ditch the dongle and move back to the headphone jack with the 8 (hey, it was a different time and no one really knew what was going to happen next).

About 3 months later, my iPhone 6 slowed down dramatically and its battery would drain rapidly. I’m not a power user and could easily get at least a day if not a day and a half out of a single charge. I figured it was time for an upgrade and while I wasn’t thrilled about the iPhone 7’s lack of headphone jack I didn’t want to switch to an android phone so I upgraded to the 7Plus. About a week later, I was getting used to my new phone when I learned that Apple had been artificially throttling battery performance on older iPhones and causing them to slow down.

I was pissed. I’d just spent a bunch of money on a new phone I didn’t really need because Apple had chosen to handicap my iPhone 6’s performance. Apple caused the performance issues which made me upgrade my phone. Now, I was stuck with this new donglfied phone that made using my current headphones awkward and meant I couldn’t charge my phone and listen to music at the same time. That’s when my trust in Apple as a brand and a company began to degrade and my tech eyes began to roam. And Apple’s hardware kept getting more expensive and restrictive despite massive profits and price changes in physical memory. Apple wasn’t even using premium parts for a lot of its most expensive products. It kept cheaping out on chip sets, charging ridiculous amounts of money for RAM, and worst of all, designed a keyboard that was faulty. I write for a living and a keyboard that doesn’t function properly on a machine that cost at least 1200 bucks was a non-starter for me.

But, I might have given Apple the benefit of the doubt if it wasn’t for its earnings report and recent keynote event. Apple made most of its money from Iphone sales in the US, but by 2018 most people who wanted an Iphone in the US had one. US consumers weren’t buying Iphones at the rate needed for Apple to continue to produce its previous profits. Instead of diversifying its product line or making essential changes to its product to compete in the international space Apple raised prices on existing products. Apple had over-leveraged itself with the Iphone and it felt like instead of learning from its mistakes it passed the cost its failures on to its customers. Apple is also pivoting away from hardware to jump on to the services bandwagon seemingly not learning anything about the failures of its hardware design and announcing a credit card that looks designed to do little more than lock people into the Mac ecosystem.

When my 2013 Macbook Pro unexpectedly kicked the bucket after doing a lot of spec and price comparisons I bought a Razer Blade Stealth. And aside from the downsized right shift key, I’m pretty happy with my choice. I might buy another MacBook in the future, but for right now, it looks like this is the start of a slow transition out of Apple’s ecosystem.

#MacbookPro #Apple #OS #PC #MactoPC