Love/Hate Relationship with Apple
I’ve been a Mac user for most of my laptop/desktop and phone needs since 2008. Before that, Linux on desktop, which was always a source of pain — getting sound drivers and video drivers to work, power saving and suspend states, etc. The lack of commercial mainstream applications also was always limiting — simply redlining documents shared in Word, spreadsheets, etc. was difficult — in a lot of cases the solution was “Google Docs”, but that has its own problems.
Apple hardware has gone from expensive and ok to somewhat-expensive and objectively the best. Apple’s own silicon, early access to TSMC for iPhones, etc. gives them a huge advantage.
The downside of Apple, however, is how locked down their ecosystem is. It really has been pretty locked down vs. alternatives throughout their entire history — Apple in the 70s-90s vs. Unix, PCs with multiple operating systems, and even Microsoft Windows at various points. Post Steve Jobs return and OS X, things got a bit better (due to Unix foundations), but still not great. iOS has been incredibly locked down from the beginning, to the point where it is everything we railed against Microsoft doing on the desktop back in the 1990s.
Not being able to easily override some core OS functionality is probably the worst practical consequence of this. You’re largely stuck with Apple’s effort at a web browser on iOS (even third party browsers have to use the Webkit engine; they’re just chrome around the browser engine); third party mail clients and other tools on iOS also are distinctly inferior. Apple’s anti-adult content, anti-cryptography policies severely limit what’s possible on their devices, and the 30% tax on purchases makes a lot of things painful. Apple does a lot of stuff “good enough” and their “good enough” is often “very good”, but it’s rarely if ever exactly what I want, and there’s no way to override most of it.
Apple’s security tends to be pretty good. For a while, iOS was absolutely better than Android, but once Rubin was removed and decent security practices started to be instituted (he was apparently actively opposed to security, not merely uninterested), Android’s rate of improvement increased. Probably sometime around 2018-2019 the best Android configuration would be better than the best iOS configuration for security, at least in a heavily locked down corporate environment, but iOS is more usable, the hardware is better, and it’s probably better out of the box for security than most Android phones. Windows 11 can be locked down pretty well in a corporate environment, but there’s a lot I hate about the Windows ecosystem, and for a single unmanaged device it isn’t better than MacOS. Apple seems to be trending downward in a lot of ways, but from a substantial lead. I’m also just very used to how things work on Macs.
Every time I buy a new phone or laptop which is part of the Apple ecosystem, I hope it will be the last, but I also do the calculation on how much use I’ll get out of it even over just a year, justifying the purchase. I try to avoid building Apple-only products into my workflow, so I don’t use Apple-specific tools for managing passwords or make extensive use of iCloud (beyond photo roll, which is genuinely useful but also very scary), etc. I actually run (sadly) Windows 11 in a VM (ARM version, using Parallels) for a lot of work stuff, since we’re locked into a Microsoft system for compliance management reasons, and all my server infrastructure is Linux or FreeBSD based.
I’ve experimented with alternative OSes. I have Linux (and Windows 11) on desktops; probably will get a Linux-dedicated laptop for general use (I do have some for crypto, but that’s a single-task device). I’ve used the alternative Android forks and other OSes for phones and tablets (Graphene, EthOS), and some hardware devices like the reMarkable.
Still, I haven’t found anything today which is better than iOS + iPhone 14 Pro for a mobile phone, or MacBook Pro 16 for a laptop, and I’ll be stuck on the platform until that changes. Entirely likely I’d buy a next-gen Mac or iPhone again, too.