The reports of my death, er I mean, move away from apple, have been greatly exaggerated

I was going to move away from Apple products, en masse. No more iPhone. No more Macs. No more Apple Watch. So I began to pick away at my dependence on Apple, by buying an Android phone, testing all the stuff I do on a Windows machine, etc. 

Why would I do this? Don’t I dig Apple? Well yeah, actually I still very much do. But damn, their prices seem to have gotten just crazy out of control. I got frustrated, maybe even a little angry about it. 

Here’s the thing; it took less than a day to realize how annoying it would be FOR ME to move back to another ecosystem. Yes, there’s something kinda like Logic. Yes, there’s something kinda like Final Cut Pro.

There’s stuff kinda like Photos. But it’s not the same cohesive workflow from phone to computer, from computer to other people in my family, as it is with Macs. That’s where they get you hooked.

You see, not only am I on MacOS/iOS, but also my wife. My oldest daughter. And now my son and youngest daughter each have their own iPads, complete with iCloud accounts attached to Family Sharing. 

So now they can text me too, Facetime, share videos, all that, because we’re all in this ecosystem. Damnit Apple! It’s definitely Kool-Aid, but the Kool-Aid is delicious.  I bet the same thing could also be done with Android/Windows, but the problem is you have to do it all in one shot, with every person. Switch out one, and the whole thing comes tumbling down.

So what to do about price? Well, nothing, really. Except perhaps to realize the hamster wheel of replacing laptops, phones, tablets, etc needs to slow way the hell down. With laptops lasting as long as they do (my wife’s is nearly nine years old!), and even phones going well beyond the requisite two year cycle, there’s just no great need to be the tech addicts we sometimes are, and replace everything so often. 

When I do replace my current laptop, it’ll be with as fully loaded of a machine as I can afford, so it lasts another 5 years or so. When I get a phone, it’ll be one with the most current processor. And so on. 

Another thing I found with non-Apple stuff, as I go to sell my Android phone, is that non-Apple stuff has shite resale value. You seem to get a fraction of what an equivalent from Apple would sell for. When someone mentions the “Apple Tax”, that bears mentioning. 

So there it is: my grand experiment was shockingly (but not surprisingly) short. 

TL;DR – My wife was right.

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