While Ed’s story of crappy tech points directly to a Windows computer, Apple isn’t much better. Yes the hardware is nicer so you don’t have multiple minutes to wait while you login in, but it’s also more expensive meaning that many people couldn’t afford the supposedly “better” experience. Then if you’re a power user Apple fleeces you on hardware costs so hard it’s almost unbelievable.
I moved to Linux full-time early this year and outside of a few edge cases have been very happy with the move. I know many people will read that and say that it’s too much work to use Linux, but is it really any more work than navigating the ad crapware installed on Windows? Is it more work than working to avoid the news sources you’ve told Apple News you don’t want to see, but it continues to put in your face or the always present notifications in System Settings about iCloud or whatever latest service they want to push?
In my years of experience, macOS doesn’t just work. I have to help my wife at least weekly with some odd behaviour on her M1 Air that requires me to do some “nerd stuff” as she calls it.
On the Apple front I find the ecosystem lock in to be the biggest offense to the user. The foot dragging on RCS, the crappy support for iCloud on other platforms, the push to handle all your passwords now which also has crappy support on other platforms. I know that many Apple people will talk about it being a choice and I did too once, but when I started to look outside the Apple ecosystem I realized how much work I’d have to do to make just my life work1.
Yes family sharing on photos is excellent, but what if I want to use something like Immich and really control my photo experience? It’s possible but takes far more work than Apple Photos because Apple doesn’t allow other apps to have access to photos. There are some security issues they address, but mostly it feels to me like it’s about locking you into their system.
Overall, I haven’t found my Linux experience to be any more work than my macOS experience. I had to investigate new apps, but people do that all the time and try new shiny things I merely changed the platform I’m doing it for. One big bonus is that many of the apps I ended up using work on macOS and Windows as well as Linux so if I switch back I don’t have to find new software again.
- I didn’t even start to think about moving my family over to anything but macOS as it would be too much work to get them out of the locked-in ecosystem. ↩︎