Beefs with Apple
Here’s a partial list of reasons I’d like to stop using Apple. (See also Beefs with Google.)
“They make great hardware!”
It’s true. BUT
They deliberately degrade its performance … and lie about it
In case you missed it: Apple has been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for the offense of secretly slowing down old iPhones. Without admitting wrongdoing, after denying the practice for years.
Maybe the fine means justice has been served. Or maybe a few hundred million dollars isn’t much of a penalty for a company that brings in hundreds of BILLIONS dollars a year. To be clear: if you have $394.3 billion in revenue and you pay $113 million in fines … you now have $394.1 billion.
They make terrible software
Macs are great. OSX is great. Everything else kinda sucks.
Case in point: I’ve lost data multiple times trying to use iCloud backups.
Case in point: I once tried using Apple’s Calendar program as a replacement for Google. I imported my GCals with just a few clicks, and then watched in horror as Calendar sent an invite for every single event I had scheduled for the previous 3 years. For weeks I was getting confused emails from friends and colleagues wondering why I invited them to attend a call that happened 18 months ago.
Case in point: The Family settings on the App store are so confusing I simply gave up buying new apps. Though to be fair, it looks like something that five year olds are pretty good at.
Their business model is centered on locking you in to good-enough options
This is an old story. Apple’s been monopoly-chasing since before the iPhone. Their business flourishes when you buy their hardware, settle for their mediocre software, and spend money on their streaming services.
This is at odds with selling general-purpose computing machines, which technically can run any program and play any media file. Going with Apple means spending more money on a device that can do less stuff, period.
(As a practical example, try copying a .flac audio file from your Mac to your iPhone, and playing it. I have a computer science degree and I can’t figure out how to do this. Frustrating enough to make you want to admit defeat and subscribe to Apple Music :)
They lie about more stuff
You know how you can tell your iPhone not to track you? It doesn’t listen.
They may be doing price fixing
To be determined. More info here.
So what should you do?
I don’t know! I’m going to try an Android phone running GrapheneOS as lately I find that my iPhone is slowing down—no doubt to “improve my user experience.”
If you want to hear about how that’s going, feel free to get in touch.