Insert rotten Apple pun here
Over the course of this year, there have been some important changes in my life. I lost about fifty pounds, moved to California, shifted my role around to better position me to do the work I enjoy. I’ve also moved on from using iOS and macOS the majority of the time. This is probably a lower order life change than the others; but as someone who has been a self-styled Apple pundit for decades, it’s been quite a thing.
There are two primary drivers of this decision, along with some ancillary ones. The first is watching Tim Cook sidle up to this president, obviously one of the most vile people to ever live, and curry favor from him for his trillion dollar company. That set of circumstances alone started to rock the foundations of my support for Apple. The coup de grace, though, was Liquid Glass. It has ushered in a whole host of evidence that, at least for now, any serious thought about human/computer interfaces is more or less dead at Apple. (His departure may hasten a return to former glory, but we’ll see.)
For three decades Apple has been the arbiter and tastemaker of what constituted a “good” computing experience. Even when its fortunes were in the toilet, other platforms and products were still compared to those from Cupertino. Windows95 may have had ubiquity, but macOS had class and grace. The Jobs comeback only cemented Apple’s position as change agent and benchmark. The Tim Cook era has been less inspiring. Sure, it gave us the Apple Watch and Apple Silicon. But it also gave us yearly need-them-or-not refreshes of the iPhone and MacBook, and an incrementalist bent.
I don’t need a new phone every six months. You don’t either. I also don’t need a computer every twelve months. Apple as e-waste producer and perpetrator of grinding consumerism has been a bad look, at least for me.
I bought a CMF Phone 2 Pro on release day because nothing’s approach to products is refreshing. It’s a bit of a hobbyist phone, to be honest. (In fact it was sold as part of a “beta program”.) Getting service required some hoop jumping, and it didn’t really click for me initially. But three months ago I went cold turkey, turning off my iPhone and putting it in a drawer for days at a time. I discovered that Android is actually really good now. (It honestly had not been for many years.)
Using this phone does not feel like caring for an infant that needs my constant attention. So much of my preference now comes down to that one simple difference. And yes, there are configuration choices that enable or disable some of this. But the point is that, largely, Android ships that way. The iPhone of 2025 is shipped as a constant umbilical to consumption. Yes, you can turn it off, but why should you have to? (Coicidentally, this is the argument for Liquid Glass—“if you don’t like it, you can turn it off!”) A $1500 computer should not be designed, by default, to foil my attempts to use it in the way that I prefer. These developments are, to my eyes, recent at Apple. There always was the walled garden verticality, but it always felt like that was a feature and not a bug; it kept the ecosystem in sync and brought in the best apps and partners, while leaving a lot of the cruft out. But now the cruft and jank are here in full force. Almost all the positive benefits of the walled garden are gone. So whats the point?
I also picked up a four year old Lenovo Thinkpad and put Linux on it, starting with Arch and then coming to my senses and installing Fedora. There is so much interesting stuff happening on Linux right now. There has been a renaissance of window managers and desktop experiences, and a resurgence in the kind of academic thought about user experience that is so lacking at Apple and Microsoft right now. I alternate between Gnome and Cosmic, and I feel completely productive on both. In a nutshell, this platform is lightyears ahead of where it was ten years ago.
So again, these changes are pretty small in the long run. But in a world where ethical consumption is basically impossible, small choices matter much more.