In the last year I’ve successfully switched to a PC for work and home. I felt that this was not by choice – an outcome I’ve ranted about before.
I’m revisiting this, as I saw a recent video (embedded below – skip to 2:38) where I think Dave2D nailed this issue, giving a clear explanation of how this is a problem, and the resulting consequences for customers in the Apple ecosystem.
In a nutshell, when you buy into the Apple ecosystem, you’re not just committing to Apple’s best features and innovations, you’re also committing to signing up for whatever bad or inconvenient design choices that they make – across both their hardware and software.
For the price, their products should be “no-brainers”, flawless machines without compromise. Unfortunately far too often, they make major missteps with their products.
People sometimes call apple users “iSheep”, when it appears that people buy Apple’s products with apparent ignorance of those flaws. Yes, part of this may because people may believe the apple hype, and just buy whatever apple ships out from their factories in a shiny white box, but I think another major factor is that once you buy into the apple ecosystem, you can quite easily become compelled to continue to regularly buy whatever product apple make to remain in there – the good, the bad, and of course, the butterfly keyboards.
Great review. I’m deep into the Mac ecosystem with phones, iPads and I love it. However, I have one beast of a Mac Pro for video editing and it just hit a wall where it will not update to the latest Mac OS. Software is beginning to crater too, for example Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve requires the latest OS. I know Windows devices become obsolete too, but in this case, I have a $12k investment that has become a liability. It’s probably much cheaper to build a new great Windows video editing station. I needed my Mac to be compatible with customer systems but that is starting to change. Think about it carefully!
Thanks Robert! It’s amazing to see how much of a turn around Apple has done in their hardware in the last 12 months since my last apple rant last year.
Presumably your Mac Pro is one of the classic cheese-grater towers – released between 2006 and 2013. 7 Years on a workstation isn’t bad. There is an “enabler hack” to enable running the latest MacOS on older hardware – but it’s clear from Apple that they think its time they got to dip into your pocket again for another 5 figures!
I’m going to do a new post soon, but for now all I’ll say is that I’m certainly happy enough in windows land, and having seen their new Mac Pro, I don’t think I’ll be switching back anytime soon at all…
I was not aware of the patch! You have possibly saved me for another year.! Sprinting to my Mac now. I have no complaints on longevity, I built my Mac in 2008 with 24 gigs ram, dual graphics cards and 12 terabytes total storage. When I benchmarked it against a new iMac last year it was still faster! My problem comes in when I want to share FCPX projects because right now I can’t, mine is out of date. Windows expire too, but Macs are 10x more painful in the wallet. Thanks!!
Nearly every fellow scientist with whom I work uses Macs and are “all-in” regarding Apple products. I used a Mac for 3 years at work and was relieved when its refresh date finally came and I could trade out for a PC. My personal laptop is a Windows/PC, and I have to say that for the first time in my career, I feel as if I now have the better computing tool among my peers. My computer was not cheap — I decided to go for a Surface Book. I’ve had a Surface Book for 4.5 years now (I grabbed on as soon as they were on the market), and I’ve never looked back. Windows 10 now provides a Linux terminal, the only thing that I always envied the Mac users over, and I’m able to do everything in that terminal that I used to do with a split-partition/double-boot disk. (Which involved painfully logging out of Windows, then into Linux, and forget about much cross-talk between the 2 operating systems — so glad those days are gone!!)
What I especially like about the Surface Book is that I can just pop the top off of the one at home, take it to work and use it to take notes through the awesome OneNotes application while using the work-computer (identical Surface book model) to do other stuff. The ~1-pound screen makes for a very light load in the backpack while commuting! I’ve also started getting more familiar with OneDrive lately and have been using it quite a bit to do automated backups, etc. Windows is no longer WinDoze, as far as I am concerned 🙂