I just bought an Android phone with Google Fi service. This is the story of my breakup with Apple.
First Love
Apple was my first direct experience with computers, aside from a few programming lessons in a high school math class.
I hate math.
While I was in college, I had a co-op job at an art gallery. Most of the staff had Macs, except for the guy who did budgets. He had an IBM PC. In my part of the office, where we published a performance art magazine and other print materials for the gallery, we had one of each. I tried to use the PC a few times. Seriously, I tried. These were the days of command-line interfaces which, on a non-Apple PC, you still had to deal with even if it had a graphical user interface. Oh, my roommate also had a PC. I tried using it once to write a paper for school and nearly erased everything on it. When I bought my first computer, it was an Apple MacClassic II, for $800+, expanded to a luxurious 4MB of RAM.
Staying True
As Apple faded in market dominance, replaced by IBM and other PCs running Windows, I used several PCs at jobs but remained loyal to Apple at home. "Intuitive" was the buzzword then: When I tried to get it to do what I wanted it to do, it would do it (most often). As the years went by, Apple became something of a joke. You couldn't even buy one in stores: When my good ole' Mac II finally wouldn't do the job, I had to order my next Mac by phone from mail-order catalogs.
In those days, Microsoft was the dark side. Less functional, less attractive, less useful but they were smart to have licensed their software to numerous hardware manufacturers, making their computers cheaper and dominating the market. "We're better than you!" Steve Jobs protests feebly to Bill Gates in Pirates of Silicon Valley.
New Days
Apple's resurgence, and Microsoft's tortuous path since, are well documented. Windows and OSX became more and more similar, but I could still make a better-looking presentation faster in Keynote than PowerPoint. I stuck with Apple.
As it became common to have multiple computing devices -- my work laptop, my mobile phone, the home desktop -- Apple kept me with the ease of their ecosystem. Synchronizing email, contacts, calendars, and to a lesser degree, documents, photos, music, backups, websites, preferences and more across all of them kept me with Apple. Combined with AirPort wifi and Time Capsule/Time Machine backups, it was a smoothly working system, generally speaking, "right out of the box." I'd investigate switching, but was put off by the lengthy, complicated articles on how to work across operating systems.
An Illicit Affair with Gmail
But then it started to change. Blame Gmail. Gmail began as invitation-only, and I acquired one while working on my master's degree. But I didn't use it much.
My current job started using Google's GSuite of apps around 2010. I signed up because I didn't want anything to do with Outlook, and I mainly used Gmail for my work account. My personal account, using the same .mac address I'd had for years, had become a spam magnet, junk filters be damned. Apple's Mail client, to be blunt, sucks. It is and has always been buggy. It also lacks many organizational features in Gmail I soon became enamored with: tags, priority inboxes, easy folders and archiving. Gmail eased me into Google's contacts, which again had more tools and became my preference. Then I played with their calendar and a single feature at the time won me over: support for events in multiple time zones. Google calendars could understand a flight that began in one time zone and concluded in a different one. It could overlay one time zone on another, so I could see when an event was occurring abroad and back home. Bringing these all together, Google email with invites from contacts for events could easily self-populate in my Google calendars. (Yes, Microsoft Outlook does this very well. But still: It's ugly AF, counterintuitive, and takes too many steps.)
Meanwhile, Apple was starting to suck.
15 Ways to Leave Your Lover
1. Mail, barely updated or improved year after year.
2. Dongles. I got sick of constantly buying new adaptors and cables. I knew Apple was making money off this and felt like a schmuck.
3. Optical drives for CDs and DVDs. I survived when Apple abandoned floppy disk drives (don't laugh), because it turns out they knew just before I did that I wasn't really using them. But I still use CDs and DVDs all the time -- for playback and recording --and having an external disk drive is a pain. I felt like I was being pushed around by Apple, losing features I needed for the sake of their product design.
4. Airport / Time Capsule. The all-in-one wifi router and backup hard drive sometimes had problems, but mostly was an elegant solution. They just killed it.
5. Headphone jack. Sure I don't listen to music on headphones as much anymore since I moved from a city with public transit to a rural area where I have to drive. But getting rid of them? Not providing adaptors? I stuck with my iPhone SE.
6. AirPods. Apple has never made a set of ear buds that actually fit my ears. They always fell out. I usually bought third-party replacements. And now they want me to use some Bluetooth things that won't fit either, will fall out, get lost, and get destroyed? Apple's wired earbuds didn't fit but were free and at least gave me a backup to use.
7. MagSafe. Brilliant, unobtrusive and a problem-solver. I was one of those people always tripping over my power cable and jerking the laptop across the room with it. The mag power connectors brilliantly solved this problem. Classic Apple. So they got rid of them--classic New Apple--and replaced them with...
8. USB-C. So it's now just one port, but I have to get adaptors and replacements for ALL of the old ones?! When my job bought me a new computer this year I specified a 2017 MacBook Air because the new models hadn't come out yet and the existing ones still had all my old and still-in-use ports.
9. Meaningless updates. I can't remember the last time an OSX or iOS upgrade had a killer feature I really wanted. There's been some incremental tweaks here and there, but nothing to justify the incessant update reminders, cajoles, and deceptions.
10. iPhone X. $1k. Seriously? When carriers no longer subsidize handsets?
11. New crap introduced, old problems not fixed. Apple Watch debuts (yawn), but bugs with duplicating contacts, Mail not connecting, and iMessage/Messages suddenly deciding not to work continue, year after year. Working "out of the box" has become "after searching multiple support forums to try lots of different fixes that may or may not work."
12. Big phones. I like to carry my phone in my pants pocket. I like to operate it with one hand. The SE gave me an opportunity to stick with the form factor I liked. But, again, Apple decided to go with what it thinks we want/need, as opposed to what I really want. There are no new iPhones in the size I like.
13. Planned obsolescence. My battery stops holding a charge just as I'm paying off my iPhone. Shock. The Lightning port has, for two iPhones now, become dirty with crud at about the same time and requires cleaning in order to charge, and even then not reliably.
14. iCloud. How much am I paying for this, and what for these days?
15. Product design. What happened to pretty and cool?
BONUS: 16. My new MacBook Air running High Sierra freezes and crashes constantly. Return on the spinning beach ball!
Looking at Others With Lust
Some of the Android phones have cool features. Some of those phones have cool designs. And, whoa, many of them are cheaper.
Along Came Fi
Reading the morning news, I found out that Google was opening its Fi carrier service to iPhones. I was already in the market for leaving my carrier, T-Mobile, because their local coverage was poor, and I no longer needed their excellent free data roaming in Europe. I clicked, I read. My iPhone SE was on its last legs; I knew I'd have to replace it soon and did not like Apple's options. I had decided to switch to a pretty, cheap Huawei when it became necessary. But Google offered me - Wow! - a financial reason to buy one of their phones, or other phones that Fi supported. For one day only (a marketing gimmick I succumbed to), they would give me the equivalent of the price of a new phone in travel gift cards. I still travel a lot and need ways to pay for it. Although it wasn't the same as getting a handset for 'free' when I signed a two-year contract back in the day, it was a tangible way to offset the cost of a new phone. It incentivized me, to use a marketing buzzword, to choose a more expensive phone: Google's Pixel 3. What's more, Fi doesn't limit me to one carrier, but intelligently combines Sprint, T-Mobile and US Cellular networks, promising to smoothly shift me to whichever is strongest in the area where I happen to be.
I signed up. It hasn't arrived yet. But when it does, I'll cancel T-Mobile and start integrating the phone into my life. The former Apple ecosystem synchronization issues are no longer a great concern. I have redundant backups in iCloud, Box, Dropbox, Amazon, and Google Drive. Most of my work is cloud-based on one form or another. I work on the MacBook Air, but I want a Chromebook, or tablet hybrid, for home use and casual browsing and streaming. I've already replaced my Time Capsule.
I might regret it. I might go back. But, at this point in time, I've made the significant decision to buy a non-Apple hardware product for the first time ever, in my life.
That's 30 years of customer loyalty gone. Think about that, Tim.
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