I have gone all in on Apple

Well, now that I have retired, I really don’t have a need to keep up to date on all the various worlds of computing and what is happening there! So I have gone all in on Apple products, iOS, macOS, TVOS, and WatchOS. My Dell Windows 10 system, Apple MBPro Ubuntu Linux system and my Lenovo Linux Mint system have been shut down, removed from the network and relegated to the closet of doom! Now I’m set up with my 2018 MBPro 13", 2018 MBAir 13", iPhone 11Pro Max, iPhone XR, iPhone X, iPad Pro 11" w/Magic Keyboard (This is turning out to be my daily driver!) and Apple Watch Series 4 - everything works with everything else, flawlessly

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I have moved there to…

I was a Windows developer for years, started a home repair business, and lost faith in Microsoft with the “Windows Genuine Advantage” fiasco around Windows XP, then the forced upgrades to Windows 10.

My firs Apple product was the last of the old style MacBook Airs, and I loved it. Replaced it with a Retina Air, but I do NOT like the keyboard.

Then a second hand iPhone 6s+ that I still have as a second video camera, and drone controller, replaced with iPhone 11pro

Then a second hand iPad. My wife has it, I have an 11" pro and Magic keyboard.

Just received a 2020 13" MacBook pro with enough disk space for Bootcamp to give me a home for the ONE windows app I cannot replace.

I am looking for a home for the Butterfly Air, and a Dell XPS 13, and am quite happy with Apple, despite the cost, particularly here in Australia, where we pay a premium.

Enjoy!

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I love the 11" iPad Pro and magic keyboard - its what I use probably 80% of the time now

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I have a love-hate relationship with Apple. I first used Apple ][s back in the mid 80s, then Macs at the end of the 80s. The company then moved pretty much to all MS-DOS and later Windows around the turn of the decade. Through the 90s, I had little contact with Macs.
At home, I had Amigas, until 95, when I switched to Windows 95 on a P90 machine.
I bought an iMac 24", when Apple switched to Intel. With my lecturer discount, the price worked out at about the same as a buying a Windows desktop + 24" monitor. Mac using friends talked me into buying it, because Apple provides such long term support for Apple hardware…
I also traded my Windows CE smartphone for an iPhone 3GS in 2009. My phone was defective and I had to return it to Apple 3 times in the first 7 weeks of ownership - each time for 2 weeks! Effectively, I had the iPhone for a total of 3 days in the first 7 weeks. On the 2nd day, it locked up, returned it to the shop and I was given a candybar phone as a loaner, whilst the phone was sent off to an Apple authorized repair centre. It came back 2 weeks later with “no fault found”. Within a day it had frozen again, sent back off for repair. 2 weeks later, it came back with “no fault found”. I started it up in the shop and it failed straight away. I got very load and the people queueing up to buy iPhones looked a little startled. This time it went away for another 2 weeks. When I went back to the shop to pick it up, a memory fault had been found and I had a replacement unit. After that, it ran mostly reliably, until I replace it with an htc Android handset, and later a series of Lumias.
When Apple dropped support for my 4 year old iMac, I looked at replacing it with a more modern iMac, but the prices of desktop PCs and 24" monitors had dropped dramatically, when I bought the original 24" iMac, a 24" display was around 800€, now they were down to under 200€, but the 24" iMac had increased by 200€ in price, even though the cost of the components had plummeted to record lows.

I then looked at a MacBook Pro - I wanted a quad core i7, 8GB RAM and a BluRay drive. At the time, Apple only offered a 2 core i7 and DVD, no BluRay, at a cost of around 3,000€. For 1,200€, I ended up buying a Sony Vaio with quad core i7, 8GB RAM and BluRay. That is still running today.

A year later, my daughter’s Mac mini was also dropped like a hot potato by Apple. Both were stuck on OS X Lion. So much for Apple’s “long term support”. Ironically, Microsoft stopped supporting the BootCamp side of my iMac in January of this year! Although the logic board failed 3 years ago.

Having been stung often enough by lack of support and poor build quality, I’ve been off Apple products for a while now. I also don’t like the App Store experience and the lack of flexibility of iOS - I put the icons exactly where I want them on my phone and adding and removing apps doesn’t shuffle them around. I also have a couple of widgets displayed that make it easy to quickly accomplish tasks, without having to start an app.

At the moment, I have my 2010 Sony Vaio running Mint Linux (the battery still lasts an hour, so about 50% capacity after a decade) a couple of Raspberry Pis and my Ryzen desktop. My HP Spectre X360 is now used primarily by my wife.

I don’t like Microsoft that much, but they are better than they were in the late 90s and early 2000s. But Windows 10 data gathering is not something I feel comfortable with (although I have disabled it, for now). I tried to go all-in and move my Ryzen to Linux in April, but Linux had a hard time with the hardware and crashed constantly, so that is back on Windows, for now.

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I was given a MacBook Air for a retirement gift. Other than a rarely used second hand iPad and couple generations of iPhone, the MBA was my first Apple computer. Thankfully if I would have started with Apple, I would have never had an IT career :rofl:

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I laughed out loud at this. Funny!

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