Leaving Apple Behind
I’ve been using Apple computers as my daily drivers for around 20 years now. I’ve had iPods since the good old click wheel days, and the iPhone has been in my pocket since around 2008. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on apps and subscriptions during that time.
The hardware is as solid as it has ever been, but the slow downwards spiral with the quality of the software, the dumbing down of macOS and finally the liquid glass fiasco has completely soured me on the software side.
Add to this their antitrust and anti-competitive practices, their recent political position, their relationship with China, their relationship with the Trump government, and I think I am finally ready to abandon ship…
Even now on the Mac my software stack is very skewed towards Open Source and self-hosting. I don’t really use iCloud for anything, I use Deezer for streaming and I self-host my personal music library using Jellyfin. I’ve used Linux on the desktop extensively before and I use it for work on a daily basis, so that transition should be fairly seamless.
Finding hardware to run it on was the difficult thing for me last time I tried this. Lenovo makes very good machines, with excellent keyboards, but the ones that are easy to maintain and upgrade tend to have sub-par screens, Framework makes interesting hardware, but I’ve read bad things about the overall quality of their laptops. I haven’t used a nice Dell or HP laptop in years, though I’ve used both extensively as work computers in the past.
After researching various options, I am thinking of going with the OnePlus 15 for the phone and TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 for the laptop. I really wanted to like the Fairphone 6, but it’s slow, has worse cameras and worse battery life. With OnePlus advertising 80% battery capacity after 4 years on the OnePlus 15, the Fairphone 6’s replaceable battery becomes less of a selling point. The InfinityBook Pro 14 has the same series of processors as the Framework 13, but you get a nicer screen, dual Nvme slots and all that for 1000 PLN less with a 32GB of RAM and 4TB Samsung Nvme SSD included.
Now I just need to pull the trigger on both before the RAM and storage increase in price even more.