I’ve been thinking about buying a MacBook lately. I don’t have a proper need for one at the moment, so I’m giving it time (well, as long as the AIpocalypse will let me 🫠), but I’ve been keeping an eye on it. The performance to price value (again, pre-AIpocalypse) is fucking wild and macOS genuinely seems like the best of the bunch at the moment. But, I won’t lie, it’s weird and kinda funny, because I’ve been up and down with Apple when I was younger. I swore by Android, and I scoffed at the Apple Watch and thought it was silly. But now here I am with an iPad, an iPhone, an Apple Watch(!!!) and some AirTags. I’m also subscribed to Apple Music too.

When I was a kid, I wasn’t that aware of Apple as a brand back then beyond the iPod, which probably shows just how important the iPod was for Apple back then. But the moment I did I knew that, specifically with Mac, they were standing out in a way the Windows OEMs did not, and that piqued my interest. I recall the PC World I went to (before it got absorbed into Currys) having posters advertising the new Mac OS X (which at the time was Leopard). I may have even given Mac a little go on the demo laptops, even. That was when I became aware of Mac as a brand, and was interested in this ecosystem I’d never really seen. I got myself an iPod nano, which unfortunately suffered from The Black Spot. As I grew to become a teenager I’d get myself an iPod touch like any other teenager back then, but I’d actually grow to resent Apple around this time.

That point was when I got my first Android phone. This is where I’d end up in the OS Tribalism Wars, specifically in the mobile space. I basically became an Android fanboy, lol. It didn’t help that the people around me were also like that, and it also didn’t help that Steve Jobs hated Android, claiming it was a copy and that he was going to go into “thermonuclear war” against the OS. Android was doing plenty different to Apple back then, and it was Samsung that was trying what they could to copy them – if that war was directed towards them, then maybe it’d be more understandable. This was also during my first steps into Linux, as well, so take that as you will, lol. Nowadays, I think he paved the way for Apple’s user experience and he is in fact a visionary there, but for other things – like treating his illness – he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.

As I grew up I became more apathetic towards them. I wasn’t allowed a contract phone so I was getting hand-me-down iPhones back then. Although I’d still be enthusiastic with new tech including from Apple, they weren’t really a thing for me, but more of a means to an end. This was especially since I was using an iPhone 4S around the time everyone were using an iPhone 5. I’d give Apple Music a go when it launched but went back to my local music library + Spotify. When I was able to get a phone on a contract, I went right to Samsung’s flagship phone and stuck around with Samsung and therefore in the Android ecosystem for a decade, with a fling with an iPad Air which was nice but didn’t overly convince me to go all-in with Apple. It was one of my go-to travel devices at least, alongside my Steam Deck, but for the longest time I was still an Android lad when it came to phones.

That was until last year, when I was looking at smartwatches to help subside issues from my ADHD such as missing notifications. I initially scoffed at the Apple Watch when it came out – like, who the fuck wanted this? Turns out like, a decade or so later, that group would include me. I wanted something that piped notifications from my phone to my wrist and tracked my sleep, and a smartwatch is a great idea. People were suggesting Garmin and other brands that worked with Android, however deep down I knew the Apple Watch was for me. While Garmin is great for some people, they’re not competing in the smartwatch space like Google tried but rather niching their products for people who need fitness tracking or geolocation services over a jack-of-all-trades. If you wanted something general and not a niche that Garmin fulfils, you should just get an Apple Watch. The smartwatch ecosystem on Android has not taken off at all and is in a bad state to the point when I was asked on smartwatch recommendations, I couldn’t give a clear answer. Fireborn has a good post on this topic you can check out here.

However, was it worth it to change my phone for the watch? Well, yes. I was well overdue on a new phone – my then-current Samsung phone wasn’t getting updates, which annoyingly meant that using passkeys saved by 1Password was a right fucking pain since that’d come in a later update that Samsung will flat-out refuse to put on my phone. If I wanted to use passkeys, I’d need to save my passwords via Google, when I already have a password manager I like using. Call it planned obsolescence or whatever, but I basically needed a new phone. I also hated Samsung’s One UI on this phone, to the point where Liquid Glass legitimately felt like a breath of fresh air – I know that Samsung has changed to be more iOS-like, but frankly the One UI of 2019 was just so ugly in hindsight.

So I got myself an iPhone.

And guys, I don’t think I can go to Android anymore.

While Android isn’t bad by any means (it’s the one time that Linux actually took off! /j), it just feels better to use my iPhone. One example is just how polished some cross-platform apps I used were. Spotify is generally well polished on both iOS and Android, but my bank’s app and Uber feel so much nicer on my iPhone while they felt clunky and jittery on not just my Samsung phone, but a relatively new Google Pixel that I had to set up for a family member. If I had to hazard a guess, it’s because iOS is a lot less fragmented than Android and so whatever they’re doing (staff, developer environment, UI framework, etc.) is just easier to deal with on iOS.

As for the watch, it’s been great! I get the notifications I need to do, the Sleep app helps me gamify my sleeping, which has greatly improved my sleep (when I’m not talking to friends on voice chat/VRChat, at least). I can pay for (most) things with my wrist! That really helps curb OCD thoughts about losing my phone, as I’m not worrying about taking my phone out. My AirTags also stop me from going all OCD about my valuable belongings. While not a replacement for therapies, it’s nice to know where my stuff is without having to physically check.

Could I have done this a decade ago? Maybe, but I was reluctant until recently because of Apple’s attempts to compete against AltStore that I might have changed course. I like playing some lighter PS1 games on my phone if I’m bored, and because AltStore was allowing game console emulators, Apple changed course on this and started allowing such apps on the App Store. You can download a Nintendo 3DS emulator on Apple’s App Store now. Given that AltStore has not launched in the UK, this is a great change. Genuinely – thank you, AltStore (and anyone for the legislation that led to its proliferation).

What had tipped over onto buying a MacBook was being able to pay for things on my iPhone using an express checkout with Apple Pay. A lot of shops treat billing and shipping as separate, Apple Pay neatly ties both together and lets me pay quickly. I’ve used this a bit on Android before, but for whatever reason this always feels like magic to me, presumably due to the tighter integration not just with the Apple ecosystem but also with my bank. Due to the UK’s Open Banking initiative, I am also able to attach my bank account to the Wallet app, to see what’s on my card before I pay. A tiny thing, but still something that makes the iPhone much nicer to use. I saw someone in a say that Apple sells an “emotional experience”, and it’s silly to say but I think I felt that when I paid via Apple Pay, and this genuinely created an incentive for me to get the MacBook. Hell, I remember talking to a friend about macOS and I unlocked memories of me actually getting along pretty well with macOS’ full-screen mode. A lot of Windows/Linux users trying Mac hate this, but I don’t. In fact, because of my focus problems from ADHD, I think I got along with it really well since it was just me and whatever app I was using, no cluttered mess of windows. It’s similar to why I loved Niri on the Linux side and lamented how absolutely unstable and messy the desktop Linux experience really is.

That said, there’s a lot of ideological problems people throw towards me about Apple, and I want to be clear that I do not think they are perfect. There are things that I still resent about them. Apple is also very against any consumer rights legislation that eats into their market, such as when the European Union mandated all smartphones use USB-C or allow alternative app stores, and they’ve taken to malicious compliance such as straight-up lies about sideloading and AltStore. Tim Cook’s constantly trying to get into Trump’s good books at the cost of tarnishing the Apple brand, and the new CEO will have to contend with this. These are real concerns, but I’m no longer at the point where I have the energy to deal with this. I stopped caring about rooting/jailbreaking my phone. I just want things to work, man, and right now Apple is the one.

I do have one thing to iron out if I do go all-in on Mac, though: What about MusicBee? Some of its features I love and are basically nonnegotiable if I am to switch, and Mac has the same problem as Linux where there is simply no alternative. Maybe it’ll give me an excuse to make that Great Value MusicBee…

A brief thing about Liquid (Gl)ass and the “competition”

Liquid Glass seems very divisive, and outside of concerns around accessibility, I’m very confused as to why. It’s to the point people made a conspiracy theory that Apple pushed it out to give people something to talk to that wasn’t how much of a flop their foray into AI was/is. For me, I liked the idea but I felt it needed some more time in the oven and needed to be refined. But is it really so bad that one should move to Windows or Linux, as I’ve seen some people say? Uh, no.

WinUI on Windows 11 pops a bit more compared to the flatness of Windows 10, but it’s also so clunky in comparison, too. It feels like the animations have this weird delay to them (especially the virtual desktop switcher), and they’re not exactly the smoothest. I’m not sure how Apple was able to code a glassy, skeuomorphic UI while Microsoft is struggling with animations in this iteration of Windows, even more so considering that Windows 10 had smoother animations. This concern is only going to grow larger as Microsoft converts old Windows functionality to WinUI and more apps are released that use WinUI. I had to download a mod via Windhawk (a mod manager for Windows) that removed the virtual desktop animation.

Funnily enough, Apple Music for Windows is a WinUI app! And Windows users hate it, lol.

But, at least I can use Windows, it’ll function, and I can do work. Linux? Oh boy. One single word can make Mac (and Windows) mog Linux in every single way: Wayland. The underlying display server that drives Apple’s UI is what Wayland aspires to be, but an ideological vision that doesn’t even match Apple’s has basically turned it from a replacement for a geriatric, decrepit mess into a decades-or-so long beta test that seemingly has no end, and it was a factor into me leaving as I kept running into issues stemming from Wayland. Android is criticised for its fragmentation hurting it in the long run, and Wayland is absolutely worse on this regard. I talk about this in more detail in my Linux problems post.

I’m saying this as someone who uses Windows, and has tried for years to get into Linux – you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Liquid Glass is just Apple having a phase, to be honest. Maybe it’s because of the constant drastic changes I’ve encountered on the Windows desktop (seriously, Windows hasn’t really had a non-changing UI since 7…) and Linux (remember Ubuntu going from GNOME 2 to Unity? Man I miss Compiz), that I don’t see Liquid Glass as big an issue as Mac users make it out to be.