I've owned and used Apple products for more than 30 years, beginning with an Apple Mac Classic and monochrome StyleWriter ink jet printer I acquired shortly after I started graduate school in 1991. I've been through a string of Macs since then, and use a rather aged MacBook Pro as my daily driver at home. Along the way, I've had about three iPads and am on my second iPhone (never looked back at Android after getting the first one in 2016). I also had some fun a few years ago, refurbishing and upgrading old iPods, but my more recent technology acquisitions have been decidedly non-Apple. I wonder why that is.
I am no fan of Microsoft, so I do my best to stay away from Windows (I wish my employer felt the same way), but that's not to say I'm not open to new things. My latest laptop is a Chromebook, and for a tablet these days, I'm using an Amazon Fire 10 HD. For home automation, I also seem to be all in on Google Assistant instead of Apple Home.
The common denominator in those choices seems to be price. While iPads start at around $400, I got the Amazon Fire tablet on sale for well under $100. I got the Chromebook for a couple hundred dollars when I needed something to get me through until I could find what I really wanted, but the Chromebook ended up being something I could live with for the price. It's a fine secondary laptop, but will never achieve daily driver status.
The choice of Google Assistant happened more because of a freebie than anything else. I had not even considered home automation beyond a couple of KASA smart plugs when I got an offer for a free Google Nest Home Mini smart speaker from Sirius-XM. In addition to being able to listen to music, I could now control certain lamps, connected to the aforementioned smart plugs, with my voice.
All of this might lead a casual observer to conclude that, over time, I've been gradually turning my back on Apple and its products, but that simply isn't true. It's more a matter of matching functionality to cost. Some Apple products, such as iPhones, are totally worth the price, while iPads, given the limited uses I have for a tablet are less so, especially considering that much less expensive alternatives are available that do everything I need a tablet to do. The same holds true of my Google Nest devices. My needs were essentially non-existent and were thus easily filled by a free device.
Where the equation gets more complicated is with laptops. My Chromebook was amazingly inexpensive, but that low price came with its own costs. It does what it does reasonably well, but there's simply a lot it can't do. Realistically, a Chromebook can satisfy about 65 percent of my computing needs, and that's pretty good for the price, but it doesn't make that remaining 35 percent go away. I've also tried inexpensive Windows laptops, but those aren't exactly satisfactory, either. That's why I have an almost decade-old MacBook Pro for daily use. Surprisingly, other than degraded battery life, and the fact that it's no longer receiving operating system updates, it's pretty sprightly for its age. One thing's for certain; factoring longevity into the equation makes a Mac more affordable than it would first appear. The trick, I've found, is not to cheap out, but to buy absolutely the most Mac you can afford, as upgrading later is going to be more expensive and perhaps even impossible.
Two other parts of the Apple ecosystem I haven't explored are Apple TV and the Apple watch. As with Apple Home, streaming with Apple TV never made it to my radar. My first foray into streaming was with an Internet-enabled Panasonic Blu-Ray player, capable of streaming Netflix and Hulu. Within a couple of years, I had transitioned to Roku boxes, which are cheap and adequately serve my needs.
I have, at times, been intrigued by Apple Watches, but not enough to lay down a few hundred dollars for one. If they were to incorporate a glucometer function into the health monitoring functions, I might consider it. For now, I will continue to check my sugar levels on my iPhone, using Freestyle Libre sensors.
The bottom line is that while I don't lock myself into the Apple ecosystem, neither am I abandoning it. I use it where it makes sense and look for alternatives where it doesn't.
UPDATE: In the fall of 2023, I made an impulse purchase of a seller-refurbished Dell Latitude 7490 notebook computer, running Linux Mint in lieu of Windows, ostensibly as a replacement for my Chromebook, with which I had become increasingly dissatisfied, as covered in other posts on this site. What I wasn't expecting was that this computer would prove so satisfactory that it also replaced my now twelve-year-old MacBook Pro. I kept both machines running side-by-side for a few months, while actively using the Dell. Eventually, I shut the MacBook Pro down and have only fired it back up a couple of times since, mainly to transfer files to the Dell via a Web app called Snapdrop. I keep telling myself that I may someday get another MacBook, but to date "someday" has yet to arrive.
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