Beyond time at university, I've used Apple devices for much of the last 25 years. Use as a personal computer started when I worked at Microsoft, mainly as an easy defense against the "Oh, you work at Microsoft? I have a problem with <X>, can you help?" (a corollary to "You're from England, do you know <Y>?"). Far easier to say "So sorry, I use a Mac so I can't help you".
There was always a trade-off using a Mac. Apple's promise of giving the best experience by controlling both the hardware and the software sounded good, but the reality was Apple did a good job of optimizing for 'most people'. An Apple machine 'just worked'. Apple users rarely expected to have to type weird incantations or wield tools like Windows RegEdit to get their machines to work. Pretty much the machine worked and you could do what you needed to do, without worrying about the computer part. The trade-off came in the cost and the performance - you typically paid more for Apple's engineering, and weren't getting the highest performance components. For years, for example, Apple navigated the shift to Intel CPUs, high performance CPUs would come out that could be built into a Windows PC, whilst delays and premium pricing awaited the Apple faithful.
Then came the iPhone and other Apple devices, and I'd still argue Apple was operating by the same playbook. It wasn't that the same technology wasn't available elsewhere. It's just that Apple packaged it up and made it work so you could just use it seamlessly. I've used Android devices (part of working for Google) on and off, but iPhones have been a reasonable constant, with upgrades every 2-3 years.
With Steve's passing, Tim's supply chain management expertise became even more apparent. From the delayed migration to USB-C (really, the iPhone 14 Pro was lightning?), through to TouchID->FaceID migration (Android devices have both, but no, that's not the Apple way) and the slow rollout of better camera lenses, everything is at Apples pace, managing the bottom line.
There's unfortunately some rot in this world, and the iPhone 16 debut is the bifurcation point for me. Let's lay out a few things.
Firstly, with the launch of the Apple Watch and tying the watch to the phone (and the iCloud account), Apple gained a lot of stickiness. But unfortunately Apple just seemed to be less focused on quality. Health data (into which the Apple Watch pours its sensor info) can get very large (over 7Gb for me currently, without any abnormal use), which means transitioning a watch over to a new phone can be fickle. It was not great with the 15, but I had two weeks of failure to try and migrate to the 16 Pro. Just wouldn't migrate across. There are other bugs with the Apple Watch (I have a badge on day 2751 of 2750 towards a goal, for example), but getting the smooth migration to the 16 Pro wasn't working.
It's about now I should introduce the next flank of Apple's decline, and that's the troubleshooting experience. Search the forums, attend any genius bar, and the starting point will be "Have you backed up your device? Because what we're going to do is do a factory reset and restore.", The software version of "Turn it off and turn it on again". I'm sympathetic to a point - definitely a valuable tool in the fix it arsenal, but it's become the starting point (and often ending point) of troubleshooting. Here's the problem though - from a computer science perspective, what that process says is "We have something inconsistent in our software state that we're not going to try and debug. It could be a memory leak, or a data corruption error, or something more insidious in terms of how system, applications and data are interoperating. And we're not going to try and figure out why and make sure it doesn't happen again."
The reset and restore is going to lose any of that diagnostics, and just start again - meaning there's no explanation for the issue, or whether it might occur again. Users will often leave the Genius bar with their device working again (after waiting a while for the reset/restore purchase), without a thought to whether the issue will happen again. Try that approach with cars, or healthcare equipment, and I think you'd want a different answer.
So now you start doing more research and you find that other alternatives are quite attractive really. A Garmin watch which has days or even weeks of battery life for the same sensor data. An android phone with better cameras, biometrics (face and fingerprint both) at less than half the cost. So you conduct an experiment, and the final defense against switching - the applications, crumbles away. The Android application versions of what you use are essentially the same, except that two of them don't crash the same way the iOS versions do.
So it feels like Apple's push into generative AI and rushing out iOS 18 and then point releases to get generative AI features in place, to consume more resources, is at the expense of platform quality. It's sad to see that Apple devices don't "just work" anymore.
