I’ve been an Apple user for a very long time, my first iPhone I owned was an iPhone 5 and it was great. I had been given an iPad Mini gen 1 from my university and because iOS was still in its infancy (it had only been about for 4 or 5 years at that point) the OS wasn’t too advanced, it did everything I wanted, there appeared to be zero bugs because iOS 6 did not have the sheer number of features that iOS 18 now has and Apple at the time were focussing primarily on creating an ecosystem that “just worked”.

Something I liked back then was if I broke my screen or had to replace the battery then I could. I wasn’t tied down by some bullshit software lock for no reason. I had that iPhone 5 screen replaced a few times as well as the battery and I had no issues. Now, that’s almost impossible to do. You’re locked out of basic features all because Apple says so.

Granted, in iOS 18 they have rolled it back a little, so if you swap screens or batteries from another iPhone it’ll “recalibrate” and show it as a used part, but it still doesn’t really feel like you own it. It very much feels like Apple’s been forced to do this.

The last iPhone I purchased was a 14 Pro. Felt great to use, did what I wanted it to do, cameras were okay, but iOS just felt a bit shit by this point. Apple were focussing so much on “what can we add to the system” they forgot about “oh yeah, we should probably make this easier to use”. I hated the stock Mail app – sending an attachment on an iPhone was totally different to the desktop Mail app, it never added it properly so ended up being a pain point. The Notes app is a pile of garbage that’s never worked the way I want. Wife and I have a shared note to used for a shopping list, it never updated when either of us added to it, she’d have to message me the list or send me a screenshot, and it’d update days later.

I thought I’d try Android again. Unsure of what mid-range device I’d ultimately be unhappy with I got a Galaxy S23 Ultra. Cameras, UI, look and feel of the device, screen, battery: all amazing. It made my iPhone 14 Pro feel a little inadequate. I could customise what I wanted, though in reality I don’t customise much, I just move the app icons where I want and show a widget or two. But the problems… can I use my iCloud mail on Android? No. Can I sync my iCloud calendar? Absolutely not. What about Apple notes? Also no. You can log in using Chrome but it runs so fucking poorly it’s effectively useless.

I have also used a MacBook for a long time too – 13″ Intel 2016 with the shitty buterfly keyboard and a tendency to just turn the screen off for no apparent reason, then an M1 MacBook Air which I didn’t like and swapped to an M1 MacBook pro, sold that eventually for an M1 Pro 16 inch and it was a total workhorse. It’s now on eBay. Why? I use Windows more becuase Apple don’t seem interested in fixing what’s broken, they seem to focus more on “here’s this shiny new feature, ignore the stuff that doesn’t work properly”.

Here are some examples

• In dark mode, when you’re performing a destructive action, the colours are very hard to read. See this Reddit thread. I’ve already raised feedback tickets on this… none of them even looked at
• Window management is rubbish – I want to snap windows to the edges/sides where I want them much like in Windows. I know there’s an app to do that, and macOS Sequoia has it but it seems to be poorly implemented
• The finder app is hard for me to use. Trying to manage photos was a pain in the arse. In Windows Explorer I can preview a photo in whatever view I want by toggling on the Preview Pane and just flicking through it. I can’t do this in Finder. I have to put it in “album” view, but then I can’t see the photos in a list. I gave up, put the photos on my Windows PC and was able to organise and edit them much faster
• The video encoder when using OBS is beyond inconsistent. I want to use the available hardware encoder that Apple provide. It worked first time when I test the recording, test again to be sure and lo and behold it’s now an invalid encoder, and OBS doesn’t accept any encoder after that. It might be an OBS problem, but it was consistent through every version of OBS I used

The only good part I liked about Apple was how good the Apple Watch is, but it’s locked to the Apple ecosystem (specifically you must have an iPhone running a compatible version)

So I’ve stuck with Android, and I don’t think I’ll be going back to Apple

• Google Keep (notes) works perfectly, it actually updates in real time for shared notes
• Camera is insanely good
• I can put my email on any device I want
• Samsung’s WearOS offering is just about comparable to Apple’s Watch OS (I’ve not had a fun time with Pixel Watch or FitBit)
• Google Takeout is brilliant – I want to clear my 15GB of photo storage so I used it to get all the photos in one dump and I can delete and start again (I know I can do this in iCloud but it’s so clunky, only 1000 photos at a time)
• I have so many devices to choose from. If I want a mid-range device for £300 then there are loads. Flagships? Also lots of them. Android has come so far that they’re almost all the same so the differences between them have got smaller

I’m not completely done with Apple, though, I have a used iPhone 8 simply to receive iCloud emails and stuff like that, and an older used iPad Pro to run Zwift on as it’s pretty consistent, but I don’t use Apple’s products any more.