Unhappy with Apple
Over the past two years I’ve grown quite unhappy with Apple. The beauty and iconicity of its products are not enough for me to continue supporting the company.
Apple is often applauded for its humane interface design and attention to detail. It often does deserve this praise: one-touch headphone setup and Live Text really are fantastic features that just work. But Apple designs its products this well only when it is financially beneficial. The MacBook’s power brick is deliberately unrepairable: not only does it have no screws, but it is also tied to its power controller by serial number, forcing people to buy a new one if it breaks. The devices that do have screws require uncommon drivers. The charging cable, meanwhile, is meant to last one year and to then biodegrade, “to protect the environment”. What a clown world: a biodegradable cable that only lasts a year cannot be better for the environment than a non-biodegradable one that lasts a lifetime. I will not believe anything that Apple says about the environment until it makes its devices repair-friendly.
Apple products are also almost completely closed-source, which makes it significantly harder to find vulnerabilities and preïnstalled spyware.
Privacy? That’s not iPhone. Apple respects privacy only marginally more than Facebook and Google do. It collects metadata in the background, creates a social graph, communicates with cell networks even in airplane mode, makes a plot of surrounding Wi-Fi networks, offers no easily removable battery, and requires signing up to download software on iOS. The latter is a problem that goes beyond privacy, as Apple can ban individuals from downloading and updating apps.
As a cherry on top, Apple devices are manufactured by slaves in China. Oh, and it also wants us to believe that men can become pregnant.
I will continue using my iPhone XR and MacBook Pro until they break or stop receiving vital software updates—this way I am not harming the environment nor supporting the company. I will, however, soon delete my Apple ID completely, as I have already done with my accounts at Google and other privacy-invading and humanity-disrespecting companies.