I bought an Apple Macintosh in the year they were introduced - 1984. Things have come a long way since then, but the Macintosh was the first consumer-level computer to have windows and a mouse. It was streets ahead of the IBM PC.
I have preferred Macs ever since then and I have owned a few of them. But I will never buy another one.
Fast-forward 37 years.
I bought an Apple MacBook Pro from Apple directly on 31-Jan-2021. It cost me £3,599 (that was $4,876 at the time.)
I used my previous Macbook Pro for several hours almost every day for 7½ years. Only one thing went wrong - the screen lost its shine, which made it hard to read. Apple replaced the screen for nothing, even though the warranty had expired some years before!
That old Mac eventually suffered from a battery that would hold its charge for less than an hour and sound that was way too fuzzy for Zoom/Teams/Skype calls. Those two components are burried in tangled mess that lies inside the elegant aluminium case. That was going to be expensive.
So I bought the new one, with top-end CPU, twice the disk I had before, and twice the memory. I expected it to be a bit faster, but it wasn't. Never mind, it did what I wanted it to and it is very pretty. The operating system was Big Sur.
In May 2022 my 16-month-old Mac started crashing. At first it was about once a month,; in September it crashed 4 times; in November 7 times; and in the first 2 weeks of December, 8 times. So I called support and ended up paying £905 ($1,091) for it to be repaired. Apple's recommended repairer ran hardware tests and found that the logic board that contains main memory and SSD had failed as well as the Touch ID board. So the major components had failed in less than 2 years.
At the end of 2023 this machine started crashing again. At first it was infrequent but by early 2024 it was crashing on average more than once a day. I got used to saving my work very frequently. I spent one morning on the phone to Apple support. I spoke to a charming woman who knew a lot about diagnosing problems and checked suggested-actions with another technical expert before getting me to carry them out. She asked me if I had a full backup. I had two: one a full copy onto an external hard disk, the other one a "Time Machine" backup on a non-Apple disk (Apple discontinued the Time Capsule in 2018).
The advice was to rebuild the software on my computer from scratch, reformatting the (internal) disk and installing the macOS operating system over the internet. I did that - it takes a long time. The next day I called again and this time I spoke to a different support consultant. With his advice, and a few more checks, I started the long process of restoring my data, a few files at a time, and running a disk check after each batch.
This went on for another day until the Mac crashed again. After restarting, the disk checks on the Mac and the backup disk failed. The Mac disk was now corrupt and so was the Time Machine backup. The backup disk was not an Apple disk so the Apple consultant decided that my backup disk was the problem.
The next day I bought a new (non-Apple) laptop PC for one third the cost of an Apple MacBook Pro with the same spec. I didn't even bother to start it up with the Microsoft Windows operating system that it came with; instead I installed Ubuntu Linux. I then recovered my files from the non-Apple full backup copy. It has been running for nearly 2 years now and I am very happy with it.
I am a developer of database applications, and have formerly been a developer of database systems. I used a Mac because the user-interface was the best and because the underlying operating system is UNIX-like. The fine article Mac Linux Difference by Ankush Das explains the limitations of this, but, despite these limitations, macOS has been good for me because I generally run Java (and some of my team-mates run Python) programs on Linux servers with Bash shell-scripts and cron orchestrating them. I could do all this on the Mac. I have been involved with several large data warehouse projects that have been running for years (some since 1996, and several still running) on this architecture. We have updated some components, but SQL/Java/shell still performs reliably and well.
I would not like to try to build such systems with Windows/Server, in fact I would decline any offer to do so. For our servers we use proper Linux, in it's popular flavours. We use Macs and PCs for developer clients, and almost entirely Windows PCs for end-user clients. It all works fine, except for the things I hate about Microsoft.
Meanwhile Apple has annoyed me more and more. At one point I was advised to ugrade macOS to Monterey. Fortunately the upgrade failed because when I looked at the Apple blogs it quickly became clear that the bugs in Monterey would have caused me a lot more hassle.
Apple's design changes are my biggest complaint.
Apple turns my computer on when I lift the lid; Apple doesn't know why I might want to lift the lid. I want a button to press so that turning the computer on and off is under my control. Incidentally the touch ID (to log in) worked for a few weeks and then stopped. I was happy to be rid of it.
Apple opens Photos when I connect my iPhone. I will open Photos if I want to.
Apple "curates" my photos; I will "curate" my own photos the way I want to. Apple now zooms windows when I move them. In my database work, or just when writing a letter, I want the thing I am writing to be in the top-right hand corner, and the things I am referencing to be on the left. Apple snaps them to full screen.
Apple wants me to use iCloud for all my data. I want to keep my data on my computer and my backup disks. What does Apple want it for?
Then there are all the apps that take machine cycles that I paid for and that watch what I am doing, and make inane suggestions. This suggests that Apple is collecting a lot of information about me. I do not agree to this. Maybe it was buried in the many pages of Terms and Conditions that made my eyes glaze over very quickly. I'm happy to read. I'm currently reading Thomas Piketty's 1,000+ page book Capitalism and Ideology. Apple would probably prefer me not to, since Piketty has their number.
I want to remove the following applications from my computer. I will never use them and I don't want them:
When I go to the app store, let me search for what I want. I do not want Apple to try to sell me other apps. Try searching for Firefox (because you do not want Safari or Google Chrome or Edge). The app store shows loads of ads for games. I don't play computer games.
In the drive to make ever more trillions of dollars, Apple has trashed its previous values. Apple has lost this customer. I now use Linux exclusively. I'm sure Apple doesn't care.