This month I’ve made a pretty drastic decision to move away from Apple products. Part of it was because I don’t really agree anymore with how Apple wants us to upgrade our hardware: I get it, it’s an SoC and everything is soldered on the motherboard. It makes perfect sense that you have to buy a new laptop to get better perfomances, I can deal with that; but they can’t expect me to accept the same should be true for desktop usage, not when they are known for planned obscelence — I’m not going to spend 2k euro on a Mac Studio and have it become obsolete in 5 years just because they wanted to flip the money switch. It’s not happening. I wanted better hardware for 2025 because as I said in previous posts I want to get into open source development and I need some more perfomances; but to do that I had to buy a new Mac.
How do I go about that though? Where do I get the money necessary to buy all that? I can easily afford it, but that’s not how I work, I find it extremely weird to buy a new shiny product and still have the old hardware hanging around, not really adding value to my life.
“I’ll sell my Macbook Air” — I thought — “it’s definitely gonna fetch me at least 600 euro, i bought it for 1.2k in 2021: a 50% loss in value is to be expected.”
It was the perfect plan until I found out that other Macbook Airs with my same exact specs were fetching for 450/500 euro. I was shocked, I won’t lie. So I just swallowed the bitter pill and dealt with it. I managed to sell it to a coworker of mine for about that price and finally managed to build a PC from scratch: a desktop workstation with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900x, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of M.2 SSD and an RX580 graphics card cause I want to game on it (not a whole lot, just enough to get a copy of DOOM Eternal running.)
I’m actually pretty satisfied with it and that has actually brought me to the realisation that I don’t need Apple anymore, I am done with all their bullshit and ecosystem. I won’t even go into the ethical reasons that played a part in me wanting off the Apple train (Tim Cook donating Trump 1 million dollars? Goddamn man, that’s a low price you’ve set for your dignity.)
All that has also made me question the iPhone 15 I bought in december 2023, but the fun fact is: it has lost most of its value! Shit went from 974 euro to an estimated value of 574 euro in the span of a single year!
I know this is probably better than anything that’s on the market, because you know: Apple. But that also means that if I have to sell, I have to be fast and do it before the iPhone 17 releases or it’s gonna drop in value even more. Which I would do if I didn’t have another big issue: there is nothing on that pricerange that I actually want to buy or that I consider to be on the same level. I’ve looked at Nothing Phones but those don’t seem to be good enough, I could get a Pixel 8 which is a good phone but then what? Move from Apple to Google? Which is arguably even worse when it comes to privacy? Absolutely not.
Mind you, I’m not going full thin-hat right now, but I really don’t want to depend on any sort of big tech company: I don’t want to have anything to do with them anymore, they have proved themselves time and time again to be liars, manipulative and double-faced.
At the end of the day I think I’ll have to stick with the iPhone 15 until I can find a better alternative, but it’s not really what I want. Hopefully something will be released before September, even though I’m not counting on it.
One thing is certain: Apple won’t get any more money out of me.