An Apple a day...

"Wow, you're getting rid of your last Apple device?" – that's what my wife asked me the other day, when I told her about my plan.

Well, the word "plan" is maybe a bit much. It's more like a recurring theme over the last few months.

I have never considered myself an Apple fanboy, but I always appreciated their simplicity and the interconnectivity their devices had. My MacBook Pro would seamlessly work together with my iPhone. No hacky third-party solutions to copy something. They really built an eco-system.

Yet, in May this year, I started to question whether this eco-system was worth its money.

Chilling at the pool in our town, I wanted to quickly look at some stuff for Magic Pages. But all I had with me was my phone. Now, accessing a server remotly through a smartphone works – but it's not fun.

So, I realised that it might be time to look at devices that fill that gap between a phone and a computer. Tablets.

Even from a financial perspective it made sense. Magic Pages was doing well – and since the tablet would be used for work, it's a classic business expense.

So...just pick up the next best iPad?

I considered that. I mean, it would integrate with the rest of my hardware. But looking at the iPad lineup, I just didn't get excited. If I wanted to use the tablet for productivity outside of home, I wanted a proper keyboard with it. Ideally a pen to quickly take notes and sketch some infrastructure diagrams.

And well...only iPad Pros would fit that role, realistically.

The 11 inch display seemed too small. It just felt like a tiny upgrade from my phone. So, it had to be the 12.9 inch model.

Pen? Yes. Keyboard? Mhm......WHAT??

2,037 Euro.

I was shocked. My M1 MacBook Pro only cost 1929 Euro back in 2022 – and it clearly brings more to the table than a tablet.

Alright...maybe I can compromise for the 11 inches after all. Let's reconfigure this. Well...still 1,637 Euro 😂

What the heck.

That's when I made the decision to go Android.

I won't bore you with the details, but I ended up with a XIAOMI Pad 6S Pro. Including a great pen as well as a keyboard cover, it cost me 699 Euro in the introductory offer. It's been a powerful companion for the last few months – and if you've ever sent a chat message or email to Magic Pages late at night, changes are, I replied using that tablet on our couch.

So yeah, the spell was broken. My mind got expanded beyond Apple. Turns out, Android took quite some leaps in the last few years and I actually loved using it.

A few days after I got the tablet, I realised something else: I had a pretty expensive and nearly maxed out iPhone 14 Pro. But all I am using it for is...browsing the web. Replying to messages. Creating a WiFi hotspot on the go. Quick photo here and there.

It was 100% overkill. I quickly compared some websites that buy used electronics and resell them. And since the iPhone 16 launch was still a few months away, I still got good money for the iPhone.

Sold it – and bought a Xiaomi 13T. If you just look at the hardware specs, it is certainly quite a downgrade. I mean, half of the camera lenses are unusable, if the light is bad 😂

However, looking back at the last 4-ish months of using it, replacing the iPhone has been a really, really good decision.

In my day-to-day I don't notice any difference. I can still check emails, browse the web, and reply to messages. I can still snap the occassional picture (though, the quality is a bit worse, admitettly). I can use it for navigation in the car, and it creates a WiFi hotspot when I need one.

Now, four months later, I am also getting rid of my MacBook Pro. It's still in good condition after two years of usage. It works perfectly. But as my business grows, I need more power and storage on my main work machine.

In the last few months, I regularly had system warnings pop up. Not enough memory. Storage is getting full.

To be fair, this is the lowest spec MacBook pro from the 2021 lineup. And I could have optimised some workflows to reduce the memory usage.

But I looked through my 512 GB SSD and found a whopping 4GB of data that I could delete without impacting my development process 😂

Most storage-intense things are already offloaded to a network storage, but I still need to keep files on my laptop as well.

And as you probably know...Apple is not a fan of hardware upgrades. To get more storage or memory, I'd need to buy a new Apple device. And since it's a more powerful machine...it would cost me 3,649 Euro (38GB memory, 2TB SSD).

I might sound like an old grumpy bastard now, but where are the days where you could just unscrew the back of your laptop and pop in a bigger hard drive? Ohhh right...these days are still here. Just not when an Apple logo is at the front.

Again, I checked how much I could sell the MacBook for. Around 1000 Euro. Not too bad. So, let's look at alternatives.

It literally took me 10 minutes and I found the perfect replacement. The Lenovo Yoga 7 Pro. A nice 14 inch laptop (same as my MacBook), with a beefy CPU, 32GB of memory, and a 1TB SSD. And the best part: I can unscrew the back, and add a second SSD.

All of that for 1800 Euro. Add in a 2TB SSD for 100 Euro, to match it up with the Apple alternative, and we are still at nearly half the cost 🙃

So, soon I'll be Apple free. Still love their eco-system. Still love how everything works together. But quite honstly, I simply cannot justify these prices.

I'll try to post an update in a few weeks to report on my experience with a Windows/Android eco-system.