Chris WiegmanOver the weekend I finished another big upgrade to my home office, I replaced my laptop, monitor, keyboard and mouse with new Apple hardware. While the equipment it great I have some mixed feelings about the whole project in general.
Too much Apple?
At this point I am, once again, “all in” on the Apple ecosysterm. The last time I was this deep into Apple’s ecosystem was 2017 and I made a big move to escape it. This time around I’m even deeper in that we use Apple Watches, Apple TVs and I now have an Apple Studio Display as my home monitor.
In many ways it is the right move for my tech today, but I can’t help but feel like this is still too much Apple. With my family’s needs and the fact that Apple does remove so much friction in my own tech stack I like working with my tech, but I still have concerns over the long-term.
My ideal tech stack
I’ve said for years that my perfect tech stack allows me do what I need to do regardless of where I’m at or what device I have with me. If I’m at home that probably means sitting at my desk with my laptop. On the go my phone gets me what I need and, at work and for writing, my iPad makes the perfect laptop for when I don’t want to be distracted.
That integration is important to me. When I left Apple in 2017 the only way I came close to something that worked for me was going all-in on Google’s ecosystem. I later tried to move to a more FOSS stack with Linux, NextCloud and so many other more “open” tools and it was a mess. If I pretended I didn’t have a use for a number of tools, especially maps, it was OK but I really was just pretending. Add in my family, with whom I share quite a bit of data, and it all fell apart pretty quickly.
So, here I am, with pretty much 100% of my tech on Apple, where everything works really well, wondering how I’ll get back to Linux as my daily-driver. It’s probably not a healthy place to be.
My current stack
So what all have I upgraded to:
Last year I upgraded to an iPhone 15 Pro Max and Apple Watch Series 9. This added to two Apple TVs we have (one on each of our TVs).
In the last month I’ve upgraded the rest. We try to keep to a 3 year upgrade cycle on our laptops so I went from a M1 Max MBP to a 16" M4 Max MBP. What started that shopping was the impending death of my 8-year-old Dell monitor (the colors had been fading for a while and were to the point that many were unrecognizable). I upgraded that to an Apple Studio Display. Given that I’m using Apple Passwords these days, and it requires so much use of TouchID, I added an Apple kayboard and trackpad for my desk as well. This is all after upgrading my M1 iPad Pro to an M4 iPad Pro a few weeks ago to get the cell service on it. At work I have no access to WiFi during the day for my devices and I keep very, very strict separation of work and personal data. This means I upgraded the iPad to add cellular service to it which gives me a device in my office that I can more easily use for anything that isn’t strictly related to the day job.
On the Apple devices themselves I stick mostly to Apple’s software using iCloud, Music, Podcasts, Notes, Reminders and pretty much everything else that comes with an iCloud Family subscription. This is another case where their apps work very, very well for my needs but I can’t help but fear how many eggs I’ve put into the Apple basket.
The truth is I need to stop agonizing about it all. I’m in Apple both because it works for me personally and, more importantly, because it works across my family. Sometimes that’s a good enough reason for anything, even if there are, potentially, “better” options out there.