At least once a year I still get the urge to switch up my tech again. In the past I’ve gone as small as switching tools and as large as switching my entire tech ecosystem. I guess you could say I’m always searching for something with my tech and I’m OK with that.
These past few weeks have found me looking again at moving off of Apple. I’ve been eyeing a new Pixel phone (I still say my Pixel 3XL was probably my all-time favorite phone) as well as Linux laptops. It’s tempting, but I’m going to stick with Apple.
Apple device integration is still the best
Primarily my main reason for sticking with Apple is the device integration. I can start something on one device and pick it up on another and that pretty much works for everything at this point.
Every other tech I’ve tried finds some way to limit this and the result is always that for pretty much any real task I have to keep my phone and my laptop with me to get it done. That might seem normal for most, but that’s my problem with it. Every one of these devices is a general purpose computer and I want them to behave like it. Apple, these days, does a great job with it.
My family is still on Apple
The second reason I stick with Apple, and what brought me back to it in the first place, is that my entire family is “all in” on Apple. That has come in surprisingly handy these past few years in sharing data, offering tech support and more. Sure, I can (and did) work with them when I was on Android and Linux but the friction was much higher, particularly for my parents and my brother. These days I don’t have to guess. I know what they have and we make it work.
Everything I need is actually available for Mac
Next, unlike Linux where I spent a large portion of my time fighting to make various services or apps work, everything I need works well on my Apple hardware.
This means I don’t have to find weird third-party clients for things like Sonos or deal with alternative apps for many of the things I use on a regular basis. It also means that I can get by on Apple’s default apps for almost everything I need. That was simply impossible on Linux.
As a perfect example of this, I wiped my Mac this morning. It took me less than 2 hours to completely restore it, configuration and all. That’s not from a backup either. I simply ran my dotfiles’ setup script and it was all back to working order very quickly. I never could get my Linux machines anywhere near that efficient and it’s come in handy on more than one occasion.
iCloud’s services just work
Finally there’s iCloud. I have a lot of data in it these days and, unlike with Google or the dozens of other services I’ve used, I’m OK with that. Once I log into iCloud my messages, mail, phone and so much else is just there and works. That has been a very handy thing for me.
Apple really is the best, for me
So all this, device integration, family, app availability and iCloud put together mean that Apple’s ecosystem, while not perfect, is still, in 2026, the right fit for me. Not only do I not see that changing any time soon, but anymore I don’t know if I even want it to.