Apple Just Lost Me

Apple Just Lost Me

Apple has just lost me as an user. It will take me a while before I can fully migrate away from their devices, and I suspect I might need to keep a mac around for my work, but I will move all my personal computing to Linux and Android again.

I been an Apple user since MacOS 8. I had both a Newton MessagePad 2000 and an eMate 300. I got the original blue toilet-seat iBook G3. I was there for the developer road show introducing MacOS X. I paid for my developer account since then. Recently, I had a Macbook Air, iPhone 17, iPad Mini.

I’m gonna throw all of them away – not literally ofc – because of recent slop this company been shipping. It is death through a thousand papercuts. To summarise for yous there are three main issues for me and the last one happened today and is what pushed me through the threshold.

Gatekeeper

I absolutely hate Apple quarantine and gatekeeping of software. As a developer, I should just be able to ship software to those interested in my apps. Be aware that I don’t give a flying fuck about mobile development, I’m talking about desktop apps here.

I gave in to the Apple racketering scheme and got myself a developer account from the very start. I had to fax my card details to them, that is how long I had my account.

Even though my software is packaged and notarised as per their requirements, they still show my users a dialog box confirming they want to run my app, something they do not for apps installed through their walled garden. This is just friction to punish developers outside their store. I am very tired of it.

macOS 26

That has been an absolute fiasco. Liquid glass is completely broken from a design point of view. I have no idea how that got out of the door, and now multiple updates in, it still just as bad.

Not only it looks ugly, and that is subjective of course, but it is visually broken. Interfaces built with AppKit or SwiftUI that rendered perfect, are now overlapping controls and clipping stuff. They have no consistency at all in terms of icons, placement, corners…

I am not a designer, I don’t even care about design much, but when a bad design spreads like ink on a glass of water poisoning my workflows, it is when I notice it.

Age verification

My iPhone updated last night and per UK laws, it introduced age verification. The way Apple decided to implement this is through credit card checking.

First it attempted to check my Apple Wallet, it failed even though I have five cards in it and am able to use the App Store fine.

Then it moved onto wanting me to manually add a card to verify myself. It failed with all my five cards. Four were debit cards, and one was a credit card from another country, cause you know I am an immigrant who has accounts still in my own original birth place.

So it failed age verification and locked me out of many features. Bear in mind, I am 45 years old. I have an Apple account for 25 years, the age of my personal account alone should already verify my age.

Credit cards are not documents. Many people don’t have them. Apple don’t provide any other way to verify your age because they are a stupid American company with American values in which you’re just as human as your credit score.

Age verification is a scam, but checking it with a credit card is even worse.

Next steps for me

I was already done with Apple for some months now, but due to that happening today, I am angry af and will speed up my plans.

I’m tired of devices that are not actually mine, of workflows that without blessing from a higher corporate authority won’t work. I’m gonna move back to Linux and Android.

Yeah, I know Google gonna fuck Android soon the same way, but at least with Android you tend to have more options.

For my computing needs, I purchased a MNT Pocket Reform. It will take them a while to assemble and send it to me, but once I have it, my macbook will become a work laptop only. All software I make already ships for Linux.

I am considering getting a Fairphone Gen 6. Not sure if I will go with stock Android or their Murena /e/OS version. It depends how the degoggled version handles my banking apps. I might need to go with stock Android.

After those two, I plan to assemble a little homelab using either a TinyMiniMicro form factor PC running Linux and if I have the budget an ugreen NAS. On those machines, I want to have something to handle my photo backup and shared drive. Will probably use either tailscale or some cloudflare bullshit to connect them to each other.

This is it, moving back towards taking control of my computing again.