Why I don’t buy Apple products

Let me be clear up front. I think Apple is a great company and that they make great products. I’ve got no beef with any of Apple’s customers. And don’t get me wrong, the Mac and iPhone products are well-engineered, beautifully made, and work marvelously for millions. Apple builds products that make technology usable for many non-technical folks.

They just aren’t for me.

I’m an Android and Windows guy. Other than maybe a few months of paying for Apple Music, I’ve never bought a product from Apple.

I chose Windows back in the day because I started on DOS and I liked Microsoft. (OK, I was kind of a fanboi.) Macs also were more expensive, but as I realized later, I had an instinctive desire to tweak and customize my solution. The Macs were great—they worked right out of the box—but something appealed to me about configuring and tweaking my AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files to keep things running smoothly. (If you don’t know what those two files are, consider yourself lucky.) Maybe it was my inner geek coming out. Or maybe I just have a masochistic streak.

Windows nerd

DOS applications would have wildly different interfaces. Windows came along and standardized things a bit, but their standards were more suggestions than requirements. Android is similar to Windows in that respect—there are no rules for Android applications, though there are many conventions commonly followed.

Contrast that with the Macintosh, where all the applications worked the same basic way and had a consistent interface. Apple provided a standard and straightforward way of doing things—an intuitive, point-and-click way that appealed to non-nerds. Apple products from the very beginning “just worked” and didn’t require much technical skill.  They were perfect for a large portion of the population for whom “just works” is exactly right. 

But for some reason, I and many others preferred the “Plug-n-Pray” way of doing things, or preferred paying less for our computers. Indeed, Windows dominated and still dominates the OS market (though Linux devotees are bristling right now). Windows was more business-friendly, providing server versions and network-friendly systems. But Macs were definitely cooler and hipper. 

But that wasn’t all there was to it. I didn’t mind being nerdy, but there are definitely some philosophical differences that make me prefer non-Apple products.

To start, although I know this is blasphemy in the tech world where Steve Jobs is worshiped as a god, but I never liked the guy. Sure, he was a visionary. He rescued Apple from the depths of despair and turned it into the most valuable company in the world. He gave birth to the smartphone. He literally changed the world. 

But I never was a big fan of Jobs’… unpleasant manner. Did he have to belittle and threaten his employees? Some would argue that, well, yes, he did—that Apple wouldn’t be the company it is today were it not for Jobs’ “aggressive leadership style.” That may be true, but my experience is that being a jerk isn’t at all necessary to be a great leader. 

Handcuffs aren’t golden

But beyond my Steve Jobs problem, I don’t like that Apple systems are closed, or so tightly locked down and controlled by Apple. I understand that applications must have a consistent user interface and meet exacting standards. It makes for a good user experience, especially for many users who aren’t as technologically savvy as others. But Apple takes this control too far.

And Apple’s closed mindset leads to a certain… attitude? (I hesitate to say “smugness,” but I guess I just did.) The famous Blue/Green bubble issue is a classic example. Apple has a proprietary messaging system, and regular SMS-based messages show up as green messages in their messaging app in contrast to the blue message bubbles of iPhone-originating messages. This creates a kind of cultural divide, with the “cool kids” having the right color text bubbles. When asked pointedly about it, Apple CEO Tim Cook famously said “Buy your mom an iPhone.”

In addition, Apple leverages their closed system to brag about their privacy features. But what they are really doing is making sure they are the only ones that can monitor your every move online. Apple ran a large marketing campaign talking about how safe your information is on their systems, implying that companies can’t track you on your iPhone and MacBook, but they neglected to acknowledge that they are tracking everyone. Apple is doing exactly what they accuse companies like Google and Facebook of doing and wrapping themselves in the veneer of “privacy.”

I also don’t like how Apple has historically treated developers. Back in the early days of the App Store, Apple had very strict requirements for developing iPhone applications, not the least of which was to require the use of Apple’s tools to develop your app. You couldn’t build a compiler on Windows and compile Mac or iPhone applications. (I say this as a former product manager for a company that tried to do just that.)

Apple established 30% as the take rate for the App Store—a rate that I think is, well, highway robbery. Developers do all the work and Apple gets almost a third of the revenue? And then, Apple enforces that take rate not only on the price of the app itself, but on all sales made through the app on the Apple platform. Apps like Amazon’s Kindle can’t sell books on the iPhone without paying this toll. Spotify has to pay 30% of subscription fees to Apple. Naturally, Spotify’s main competitor, Apple Music, has no such requirement. 

So yeah, Apple is a great company that makes great products. But I’ll stick with my Chromebook, my Windows desktop, and my Google Pixel, thank you very much.