End of the line for MacBook Pro

For nearly ten years, my entire computing environment has been a MBP with a Linux VM. OSX was an excellent end user (non dev) environment (music, photos, video), Linux is my preferred dev environment, and VMWare simplified wireless networking compared to some Linux/raw metal systems.

Then, over ten years, OSX has steadily degraded. Some of the UI decisions were just terrible, e.g. the skeuomorphic Calendar app (RIP). iTunes has long been a mess. iPhoto and Photos have been completely inscrutable to me for a long time.

By adding the cloud to things, Apple tried to maintain the fiction that your content is seamlessly anywhere you need it, while safe in the cloud. But there are at least two ids to deal with (I think? Apple ID and something else?). Consuming content on my phone chews up the data permitted by my phone plan. What I would prefer is to manage file locations manually. But the design of the apps makes that difficult. I never know if it is safe to delete anything anywhere, because I don't know the rules for propagating the deletion to other devices. It's a mess.

And now, the absolutely terrible changes for the new MBP. Getting rid of the ESC and Fn keys, and what appears to be a crappy MB keyboard, instead of the old, far superior MBP keyboard. And the non-upgradability of components has really gone too far.

I have the last gen MBP before the current one, and hope it lasts a long time. But looking ahead: If I go to vanilla hardware running Linux, how can I sync photos, music and other data with my phone? I'd rather not go to Android, since it appears that Google's incentive is to mine my data, and Apple does not appear to be in that business.