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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

That stopped being the case a while ago.

In the last 2 years my family completely switched away from iPhones and has replaced most of our macs with Windows. I am the lone holdout and when this laptop dies I will probably switch as well.

It makes me sad. I used to love Apple. But they became focused on locking down a closed ecosystem and have consistently made the user experience worse. I hate Windows. But Apple has made themselves obnoxious enough that I no longer trust their upgrades, and do not want to be locked in to their fragile hardware choices.

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In what ways have they made the experince worse?

Why do you not trust their upgrades?

How are their hardware choices fragile? Do you mean build quality or do you think their ability to build their own chips will fail them and their chips for all the ipads and iphones haven't cut it?

How are you not locked into the hardware choices of any laptop maker? Are there realistic, upgradable laptops out there? or are you switching to a desktop system?

Speaking personally, 3 experiences locked in my decision.

1. Having my phone break, one day out of warranty, with a factory defect. And then being unable to even set up an appointment because that phone was required for 2-factor authentication on my apple ID. (Which I don't even remember having set up.) I lost all data.

2. Having keys fall out of my computer requiring losing it for weeks. After that every article that I've read about how Apple has tried to lock down their hardware and make it harder for independent shops to repair has added to my concern that I'll have no options if it dies.

3. The Catalina upgrade was bad. A friend whose whole life was saved to iTunes found he was unable to migrate his extensive collection. His purchased movies, TV shows, songs, etc was over a terabyte, all gone. As for me, I was bit by the Catalina and Microsoft Teams don't want to play bug described in https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/macos.... If you look at the thread, people are still reporting problems a year later. As for me, I cannot run XCode, and can only share my desktop if Teams is full screen.

You pay a premium for Apple hardware. You used to get a premium experience. The "premium experience" that I have been getting sucks. And not on hypotheticals, but on actual bad experiences that I have personally had.

The last few years have been a bad time for Apple product quality. Terrible keyboards, broken backlights, software updates that lock down the system, and so on. They've definitely lost their quality edge.

That keyboard was terrible. Johnny Ive definitely went off the rails and this was a good example. They admitted it was crap and don't ship it anymore.

I don't remember anything about broken backlights being a thing? Can you point me to an article or documentation where this was widespread?

I assume by updates locking down the system, you're talking about things like gatekeeper. What ways has this actually impacted you? What can't you run, and are these apps that have had any active developer attention in years?

You say they've lost their quality edge. Do you mean quality control coming out of their factory? That their defect rates have gone up? Or do you mean their products are being poorly designed?

> I don't remember anything about broken backlights being a thing? Can you point me to an article or documentation where this was widespread?

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/08/20/apple-sued-over-s...

> What ways has this actually impacted you?

None of Apple's mistakes have impacted me because I refuse to purchase broken hardware powering a walled garden.

> are these apps that have had any active developer attention in years?

I've got apps I run in PCem because Dosbox won't cut it. Why should I stop using software I prefer simply because someone has made something similar, wrapped in electron, running atop a hideous tower of dependencies and bloat? Hilariously, emulating a 90s PC running FreeDOS takes less memory and CPU than utilizing some modern alternatives.

> Do you mean quality control coming out of their factory? That their defect rates have gone up? Or do you mean their products are being poorly designed?

Backlight failures are both design and factory quality. The app lockout was software quality and design. The keyboard was design.

> But they became focused on locking down a closed ecosystem

That's who they've always been (post Woz, at least, which is a long time). They've always wanted to own the whole thing, from OS to hardware. There are advantages to that, but freedom for people to experiment, tinker, and run what they want isn't one of them.

Considering that Apple's closed ecosystem is like living on the Globex Corporation campus, and everybody else's is... well, like post-monorail North Haverbrook, can you fault Apple for wanting to maintain the control that keeps the UX quality so high?

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