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Comment by gordon_freeman | Hacker News Reader

If there is one company I'd say that has made a significant (positive) difference in my life, I'd say it is Apple.

It's been my bread and butter.

Sort of a love/hate relationship, though. Anyone who is a seasoned Apple dev, has been incandescent with rage at Apple, at more than a few points in the relationship.

But the thing I can't forget, is the absolute torrent of derision and abuse from Apple-haters, telling me what a loser I was, for sticking with them.

Funnily enough, I've not felt like hating anyone back. Never worked for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_tDj1BvEfw

I never understood the tribalism. For nearly a decade now I have used Windows, Linux, and Macs essentially daily. I have an Ubuntu desktop in my shop, a variety of Debian servers in the cloud, a Windows desktop in my office, a Mac Mini in my bedroom, a MacBook in my bag, and a handful of iPhones/iPads everywhere else. They’re useful for different applications and workflows, and it’s not that difficult to adapt to where they all feel natural. I recognize I’m the weird one though, and I rather enjoy learning new interfaces (I switch my default web browser every few years for “fun” and as a maintenance strategy (kind of like an especially opinionated factory reset).

Same, OSX was the only OS that worked with me when I was legally blind.

If I only had to pick one I'd probably go with Monsanto.

at least tech wise, at&t or maybeeee sun for me

You are not alone.

15 years ago I was thinking about switching my career to a different industry altogether, just didn't know what it would be. One thing I knew was that I was so tired of building web sites and backends. Boring, repetitive, uninspiring.

Then a friend asked me to write a simple iPhone app. I had no idea what development for Apple platforms would be like...

Fast forward to 2026, I'm 57 now, still in tech, building apps for Apple platforms, still enjoying it very much.

The durability of their products still surprises me. I still own and use iPhone 11 (still it is my first iPhone when I switched from Android). Still getting latest iOS updates and functioning very well and may last for 2 more years. What other phone could do this?

Typing this on an iPhone 11 as well. Still feeling zero pressure to upgrade.

I’ve had the exact opposite journey. Native apps, disillusioned and frustrated with the backwards tooling, moved on to more open platforms (web apps and backends)

I’m curious what you find “backwards” about native tooling. I know the sentiment is common, and there must be some truth to it. But my partner works in web infra and frequently laments her inability to trace a single request through her company’s monolith while trying to reconstruct a failure from logs, and I am baffled that there’s no equivalent to attaching a debugger and stepping through execution.

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