But what about Apple?

Apple doesn't deserve your money.

My advice about Apple products is "do not buy them" and "begin migrating away from the Apple ecosystem as soon as you can."

Fuck Apple.

Cost

Apple hypes the shit out of their M-series processors and they seem to be perfectly fine processors so far as processors go but also they're built specifically to prevent people from "misusing" Apple's hardware by installing other OSs on it or "misusing" their software by creating hackintoshes.

The M-series is how most people are justifying the absolutely obscene cost of Apple hardware.

I'm not going to look at the apple website right now because it's bad for my blood pressure, but the last time I looked at a MacBook Air they were charging eight hundred fucking dollars for a 2TB SSD. That is unconscionable. That level of gouging should be criminal.

I lied. I lied and I went on the apple website and right now charging $600 for an upgrade from a 512GB SSD to a 2TB SSD. I can get a 2TB Western Digital Black SSD for $140.

Apple is charging as much for that SSD upgrade as most people who write to me are looking to pay for a computer. They're charging $200 to go from 16GB RAM to 24GB.

Say what you want about what flavor of hot shit you think the M3 series is, that is eight hundred fucking dollars to get a fucking drive and 8GB more RAM and there is exactly zero reason that should be true except that the market will bear it because people keep giving Apple their fucking money.

Eight hundred dollars - just the cost of the upgrades! - is more than I have paid for any computer I have ever owned except the macbook I bought for $900 in 2005. They lost me. I was 100% a Mac Believer and they lost me.

Utter contempt for their customers

Nobody hates the idea that you might want to fix own your computer more than Apple does. If you think that you should have the right to repair the $1000+ computer you purchased with your hard-earned money, Apple wishes that you, personally, were on fire so they could refuse to piss on you to put you out.

It's fucking rad that someone figured out how to hack Apple's bullshit lid angle sensor, but it's also bullshit that Apple installed it in the first place. There's no reason to swap out a binary magnetic close sensor for a "more sensitive" angle sensor that requires calibration by Apple except to prevent people from replacing or repairing their own screens.

It is really, really difficult for me to articulate how angry this kind of thing makes me. This is a huge waste of resources and a huge waste of money. People pay for these fucking things thinking they're getting a good computer because of the price only to get repeatedly gouged because Apple doesn't see their customers as people, they see them as a resource to be drained and discarded.

And that's totally aside from the fact that they've always been unhappy about the idea of users mucking up the OS.

Hardware

There are a lot of scandals about how shitty Apple's hardware can be and how much it screws users but my favorites are Batterygate, which is Apple using their software to make it look like your hardware sucks and the butterfly keyboards, which cost users hundreds of dollars to replace because they could be destroyed by a harsh look.

Ecosystem

I know I've already got my tinfoil hat on in writing this page but Apple is a fucking pitcher plant that tries to suck users in with their app ecosystem, cloud storage, and device syncing that all feels great until you want to buy an Android tablet and nothing talks to each other. They make it a huge pain in the ass to move anything to different systems that people are pulled along into purchasing $600 SSDs through sheer inertia and the difficulty of moving their iTunes library.

It's better to just stay out of the whole system. Fuck 'em. They don't deserve your money and I wish them a very Burn To The Ground.