Jichi's Blog

For more than a decade, I've been an Apple user in one way or another. It all started in 2011, when I got a 1st generation iPad at the age of 9. Since then, I've had at least 7 iPhones, 5 iPads, 6 Macs, and countless accessories. By all means I've spent more money on Apple than anything else in this world.

However, this doesn't make me an Apple fan. Putting aside the fact that fanboyism is stupid, there are many things about Apple products I do not like. In recent years, I've grown a strong distate for their business practices, such as their cooperation with the CCP, the 30% cut for purchases on the App Store, and their unwillingness to allow sideloading on iOS. The problem is, by the time I realized how much I dislike Apple, I was too deep into their ecosystem to make a switch. Apple intentionally made their closed ecosystem diffifult to transition away. Swapping out any individual device would cause a significant downgrade to my experience, while swapping out everything at once is a huge commitment both in terms of time and cost. So I begrudgingly kept buying Apple products.

This changed when Apple's malicious compliance of the EU DMA came to light. It felt like the final straw for me. I had hoped that once the EU forces them to allow sideloading, everything will be okay. Instead they chose to do it the most predative way possible, to the point where I'm finally no longer willing to tolerate their shenanigans. Thus began my journey to remove all Apple products from my life, once and for all.

Phone

Even though I've used an iPhone as my daily driver since 2013, I've always had a backup Android phone in hand. In recent years, that role was fulfilled by a Google Pixel 5.

I love my Pixel 5. It's small, has great battery life, and the ROM is clean and smooth. Naturally my first idea was to simply start using it instead of my iPhone 14 Pro as my daily driver. However, I soon realized that it's perhaps not the best idea. To date, Pixel 5 is the only flagship Pixel phone that shipped with a non-flagship SoC. The Snapdragon 765G chip wasn't very fast back then, and definitely isn't fast now. It also doesn't receive system updates anymore, because back then Google only supported Pixel phones for 3 years. Therefore, I decided that if I'm serious about switching to Android, I should buy a new phone instead.

At first I wanted the ASUS Zenfone 10. It has the perfect size, and I heard great things about its performance and battery life. However, ASUS only promises 2 years of OS updates and 4 years of security updates, which is simply not acceptable in my opinion. To make matters worse, they recently killed off the possibility to unlock the bootloader of their phones. I also considered Google Pixel 8, but many of its killer features are not available outside of the US, and the lack of a telephoto camera on the base model is disappointing. In the end, I settled on a Galaxy S24. I wasn't sure if I would like Samsung's One UI, but it otherwises ticks all the boxes for me.

I was actually pleasantly surprised by my S24. The whole experience is very polished, much better than my Galaxy Note 2 from 2012, which was the last time I had a Samsung phone. One UI also offers way more customization possibilities than Pixel's ROM, which was always one of my main gripes with Pixel. It does come with some bloat, such as Microsoft apps being installed by default, but that doesn't bother me as long as they can be disabled. The only thing I miss is Pixel's “Now Playing” feature. It can be added to any Android phone using some workaround, but it will never work as well as a Pixel.

Desktop

The desktop is the easiest part of this transition. Linux has been my desktop operating system of choice for the last five years. This has not changed.

On an unrelated note, I recently tried switching my desktop environment from GNOME to KDE. Many features I care about, such as VRR and fractional scaling, are either missing or considered experimental on GNOME. The upcoming Plasma 6 is also shipping with initial HDR support, which will finally allow me to use my OLED monitor to its full potential.

However, I ended up switching back to GNOME. The thing is, as someone who has never used Windows as their main OS, I find GNOME's OOBE far more intuitive. The activities overview feels exactly like Mission Control on macOS, and the application launcher is very similar to Launchpad. I also love the aesthetics of libadwaita apps. I can see how KDE would be a better choice for most people, as it's more versatile, feature-rich, and doesn't have the questionable design choices made by GNOME, but for me it's much easier to install some extensions to fix GNOME's quirks than building an entire desktop experience from scratch on KDE just to make it look and feel like GNOME.

Laptop

My current laptop is a 2021 MacBook Pro with M1 Pro. I installed Asahi Linux on it a while ago, but I find myself not using it very often. The developers of Asahi did a great job bringing Linux to Apple Silicon, including writing a GPU driver from scratch. However, there are still a few things not working under Linux, notably microphone, video decoder, Thunderbolt, and 120 Hz display. While none of these things is essential, it does suck having to reboot to macOS just to jump on a phone call.

In the future, I would like to get a laptop capable of running the mainline Linux kernel. My requirements for laptops are: 14 inch OLED or Mini LED, 90 Hz or more, USB-C on both sides, and no NVIDIA GPU. After some searching, it looks there are only two laptops that checks all the boxes, Dell XPS 14 and Lenovo Yoga 9i. I will probably go with the Lenovo, since the XPS 14 is much more expensive and has touch buttons instead of a proper function row. The 2024 Yoga 9i isn't shipping yet, and I want to see how well it supports Linux before making the purchase, but if previous generations are anything to go by, everything should work except the fingerprint sensor, which is a common issue for Windows laptops running Linux.

Tablet

Getting rid of my iPad will be difficult. As of today, the tablet experience on Android is simply not on par with what an iPad can offer. Plenty of apps still don't have proper tablet support. As someone who uses their tablet in landscape mode 100% of the time, being forced to use portrait mode is a dealbreaker for me, and a quick test using the Android emulator suggests that many apps I use only support portrait mode.

I would love to get a Linux tablet. As far as I know, most modern libadwaita apps work great on touchscreens. However, I was not able to find a tablet that both works on Linux and has comparable performance to Android and iOS tablets at a similar price range.

I will have to think about this more, but for now I'm keeping my iPad.

Smart Home

For smart home devices, I've always insisted on purchasing devices using open standards like Zigbee, instead of those locked into a single ecosystem like HomeKit. This is now paying off. Everything still works, except I'm now interacting with them using Home Assistant instead of Apple's Home app. I still maintain my Homebridge server because my partner still needs it, but for the most part I am very happy with Home Assistant, and wish I had switched to it sooner.

I did have to stop using my HomePods. Without an active Apple Music subscription, or an iPhone nearby to AirPlay to it, I can no longer use them to listen to music. Fortunately I had two Google Nest Hubs, so I started using them instead. I quickly noticed how much better the HomePod sounded compared to the Nest Hub, so I decided to purchase a Nest Hub Max for my bedroom. Google doesn't sell the Nest Hub Max in Spain, but fortunately I live about an hour away from the French border, so I hopped on a bus to Perpignan and bought a Nest Hub Max there. It sounds great and I love it.

Accessories

After reading a bunch of headphone reviews on RTINGS.com, I purchased a pair of Nothing Ear 2. It's not the best earbuds out there, but it's unbeatable at its price range. I'm still keeping my AirPods Pro 2 for use at home, when I'm on my laptop or iPad, but I have no complaints regarding the Nothing Ear 2. It sounds great, looks stylish, and the noise cancelling works better than I expected. My only nitpick is the codecs it supports. Instead of a common codec like LDAC or aptX, they went with LHDC, which is supported by very few Android manufacturers. Therefore, most users are stuck with SBC and AAC. It's not the end of the world, but definitely a bummer.

I stopped using my Apple Watch and do not plan to replace it. I realized that I don't actually need a smartwatch, as I almost never use their fitness tracking features. I only used it to read notifications, which isn't strictly necessary, especially now that I can see my phone's notification on my computer using KDE Connect.

Conclusion

In conclusion, as of 25 Feb 2024, here are the Apple products I still use:

• iPad Pro
• MacBook Pro
• AirPods Pro

I will keep this post updated if anything changes, but hopefully by the end of this year, I will have successfully gotten rid of all my Apple devices.