Trying to unwind myself from macOS and Apple

I have been using macOS on the desktop since the first public beta; I was (and still am) a rabid NeXTStep fanboy, so the idea of “we’re gonna do NeXTStep for modern hardware” was too much to resist. A modern Unix that is free of all the problems of desktop Linux? Sign me up.

Similarly I have been on iOS since the first iPhone. There were a couple of dalliances and experiments with other platforms but my core device was always iOS. Hell, for a while my “laptop” was an iPad!

These days, I’m becoming less and less happy with Apple and the ecosystem.

• Apple’s stance toward privacy is laudable, but they exempt themselves; your data is safe from everyone, unless their address is 1 Infinite Loop.
• They are making a bunch of insane decisions, like fighting the weird watch patent when they have more money than God and can just make it go away
• I feel like waiting for iPadOS to “get good” is now a fool’s errand. For some reason they remain devoted to crippling it (so as to not cannibalize MacBook sales?) despite a steady drumbeat from “power users” begging for more.

And generally, I feel rather uncomfortable with my entire life in this ecosystem. So I’m working on a plan to get out.

The problem is one of convenience and effort. I have 20 years of photos in iCloud right now. Downloading them and backing them up to local devices means setting up a NAS, using RAID, and setting up an offline backup system. That smells like … work. As I write this, I have a meeting tomorrow to work with our principal architect to design a new enterprise-wide backup and DR system!

Then you have other concerns, like: I would probably invest in a real DSLR camera. That’s all fine and good, but now you still have to use something to crop and tweak: stuff that’s built in to iOS and Apple Photos. If we assume I will retain my MacBook running macOS, then am I just making more work for myself, by putting photos in 2 places?

And so on, and so on. I really now understand all the people who were stuck with Windows and couldn’t unwind themselves. It’s a lot of work, getting yourself out of an ecosystem. It’s almost like they want it that way.