This whole contretemps with Apple has me pondering my computing future. I’m not ready to man the lifeboats yet but it does seem prudent to check them for seaworthiness. My ruminations got me to wondering why Apple has such a loyal user base. What is it about it that makes the Apple product line so sticky? I’m one of those loyal customers and have been since 2008. This post is me thinking out loud—as it were—about why I am such a loyal customer.
One of the things I always say I like about the Apple ecosystem is the integration. My iPhone, iPad, and Macs all talk to each other and often something I’ve started on one device can be continued on another. All my emails and iMessages are always available on all the devices and I can even share the clipboards between them. If I take a photo with one device, it’s instantly available on the others.
That kind of integration is harder in the Linux world because the same vendor doesn’t control the whole stack. Even so, there is integration in the Linux ecosystem. I’m sure there’s integration comparable to Apple’s in the Microsoft world but that’s a nonstarter for me.
Then there’s the hardware. The iPhone and the Macs are top-of-the-line but devices from other venders are, cum devices, comparable. The situation with tablets is a bit different. No fair analysis, I think, can conclude anything other than that the iPad blows its competitors away. If you’re going to have a tablet, you probably want it to be an iPad. Of course, there’s no reason you can’t have an Android phone and Linux PC and still use an iPad. I use my iPad mostly for reading Amazon ebooks, reading email, and doing crossword puzzles so my use doesn’t depend on my using other Apple devices. And, of course, I could just as well read those books on a Kindle reader and find some other application for crosswords if I wanted to rid myself of all things Apple.
So far we have Apple’s superior integration and the iPad but is that enough to account for their stickiness? I don’t think so. The real discriminator, I believe, is privacy. I would hate to give up my iPhone for an Android but the reason for that is privacy. Android users are having their every action surveilled while, until now, iPhone users could be pretty sure that wasn’t happening to them.
Every time I think about moving back to Linux and an Android phone, it’s privacy that gives me pause. What if there are a lot of other folks out there with similar views? If Apple decides that, “You know what? We don’t really care about our users’ privacy after all” what reason would all those people have to stick with Apple? Apple, of course, insists that’s not the case but their demurrals seem weak and disingenuous. If fighting CSAM on the backs of their users ends up costing them their premier position they’ll have no one to blame but themselves. But at least they can tell all their fellow cocktail partiers that they were virtuous.