Moving into the Walled Garden of Eden

Just a couple of years ago, I would’ve sworn that my main dev setup would never involve an Apple device. Deep philosophical differences, you see. But I’ve been using a MacBook Pro ¹ since Nov 2023. A few different things came together to precipitate this.

Valerie started gifting me Apple products for Christmas. First an iPad ². Then Airpods ³. I would’ve never bought those on my own, as I didn’t want to vote with my wallet for a company that was locking down general purpose computing devices. I loved taking the iPad to the cafe to write notes on using GoodNotes 5 ⁴. I need to write a separate long post about Airpods. I didn’t think Apple had it in it to innovate at that level after Jobs. If it were a separate company, it would be a Fortune 50!

Then my Pixel ⁵ phone broke for the second time, going into a bootloop again. Researching online, it was clear that this had been a problem for a while and Google didn’t bother to replace the phones, despite it being a design issue. Was I going to give them more money and end up with another bricked phone, months after the warranty ends?

At this point, it was also becoming increasingly clear that Apple’s interests were more aligned than Google with my own interest. This is hardly surprising, considering the former being a computer company and the latter being an ad company. I stuck with Android out of love for Linux and everything that stands for, but I was beginning to think that perhaps my model of Google needed a big update. To be clear, I had no illusions that Apple was the “good guy”. I’m aware how much money Apple spends on PR to be seen as the computer company, while they build up their adtech division.

My choices were to enter the walled garden of Apple, or continue to feed the adtech moloch of Google. I believed that the iPhone was the lesser evil. Time will tell if I was right.

However, the iPhone turned out to be a much better value for money, that’s for sure. At a few dollars per month, their extended warranty (aka AppleCare) was a no-brainer. The same phone has lasted over 5 years now! They replaced the cracked screen twice, and the deteriorating battery once. I hand the phone in, stroll around Union Square, get a cappuccino at the Ferry building, and stare at the water and the bridge, and stroll back and be handed back a working phone, and I’m back home a short BART ride later. What am I going to do with Google, mail the phone in and hope for the best?

Once I switched to the iPhone ⁶, I was practically all-in on the Apple ecosystem except for my main computer.

At this time my laptop ⁷ was already 5 years old. There were some aspects that I liked about that machine, but there were some serious downsides I was gritting my teeth through. The webcam was placed in the bottom left, forcing me to carry an external webcam. They have since then fixed this in the newer models, but who is the genius who green-lighted this brain-dead idea in the first place? The mic was tinny too, so I had to always carry an external mic even on international travel.

I ran Ubuntu on it for most of that period. Upgrading to Debian Bookworm with KDE was an incredible step-up in user experience. But I’m pretty sure this is when the issues with external monitor got worse, which was death by a thousand cuts. Zoom’s background removal feature didn’t work on such a puny machine. Editing videos for marketing histre was frustratingly slow. Wrangling OBS was hard. These weren’t tasks where I could just run the app on a server and have my laptop just act as a thin client.

Open-weight LLMs were starting to come out. I bought a used Nvidia Tesla T4 on eBay, stuck it in my colo machine, and I was able to run some models entirely offline. This helped me experiment with Stable Diffusion, and I built a full public app using it and released as a feature of histre. It was a pain to develop directly in prod. Sure I could’ve sprung another chunk of cash for a second T4 I guess, but I couldn’t justify that.

Apple Silicon machines were coming out with large amounts of unified memory. The allure of not having to do crazy hacks to get by with low processing power was becoming stronger and stronger by the day.

A fun consulting project unexpectedly fell into my lap at this time, and I was able to justify to myself the purchase of the beast. I absolutely love every minute of using it. Switching between my large monitor and the laptop screen, which I do about a half a dozen times every single day, is no longer a crapshoot requiring fiddling with the window manager, or even having to reboot (shudder!). I work out of cafes, sometimes all day, without ever carrying a charger.

It was such a difficult leap because my identity was strongly tied to being a person who used Linux as the daily driver. This is despite my first computer as a 9yo being an Apple //c.

Around this time, I was also getting less rigid about my identity; I am who I am and I don’t feel much of a need to be seen as standing for anything.

Of course I still use Linux every day in my servers and virtual machines. I started playing with Linux in 1998, evangelised it pretty hard, as my college friends will attest, ran a LUG and a newsletter, dual-booted till 2006, and ran it pretty much exclusively on the machines I owned through 2023.

I hope to switch back to Linux as my daily driver, when powerful and high-quality portable laptop hardware becomes available for it. 13” Framework seems to have great specs except for the display. I think that will improve soon. Plus it looks like there are a number of ARM laptops in development. For example ThinkPad T14s Gen 6. So this might become a viable option very soon!

Perhaps the form factor will completely change again — perhaps our eyewear will have state of the art compute power, who knows! That’s the main hope I’m holding out for getting past the current mobile duopoly of Apple and Google.