The heart of the matter

For the past few years, tech has progressively filled me with different types of ​‘fatigue’. Now it’s the turn of ecosystem fatigue. 

The initial ​‘digital hub’ vision made a lot of sense at the time. As Steve Jobs said, the Mac with its capabilities gives value to all the satellite devices we use (or used at the time) — CD and DVD players, digital cameras, PDAs, MP3 players, camcorders — and also interconnects them. The example he made was the synergy between a device like a camcorder and an application like iMovie.

But, like many other things tech touches, this had to morph into an ​‘ecosystem’ where for all the things you want to do with satellite devices, now you can use an Apple device. Convenient, sure, but then these companies want more and more out of it, they want to be present everywhere you look, with everything you use in your personal spaces. Having the convenience of seamlessly pulling and pushing files across different devices is one thing; having a series of ​‘smart’ devices that essentially broadcast my habits to third parties is crossing a line I don’t want crossed. Of course, no one forces anyone into buying into an ecosystem utterly and mindlessly, except sometimes those intrusive thoughts of convenience: Why all this friction? You can have everything interconnected, a bubble where the ecosystem is always there for you.

I might like to have things interconnect, but only if I am the one controlling the ecosystem and my data within it. Not if every single fucking device has the same company logo.

Since roughly late 2023, I’ve been doubling down on what and how I used to do stuff in the 1990s and 2000s. Breaking the (Apple) ecosystem down, using different devices and operating systems, and using separate devices for different activities — a portable CD player or miniDisc player or iPod to listen to music on the go; cameras of varying vintages to take photos; and a smartphone with just the basics — phone, texts & chat, email, Mastodon, maps, transportation, weather, RSS, some browsing. It’s fine.

Some may think that all this is unnecessarily cumbersome. I think it’s very modular and divide & conquer. I divide the apps, disrupt the fabled ​‘flow’, and I conquer my space and my focus. Sometimes I’m not in the mood to take photos: the camera stays home. But I feel like reading a bit while I’m on the metro, so I bring a book. Or I want to sketch, so I take whatever analogue/digital tool I feel like using for sketching. Perhaps it’s hard to convey, but this is good friction for me. It makes me more present, in control.

This is why I increasingly find the current form of tech ecosystem to be stifling, and alienating. A place someone else tailored for me without knowing me. You’ll love how we designed the whole flow for you, these companies seem to say. And the truth is, No, guys, I really don’t. I’ll choose and take what I need and leave.

Additional stray observations

When we talk of vendor or technology lock-in, we often keep the discourse focused about specific products, their equivalents in other ecosystems, and the costs of making the switch. But the most powerful factor is certainly psychological. A user may not want to migrate to another platform because that would mean having to adopt different professional software that might be non-trivial to learn from scratch; also, the new application might offer little to no compatibility with the projects created in the old one. That’s understandable, and also unfortunate: everyone likes proprietary solutions right until the ​‘proprietary’ part starts biting them in the behind and they realise that those people always nagging about standards might not be that crazy after all.

In most situations where there’s no specific application tying a user to a vendor or ecosystem, the cost of switching is almost entirely psychological. And I’ve experienced this first-hand. After 16 years with the iPhone as my main smartphone, the mere idea of switching to an Android phone filled me with anxiety, weariness, at times even dread. It felt as if I had decided to climb a mountain without proper training or equipment. In reality, when I did switch to using an Android phone in late 2024, the adjustment period was disarmingly short.

Breaking up an ecosystem isn’t something you do on a whim or when it’s obviously counterproductive for your work. It usually stems from something that stops making you comfortable about staying within it. It may be that you don’t like the direction a company is taking. Or that, when you look past your rose-tinted glasses, you realise that the quality of the software you’ve been using for years is visibly declining; or that, after trying different hardware in a store, you realise that certain aspects of the hardware you’ve been using for years aren’t that great, after all, and other companies have actually designed certain features to work in better ways.

And since we’re talking about psychology, my advice is that if you start feeling that kind of vague discomfort in your gut, you should listen to its voice and start thinking about changes. I did, and nothing terrible happened. I cannot explain how utterly exhilarating is decoupling from Apple’s cycle of hardware and software, and all the related news cycle. How liberating revising the use and role of my smartphone truly is, from nerd sanctum of an app hoarder to simple everyday tool with just the functional basics. A tool to take out of the pocket only to check information as needed, plan routes, send/receive messages and, well, use as mobile phone.

The same philosophy applies to my computers. They run the Mac OS versions I like, the Windows I patiently decluttered following online guides and tips. And I’m still exploring Linux distros to find the one that best fits my needs and user interface demands. Yes, an outdated Mac OS has ​‘risks’. No security updates anymore. Well, it’s my decision to not update, and I’ll take responsibility for that. The information I want to keep safe is safe. The things I want ready to go back to in case of catastrophe are ready.

Like C.M. Harrington rightly observed, ​“The machine I have that runs an old version of MacOS that I use almost daily has never been compromised. […] I’m just not a target. It doesn’t mean I can’t be compromised. It’s just my machine isn’t the vulnerability that matters.”

This stance is not new at all. In the past, most people reacted to it by telling me, with an undertone of snark, Well, it’s great that you can afford to do that — obviously implying that not everybody can. Somehow that kind of comments always made me feel a little bit guilty. Then one day I said to myself, Why should I feel like that? If your work or your preferences require you to stay up-to-date with Mac OS, that’s your prerogative. My work and preferences are different.

I can’t stress enough the sheer personal aspect of my choice to go against the bubble and the ​‘flow’ of Apple’s ecosystem. If you’re fine within Apple’s or any other type of tech ecosystem, I’m happy for you and this is not an invitation to break out of it for the sake of doing so. I’ve grown fatigued with tech companies positioning it as this panacea of interconnectedness, this frictionless h(e)aven where everything is in sync everywhere. There is an undeniable amount of convenience, don’t get me wrong (and cloud synchronisation has indeed saved my arse a couple of days ago), but in this day and age you always have to add the magic words — when it works.

Because when it doesn’t, things are far from smooth. And in what ways can’t it work, you may ask. Well, you may be required to update a device you don’t want to update (because it works well the way it is), but in order for it to remain a recognised part of the ecosystem, you will have to update it. Or it’s the syncing core of the ecosystem that doesn’t work well, and when it doesn’t work well, in the best case scenario it just doesn’t sync for some mysterious reason. I’m signed in my Apple account on my two main Macs, on my iPad, on two relatively recent iPhones. I should have all my iMessages synchronised across these devices, and this feature is potentially one of the basic and most useful in the ecosystem. But in reality only one of the Macs and my iPhone SE 3 have my iMessages in sync. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.

And in the worst case scenario, when the sync engine doesn’t work well, it may display destructive tendencies towards your document or media files. iCloud is guilty of this. OneDrive too. Google Drive I don’t know because I don’t use it. Dropbox had some mishaps in its heyday, but it has been rather robust for years for me.

Another thing that has made me look past the Apple ecosystem, very simply put, is that while I still appreciate the Mac platform in general (with a few specific exceptions)¹, I can’t say the same about iPhones and iPads. The last iPhone I really enjoyed is the third-generation SE — which is the last iPhone without a notch on the display, the last iPhone with a Home button and TouchID, the last iPhone coming in a manageable size. As for the iPad, I don’t have real complaints design-wise, but it’s a device whose utility and use cases have been shrinking for me over time. I still own an 8th-generation iPad: its performance is still excellent, so I never felt the urge to upgrade to something newer and faster. But lately I basically use it to watch YouTube and read RSS feeds when I’m not at the computer. If I need to travel and bring a lightweight device to work on the go, I’ll reach for my 11-inch MacBook Air. If I need to take handwritten notes, make quick sketches, read books and documents, etc., I’ll reach for my BOOX Go 10.3 e‑ink tablet.

(As for the software, don’t even get me started. I’d end up repeating myself and making this piece way longer than it needs to be.) 

A similar dissatisfaction comes from Apple’s audio offerings. AirPods may be more than fine for a lot of people, but it’s kind of appalling that the only options I have if I don’t want true wireless earbuds are either the old wired EarPods or the overpriced AirPods Max. The €230 Beats Solo 4 could be some kind of middle ground, but why not add a decent pair of over-the-ear wired headphones? Macs still have headphone jacks: some good-quality closed monitor headphones aren’t such a crazy proposition, given how much Apple pushes audio/video editing in their marketing as one of the top professional use cases for their devices.

And HomePods… Uhh, I guess they’re okay, but my experience with a HomePod mini was massively underwhelming. It didn’t sync, the touch controls were frustrating, and communicating with Siri was even worse. And so I returned the gadget.

While we’re here, I’ll tell you what Apple should have done instead: they should have created a device that was both a speaker and an AirPort base station. I believe such a device would have been hugely successful. Instead they discontinued a genuinely useful, well-built, long-lasting, easy-to-configure router, and they’ve given us a mediocre speaker powered by a mediocre ​‘smart’ assistant. 

So, at the end of the day, an ecosystem may be convenient and a good idea for those who insist on eliminating friction at all costs. But you can’t tell me I’m introducing friction if I break up and break out of an ecosystem, when the cumulating points of failure (or mediocrity) within the ecosystem itself end up introducing friction themselves. At least the friction I choose comes from products that maybe don’t pair as well or more easily with one another, but which individually are better-quality, better-value, more versatile options than what Apple has been putting before me.