The Grass Is Greener (But I'm Not Moving)

If I'm being honest with myself, the Apple ecosystem has me in a reasonably comfortable headlock — and it's not without some genuine resentment on my end.

I'm not blind to its flaws. The pricing, for a start, is genuinely offensive. You pay a premium at point of purchase, and then if something goes wrong, Apple will happily gouge you all over again on repair. And don't get me started on sideloading — the hoops they make you jump through to install an app outside the App Store are embarrassing for a company that sells itself on user experience. (Google is increasingly following suit, for reasons I can only describe as ungodly.) These aren't minor gripes. They're the kind of thing that makes me actively root for the alternatives.

So if you asked me to pick a lane outside of Apple entirely, I don't think I'd have to think too hard. I'd go Fairphone on the phone side, and Framework for a laptop.

Both companies are doing something genuinely rare in consumer hardware: treating repairability as a feature rather than a liability. Fairphone ships phones with replaceable batteries and modular components, with an explicit goal of making devices that last. Framework builds laptops where swapping out the mainboard, ports, or RAM is the intended use case — not a voided warranty. They're not niche curiosity projects either; both have matured into products you could actually rely on day-to-day.

So why don't I switch?

The honest answer isn't that I'm afraid of the unfamiliar. I run Linux on a server and dip into it as a secondary desktop OS on my laptop. I used Android daily for ten months back in 2021, on a Pixel 4a specifically — so I know what it's like to actually live outside the Apple bubble for a sustained stretch.

My messaging isn't really a lock-in either — or at least, not Apple's specifically. I use Signal for a decent chunk of things (a lot of my friends in the AT Protocol space do too, and I've managed to get my boyfriend on it as well — being fully cross-platform helps), WhatsApp reluctantly for family and the people who simply won't budge, and iMessage just happens automatically with anyone else on Apple. Messages itself is mostly an RCS client at this point. The irony isn't lost on me that even Signal suffers from the same problem I'm writing about — getting people to switch from WhatsApp is an uphill battle precisely because of network effects.

I can navigate a different ecosystem. That's not really the issue.

The deeper thing is that Apple is just home in a way that's hard to articulate without sounding a bit pathetic about it. An iPod Touch 4, then an iPad Air 2, and now a Mac mini, an iPhone 15, and an Apple Watch — I've essentially grown up inside this ecosystem. The way everything fits together isn't something I consciously appreciate anymore; it's just the texture of how I compute. That's familiarity operating at a level below deliberate thought.

And then there are the network effects — the subtler lock-in that's harder to walk away from. AirDrop. Handoff. The way my devices talk to each other without me having to think about it. Individually these feel like small conveniences, but collectively they add up to something that would take real effort to replicate elsewhere.

The irony isn't lost on me

Here's the thing that gnaws at me: the values that draw me to Fairphone and Framework are the same values that drew me to AT Protocol in the first place. User-owned data. Federated systems. Not being held hostage by a single company's decisions about what I'm allowed to do with my own hardware, my own information, my own digital presence.

I could run my own PDS — I've written the infrastructure, I know how it works, I have the technical capacity sitting right there and have done before, but I've settled on @eurosky.social. I build software under AGPL-3.0-only licences. I've written at length about why I chose my own domain, why I publish via AT Protocol, why I want the technical infrastructure of my online life to be something I can understand and control.

And then I type all of it on a Mac mini that I can't upgrade, can't repair without specialised tools, and can't meaningfully modify. My phone is an iPhone 15 that, if the battery degrades, will require a trip to an Apple Store rather than five minutes and a screwdriver. My watch is an Apple Watch that pairs only with other Apple devices — a deliberate design choice, not a technical limitation.

There's a dissonance there. I'm building and advocating for an open, federated, user-controlled internet while living inside a computing environment that represents almost the opposite philosophy. That's not hypocrisy, exactly — the Mac isn't the internet, and I can build open things using closed tools — but it does feel like a compromise I haven't fully reckoned with.

What it would actually take

If I'm being precise about it, the Fairphone/Framework path isn't even the full switch. It's the hardware side. The software side is different.

My Mac mini runs macOS. If I moved to Framework, I'd almost certainly run Linux — I already do on my laptop. I know Linux. I can use Linux. But the daily experience of Linux, as good as it's become, isn't the daily experience of macOS. The polish gap has narrowed, but it hasn't closed. Small things — the way windows manage themselves, the consistency of keyboard shortcuts, the quality of first-party apps — aggregate into something that matters when you're living inside it eight hours a day.

The phone side is harder. iOS has shaped how I expect a phone to behave. The Android interlude in 2021 was fine — more than fine, in some ways — but the fragment of me that got used to iOS never fully adapted. Muscle memory, learned behaviours, the accumulated weight of a decade. When I pick up my iPhone, I don't think about how to use it. I just use it.

And then there's the Apple Watch. I don't know how to replace that experience. A fitness tracker could handle step counting and sleep tracking, but the watch is also a remote for my phone, a way to check notifications without pulling my phone out, a small interface for small interactions. The alternatives exist — Garmin, Fitbit, various Wear OS devices — but none of them integrate with my existing setup the way the Apple Watch does. Because nothing can integrate with Apple's setup except Apple. That's the point.

What would actually change the calculus

This is the question I keep turning over.

A Fairphone that matches iPhone performance wouldn't be enough — I already know I can live with an Android phone, performance-wise. A Framework laptop that runs macOS would be ideal, but that's not happening; Apple's silicon advantage is too tied to their vertical integration. A critical mass of my social circle moving off iMessage would reduce one lock-in, but Signal already fills that gap for the people I actually talk to regularly.

The real shift would be psychological more than technical — reaching a point where the accumulated friction of staying exceeds the effort of leaving. That could happen. Apple makes enough anti-consumer decisions that the calculus could tip. Repair costs on a non-trivial issue. A macOS update that breaks something I rely on. A continued tightening of sideloading restrictions that makes the platform feel genuinely hostile rather than just annoyingly restrictive.

It wouldn't take one dramatic betrayal. It would take enough accumulated small betrayals that the comfort isn't worth it anymore.

Or maybe the pull toward Fairphone and Framework gets strong enough that it overcomes the comfort. Maybe I watch enough Framework teardowns, read enough Fairphone repair stories, and something shifts. Values have weight. They can pull you in directions that don't maximise convenience.

None of that makes Apple better in any principled sense. Framework and Fairphone are, frankly, more aligned with values I actually hold — longevity, repairability, not throwing a device away because a manufacturer decided it was time, not being held to ransom every time something breaks. That's worth something. It's worth a lot, actually.

But here I am, typing this on a Mac mini.

Maybe one day the calculus shifts. For now, familiarity and network effects are doing a lot of heavy lifting — and I'm at least self-aware enough to call that what it is.

The grass is greener over there. I can see it. I know why it matters.

I'm just not ready to cross the field yet.