Kashmir Hill, writing for Gizmodo, in the latest of her six part series on dumping Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and, this week, Apple from her life. Fascinating read.
I cut Apple out of my life. It was devastating
Kashmir Hill, writing for Gizmodo, in the latest of her six part series on dumping Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and, this week, Apple from her life. Fascinating read.
I switched to Android for a year a while back. I did fine, but nothing felt cohesive and the whole experience was a bit clunky. From her experience It sounds like the gap is even wider now.
Looking forward to the rest of this series. Microsoft and Google would be easy to kiss off for me. Facebook, maybe a little inconvenient. Amazon, super inconvenient. And Apple, near impossible at this point.
Possibly next she should give up mechanized transportation, central heating or air conditioning. Attempting to live in a world filled with technology while avoiding the suppliers of such technology is quaint.
I’m almost inclined enough to click through to see the article’s comments from Gizmodo regulars.
Update: Yep. Lots of tunnel-visioned nerdsplaining and criticism of the writer’s ineptitude. And then the inevitable crosstalk, ending with several “Apple fanboi” accusations.
Good article, written from a consumer point of view. I can forgive the writer’s forgetfulness in not having saved two new registration passwords for a replacement Purism laptop, because it’s likely something a lot of non-techie consumers would do.
I thought this was a pretty uninformative article. She decided not to get a Windows laptop or a modern Android phone to replace her MacBook and iPhone, and spent 90% of the article talking about fiddling with her weird Linux laptop, tracking down a 10 year old Nokia, disabling iMessage so she could recieve texts, and transferring contacts. Only the last 10% of the article was actually about “life without Apple”, and the full extent of it seemed to be a few friends asking why her text bubbles were green and one person trying to FaceTime her.
My conclusion from reading this series of articles is that Apple is the easiest of the tech giants to avoid in the modern world. Unlike companies like Google or Amazon upon which vast swathes of the internet rely on to function, or Facebook which has strong network effects that compel people to use the product, using Apple products is completely opt-in. It’s a choice that consumers make freely and directly.
Yes, she might have considered your choices had the series not been heading towards cumulatively giving up all of them.
How do you define “normal consumer”? You don’t exactly sound like one.
I suppose if her senior editor is also one for arguing to extremes, those articles might get on her list as well.
My problem with the article is that it deviated from the rest of the series. For one thing, because she was planning to do a week without using any of the tech giants, she refused to use the obvious alternatives for her MacBook and iPhone: a windows laptop and modern Android phone. Half the article is about her dealing with this weird Linux vendor and tracking down a 10 year old Nokia, neither of which has anything to do with “life without Apple.”
Secondly, a huge portion of her trouble was just general platform switching costs. Having to turn off iMessage to receive texts is Apple specific, but stuff like transferring contacts is just a general switching cost. I agree it’s interesting to see how much trouble a normal non-techie consumer has switching platforms, but it’s also kind of a separate issue from “life without Apple.” And if she had just walked into her cell carrier store asked to buy a modern Android phone like a normal consumer, the employee would have transferred her contacts for her and she would have been up and running in no time.
Only the very last 10% of the article was actually about “life without Apple,” and the full extent of her troubles seemed to be a few friends asking why her text bubbles were green and one person trying to FaceTime her. A far cry from the Google or Amazon articles, where vast swathes of the internet just stop working.
I think a normal consumer, in the US anyway, goes to their carrier store to buy a new phone and doesn’t specifically ask to avoid Apple and Android phones. A normal consumer also doesn’t specifically avoid Windows.
Unfortunately, the artificial constraints of her experiment forced her to jump through hoops that a normal consumer would never have to go through. I just wished she hadn’t focused almost the entirety of the article on those unnatural obstacles.
You might be surprised by how many “normal consumers” buy into the platform-allegiance nonsense put forward by tech columnists and tech-blog commenters without the benefit of direct experience.
And what exactly would have constituted a non-artificial constraint? This was a multi-part experiment done in an attempt to understand how difficult it is to walk away from certain technology.
Your dismissal of her method and her difficulties shows me how little attention you paid to what she wrote, and how little you identify with the folks she’s trying to write for. 😉
I would say this write-up is not representative of what it’s like for a normal consumer to switch from an iPhone to an Android phone.
But more broadly, that’s not really what the series had been about prior to the Apple article. After all, setting up a custom VPN to block all internet traffic to the internet giants is not how a typical consumer goes about switching the tech products they use. This series was about illustrating the pervasiveness of the tech giants in our society and economy. Blocking Facebook was socially alienating. Blocking Google or Amazon broke almost every app or service in existence. But then with this Apple article, she took a left turn into just recounting the tribulations around switching phone platforms, and to make matters worse, she did a poor job of describing what that process would be like for a typical non tech-savvy consumer.
There was little to nothing in the article about how forgoing Apple products and services affects your life on a day to day basis. And I have a feeling that’s because the truth is rather boring on that front: many people like and prefer Apple products, but you can get by just fine with an Android phone and a Windows laptop.