Leaving Apple Island

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine, Sahil, blogged about making the switch from Apple to the Google ecosystem. I haven’t made the jump yet, but I’m on the same trajectory. When I tell people about it, the first question is “why?”

My first memory of an Apple computer was in the early 1980s when a family friend in Chicago had an Apple II and I was mesmerized by it. That green monochrome screen seemed so magical to me. Then for the next 20 years I used Apple computers on and off but was mainly an IBM PC guy.  In 2003, I bought the “lampshade” iMac and started to get hooked into the Apple ecosystem with the iPod, iPod Shuffle and iTunes in 2004. The big move came in 2005 when I bought a MacBook Pro as my “daily driver” and completely ditched the Microsoft clusterf$#% that was Windows.

When the iPhone was announced in January 2007, I knew I had to have it and waited till June when they launched it. By October of that year, I got rid of my BlackBerry and switched to the iPhone. Over the years, I bought more Apple products and slowly accumulated what I call “technical debt.”  As of today, I own the following:

• iPhone 6
• iMac
• MacBook
• iPad Mini
• 2 – Apple TVs

Some things just didn’t work as advertised but I was too entrenched in the Apple ecosystem to leave. Case in point, some of the torrent video files I download are in the .mkv container format which you cannot natively play via iTunes and thus can’t steam to an AppleTV. So I was converting (the technical term is transcoding) all those files to an .mp4 format which iTunes could understand. I soon realized I was spending too much time making it all work.

I also noticed that many of the apps I used on my iPhone were by Google and I just loved the software simplicity of Google. So one by one, I moved everything over to Google and currently just using the iPhone 6 for it’s hardware.

• Email -> Inbox by Gmail
• iTunes/Music -> Google Play Music
• Photos -> Google Photos
• Calendar/iCal -> Google Calendar
• Notes -> Google Keep
• Safari -> Google Chrome
• iCloud Drive -> Google Drive
• Podcast -> Overcast (non-Google app, but Google is planning to release an update to Google Play Music that will play podcasts)

For streaming video content to my TVs I’m using Plex Media Server on my iMac. And my Sony TVs run Android, so I’m running Plex as an Android app on the TV. Now, I no longer have to convert the files and can natively play any file and stream it to my TV without all that extra work. As of now, I’ve stopped using my Apple TVs.

The first device I will switch out is the iPhone, the OnePlus 5 was just announced but really I’m waiting for the Pixel 2 from Google. Then over time I will switch my iMac and MacBook to Windows 10 based machines and the iPad Mini will get replaced with a Google Pixel C.

When I first started using Apple products I was mesmerized and felt I had reached paradise island. However, after years of being loyal to Apple it’s time to leave the island.