While it is marked up a bit for the brand, Apple kit is like a Volkswagen car - you do pay a little more for the brand and there's no Kia/Dacia option, but you're also getting an excellent piece of engineering. Windows laptops for instance as well-built and well-specced as the Macbooks come in at a similar price - the reason people think those are expensive is that there isn't a 400 quid value option at Tesco. iPhones and iPads are similar - they're excellent hardware, priced not much above a similar spec premium Android phone, there just isn't a £200 budget option.
I'm not married to Apple (I bounce back and forth between them and Windows/Android as I see fit) but do prefer premium devices, and at the moment I'm finding the Apple options to be just a little bit better at a not dissimilar price. Meanwhile the biggest piece of junk I've bought recently is a Dell XPS 13 laptop (previous generation, I believe they've improved it) - just inferior to a Macbook Air in near enough every way despite having a similar price point. Bad build quality, bad camera, low battery life, bad screen - just junk.
I object to the way that Apple makes it nigh-on impossible to repair or repurpose their devices. A typical mid-range Windows laptop can have its screen replaced reasonably easily (I have a colleague at work who has done several) and even if it doesn't have an
easy way to get inside (one of my personal laptops requires the removal of about 20 small screws) they can mostly have their memory and storage, and in some cases things like WiFi upgraded on your kitchen table. As a non-Windows user, most Windows laptops can easily have Linux installed (though there are a few which are tricky apparently) but it can take
many months or even years for people to "crack" Apple devices sufficiently that they will run a Linux, and even longer to enable things like graphics acceleration.
A typical Apple laptop - which I have to agree is gorgeous to look at and works really well - is stuck with whatever hardware you ordered at time of purchase. 8GB RAM not quite enough three years down the line because you couldn't afford £200 to step up from 8GB to 16GB at the time (current price for upgrading a £999 M1 Macbook Air)? Tough. Even if you can get inside, there is probably no socket; the RAM is soldered on to the board, or in the case of the ARM-based machines, physically attached to the CPU package. SSD dies or you simply need to upgrade because you couldn't afford £200 to step up from 256GB to 512GB? Well yes, maybe you can get inside but woe betide you put a generic SSD in the place of Apple's approved model - for example some years ago it was discovered that with one model of iMac, if you dared replace the internal HDD with a non-Apple spare, the machine would notice and would
ramp the cooling fans up to maximum permanently. It turned out that the HDD manufacturers had written "Apple specific" firmware which changed the way the temperature sensor worked, and that drives with this firmware were not on sale to the general public. Bear in mind that a full 16GB of generic DDR5 laptop memory retails for about £50 today, or £70 - £80 for a faster stick, and a fast ~500GB NVMe SSD would only set you back about £70.
And a particular gripe, working in a place where people bring their laptops in to connect to our systems, it's settled down now, but there was a period where Apple seemingly changed the external monitor socket with every generation of laptop. I have dozens of different adapters! We saw this coming when the iMac was released nearly 25 years ago. Without warning, and without any kind of alternative, Apple ditched floppy discs and both the Apple Desktop Bus and SCSI in favour of a CD reader, USB (and USB 1 at that) and IDE, meaning that people who had invested thousands in equipment which used those connections (everything from keyboards, mice and modems to hugely expensive external hard drives, CD writers, scanners, printers and suchlike) could not use them (immediately - third parties came out with adapters before very long) with the new systems, and ended up buying new. It wasn't that the move to USB and IDE was a poor move (it absolutely wasn't), it was the way that users with older kit were effectively abandoned, a situation which hit my wife many years later when we discovered that her MacMini - one of the first with an Intel processor - was abandoned by Apple (in terms of OS updates and upgrades) after just five years. Crumbs, the thing still works today, eighteen years after we bought it, but it is so out of date that it's only really much use for the esoteric functions of the Epson scanner software and probably isn't safe to be allowed on to the big, bad internet.
The situation is even worse with phones. I realise that there is some deal going through at the moment which means that Apple is going to be forced (in Europe) to allow third-parties to replace things like screens and batteries, but they will still have to buy them via Apple and register them with Apple because otherwise - as at the moment - the phone will recognise the "foreign" part and
refuse to use it. Apple charges around £280 to replace the screen on an iPhone 12. It doesn't have to be this way. The
Fairphone 4 is cheaper than many iPhones and has internals that are entirely user-accessible. It is also built in a factory which treats its workers well and uses some Fairtrade and recycled materials. The battery is not glued-in and can easily be replaced for €30, and a user with a modicum of dexterity with a screwdriver could replace the screen for €80, the rear camera assembly for €80, the front camera for €30, the earpiece for €15, the USB socket for €15 and so on and so on. They have also been fairly open about their version of Android, so that it has been possible almost since the phone was launched to replace its stock OS with one of the "de Google-ified" replacements such as
LineageOS. Ok, so the FP4 isn't as svelte as the iPhones, but if I had that amount of money to spend on a phone (I don't), I know which I would be going for. Instead I'm stuck looking to replace my 9-year-old Moto G, probably with something second-hand but which can take LineageOS. The danger is not knowing how good the battery is, and as very few phones (obviously not just Apple) have easily-replaceable batteries, I might have to be sending a new-to-me phone off for battery replacement sooner rather than later!
Apologies for that. I have a good line in rants about that sort of thing and could probably go on all afternoon.
