Apple wins me over again, but it’s getting tougher

Whenever I make a big purchase—a TV, a new computer, a car, an A/V receiver—I inevitably enter a long period of internal debate, arguments and counter-arguments, pros and cons. It doesn’t matter whether I’ve set money aside for this, how sure I am that yes, I do need/want/carnally desire the thing in question. Post-purchase, I can look forward to an immediate period of regret and self-doubt, although as with all things, it fades with time.

For at least two years, I’ve pondered returning to a “laptop-first” computing approach. I haven’t done this since I went from a MacBook Pro to an iMac/MacBook Air combination in the late 2000s. At times, my iPad was my “real” portable computer, and I only took the laptop out with me when I absolutely needed to.

Desktop/laptop works, as long as you sync all your working documents through Dropbox or iCloud or what have you. But it inevitably leaves you with some things on one machine and some on the other, and you end up with a lot of things in the cloud that you suspect you don’t need to keep there. And it also makes it hard to justify having more than one machine be “the big one”: if I have a desktop, that’s the big one, and getting a MacBook Pro just wouldn’t make sense. The MacBook Pro must become the desktop to justify itself.

From summer 2025 on, I edged closer to buying a MacBook Pro with the M4 Pro CPU in it. When the M5 MacBook Pros dropped, they left me with a dilemma: wait for the M5 Pro CPU, or get a maxed-out M5 “non-Pro”? After long dithering, I settled on the latter. I knew I’d get a 14″, not a 16″ model, and the base M5 is still nearly twice as fast as my M1 Max Studio across the board in all things but GPU performance. I can “only” get 32GB of RAM, which is what the Studio has, but the truth is that I never come close to overloading that. Ditto for a mere 1TB hard drive. And, this frees the Studio to migrate into being a home server, which I haven’t had since my last Mac mini’s hard drive kicked the bucket. (Which also means the laptop can have even less on it!) I know the argument that the base MBP is “Pro in name only,” that you might as well get an Air, but if you really look at the specs, that’s not true. Besides, I love working at cafés and breweries where a nanotexture screen might really come in handy.

But one aspect in my internal arguments, my point/counterpoints, was new this time around. For the first time in a quarter-century, I wondered whether my next computer should be a Mac.

All that I wrote about last month in “If not the Mac, what?” remains weighing on my mind. The sloppy direction of the Mac’s user interface, which used to be its crown jewel. The drive for ever more services revenue leading to ever more dubious in-system promotions from Apple itself. The obsession with control in the name of security leading to Vista-like permission prompts and, in edge cases, absurd hula dances to install supposedly “unsafe” software.

The UI flubs can, and hopefully will, be turned around, though, and the other issues are more policy decisions than technical ones, and policies may change with new leadership. But they might not, and I have to reckon with that. Worse, sucking up to our current fascist administration is also a policy decision. I can’t disagree with John Gruber’s argument when he writes,

Faulting Cook for playing ball and kissing Trump’s ring (among other things) is like faulting a local business for paying into a protection racket—one in which the cops are complicit, and the whole scam exists at the behest of a crooked mayor. Moral rectitude can feel good, but not so much when the cops are burning your store to the ground. There is no authority to appeal to for help when the highest office in the country is running the protection racket.

And yet, I can’t help believe that there’s a qualitative difference between reluctantly paying for “protection” and proactively funding the new ballroom. It’s the difference between wheeling to stay on the Don’s good side and wheeling to be the Don’s new best bud. Like Gruber, I don’t believe that Tim Cook is a MAGA believer; it stands against everything that Cook appears to espouse. But that’s the whole damn point. Apple has spent decades consciously chasing a demographic which leans left of center—positioning itself as the tech of choice for artists, creators, and even environmentalists. For them to now cozy up with the far right in the name of realpolitik is perilous. Just ask Tesla, which has been going down in flames like a Cybertruck hitting a tiny pothole.

Now, again, I don’t think Apple is in danger of having most of their loyal customers stop being loyal, whether it’s over this or over Liquid Glass or over the way they treat developers or over their increasingly self-aggrandizing long-form commercials pretending to be keynotes. But they’re in danger of having their loyal customers (hello, hi) stop and think about new purchases in a way they wouldn’t have just a few years ago. That’s not a good sign.

With me, they’ve won this round. For the design elements I care about—which include that annoyingly nebulous term, “fit and finish”—Apple’s hardware is still second to none. It’s hard to even get close in the PC world, and when you do, the PCs aren’t that much cheaper. And despite all the, uh, Tahoeness of macOS Tahoe, it remains more comfortable for me than Windows 11 or Linux with current versions of KDE and Gnome. It’s a mix of the solid UX foundations that have so far survived Alan Dye’s depredations, the apps that don’t have satisfying replacements on Windows or Linux, and the relative seamlessness of the Apple ecosystem.

But the trend lines—both how surprisingly nice KDE is getting, and well, how everything Apple is getting—make me wonder if I’ll choose the same way in 2030.