I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated year-over-year with the inability for people to just choose privacy. I was off Facebook for many years and I remember it being largely inconvenient. Businesses would be entirely on Facebook and have no other online presence. Old friends would share their updates exclusively on Facebook. I couldn’t see it just because I didn’t want to be in bed with this one company anymore.

Yeah, I gave up on that one. I got more “social” when I wanted to push my art into the world because I was still living in a pre-2010 era where just sharing pictures was enough. (Turns out, that’s not the case.)

I was very invested in the Apple ecosystem. The iPhone was great and all but you know what really sold me on Apple? How easy it was to get my family to use it. And, then, how easy it was to have a family group to share everything with the family. I started using Mac at work, Mac at home, and I never thought anything of it.

Years passed and I had long forgotten what it was like to be outside of that convenience. Then along came Siri, Apple Intelligence, that Liquid display thing, and a whole host of changes and features that I neither asked for nor brought any real improvement to my life. While these unnecessary features kept getting shoved down my throat, I keep getting asked to pay more and more.

You want AppleCare? That costs a lot more now. Oh you need storage? Here’s some in iCloud but that’ll cost you. Don’t forget to use Apple Pay and watch your latest shows on Apple TV+ from your Apple TV set top box!

A long time ago (I don’t remember when), I saw the Murena Fairphone 5 released in the United States. I wanted it. A self-repairable phone built with some amount of ethics and a deGoogled operating system on top? Oh snap. I didn’t do it then.

I knew it would be too hard. There would be too many things that I would need to change, things I would need to retrain my family to do differently. How would I share clipboard contents from my phone to my laptop?! For any complaints I may have had about Apple, the convenience of it all outweighed everything.

Now, if you’re not locked into the Apple ecosystem, you might not understand how fully this thing can take over your life. For every core part of my life, I had an Apple product:

• Watch: For tracking workouts
• iPhone: Mostly scrolling instagram
• iPad Pro: For drawing, mostly on procreate
• Apple TV: That set top box for streaming things
• Apple HomePod: For playing music in the kitchen
• Macbook: Music, games (ha, barely), image editing, video production, etc.

For the most part, these things play very nice together and you don’t see it swallowing up your life. Need to share something to your spouse? Airdrop it. Need to get some text from your iPad to your Mac? Copy and paste across that shared clipboard. Want to use your Apple Pencil to do something on the Mac? Easy, just extend the display to your iPad.

When did the love affair with Apple end?

I really can’t say for sure what did it for me. Maybe it was the Homepod not working 100% of the time. Maybe it was the last couple of years of OS updates that didn’t actually seem to improve much of anything but added features no one really needs. Maybe it’s the hyper fixation of every big tech company on AI right now and seeing how it’s impacting real people.

Maybe it was just past time to reclaim my right to privacy.

I’m not the “live off the grid in an underground bunker” type. I’m more of the, “it should be my choice if you get to track me and have my data” type of person. And that’s where things have gotten weird for me. If I download your app to, say, buy a cup of coffee – you don’t need to know the details of my phone, location, etc. You need to sell me a cup of coffee and move on.

I’m more the kind of person that I’m okay with the idea of having cameras on my property but I don’t want those cameras sending all my videos to the cloud for some other company to process or hand over to the authorities without a warrant. I want the camera to record to a local server and notify me and that’s it.

I get that it’s convenient to have these videos uploaded and processed elsewhere. You don’t need to run server equipment in your house and blah, blah, blah. Is that the world we really want to live in? A world where there are cameras monitoring you everywhere which are sending recordings somewhere you have no control? It’s exhausting to think about.

When the Murena Fairphone 6 came across my radar, I thought on it for a while and finally made the jump a few weeks ago and started sending all my Apple products away. It’s not a 100% de-Apple-ing of my life. My Macbook was vastly superior to my spouse’s, so it was passed down the line. Her old one? It’ll be the “family” computer for a little bit. My phone and watch? Sent back for Apple credit which will be used to pay for the Apple One subscription for a while. The Apple TV boxes? They’ll continue to provide. (I tried a roku device for about 30 minutes but it’s getting sent back after realizing that there’s no way to turn off the home screen ads… on a device that I paid for.)

A change like this isn’t something that just happens overnight unfortunately.

The Experience So Far

It’s been a couple weeks and I don’t miss the old experience. My new phone takes pretty good pictures, runs the apps I need, and provides a certain sense of freedom every time I look at that “advanced privacy” screen that shows all the trackers that have been blocked.

I can admit, though, that I’ve given up a lot of convenience for that feeling.

I’ve had to force my immediate family to start using Signal for our communications to keep them end-to-end encrypted. I had to spend hours migrating photos out of iCloud to my local device and now they are backed up in Proton Drive. Instead of a shared calendar with iCal, we now have a calendar in Proton. A shared family album? Again, Proton.

If you’re keeping score, you’ll notice that I still have to rely on cloud services. I’m fortunate enough to have been paying for a Proton Family plan for the last year or two in order to host my email and provide VPNs for the whole family. It comes with a number of other services which made it a little easier to facilitate this switch.

That’s my practical advice to anyone wanting to make the switch: have a plan because your workflows are going to change. It was a little easier for me because I already had Proton, my gaming system was previously switched from running Microsoft Windows (eww) to running Bazzite OS (a linux distribution I’ll talk about some other time) and (probably most importantly) I had disposable income saved through the year to throw at the problem.

I had to make a number of adjustments:

• Instead of Affinity Publisher on MacOS, I’m using Scribus on Linux for page layout and printing.
• Instead of Airdrop, I found LocalSend which works across multiple platforms.
• Instead of an iPad running Procreate, I’ve adopted an XP Pen display tablet with Krita on Linux.
• Photo editing? I’ll probably try Gimp on Linux and see how that goes.
• Social media? I deactivated my instagram account and choose to login to facebook only from my computer periodically.
• Apple card? I switched back to my bank card.
• Apple subscriptions? I moved my default payment to Paypal and linked that to my bank card as well.
• Apple watch? Look at Garmin if you want a good fitness tracker.
• Apple music? I can still use it but I’m using Youtube Music (because we were already paying for Youtube premium anyways).

And even with all of this, I’m still only 95% disconnected from Apple. That last 5%? Well, it might never happen but I’ll keep you posted if it does.

So would I recommend making the change?

I believe it’s time for everyone to take control and remind these companies that they only exist because we give them money. We don’t need to be tracked, our data doesn’t need constant collection, and it shouldn’t be so punishing to leave an ecosystem.

In short, yes. If you’re at all feeling like I was, make the change. Just pull off that band-aid and move forward. It’ll hurt a little, but you’ll get through to the other side feeling pretty good.

Leaving Apple, in particular, can be a difficult proposition and seeing how daunting the task actually is – I’ve soured a lot on the company as a whole. While I can applaud how they’ve made a series of products that just work, the fact that you can’t make it work without using their limited set of hardware is… not okay. You can buy a Mac laptop – arguably, the best piece of hardware on the market, but then you can’t run any other operating system on it. (I am aware of Asahi Linux, but it’s a feat of reverse engineering that is still very much in progress – not complete.)

And that hardware? It’s not repairable. You can’t upgrade it. And, eventually, you’ll be forced to apply an upgrade that maybe you didn’t need… like Liquid Glass or whatever they called that garbage.

Call me bitter if you want, but for the next decade I want to focus on having more control again. I want devices that I can repair myself and upgrade as I see fit. Devices that run the operating system I want with software that supports that operating system. I don’t need you to bake an AI agent into every aspect of my life automatically. Yet, I want the option to use one as I see appropriate to my life.

I want the option to remove it when I don’t need that feature anymore.

A quick word about my art…

I am still making art though my production has slowed down. I’m juggling a lot of different things right now and I just added “learn new applications for art production” to my list. Either way, I’ll continue to make art and show it here in my blog posts. I’ll eventually reorganize my website and have a better portfolio page. And, hey, I still have an Etsy shop that you can visit and support my work should you feel so inclined.

Happy holidays and I’ll see you again in 2026.

– JL