I am in the Apple ecosystem. Quite thoroughly, actually.

My phone is an iPhone 15. The computer sitting on my desk is an M4 Mac mini. There is an Apple Watch SE 3 on my wrist, and when I want the rest of the world to shut up for a bit, I put in my AirPods Pro 3.

I use Apple Music. Most of my everyday personal computing happens on macOS or iOS. If you emptied my pockets onto a table and then looked at my desk, you would be able to make a reasonably confident guess about which company's quarterly earnings I am accidentally contributing to.

Broadly speaking, I am happy with that.

I am not completely happy with every device I own. The obvious example is my iPhone 15. It is a good phone and I have no particular desire to stop using it, but I really wish it had a 120 Hz display. Apple eventually brought ProMotion up to 120 Hz to the regular iPhone 17, which is exactly the sort of improvement I would like on mine. Sixty hertz is fine in the literal sense that the phone works, but at this price I would rather have the smoother display.

That is about as dramatic as my dissatisfaction gets. I do not need to sell the phone, swear off iOS and write a 4,000-word Medium post about escaping Apple's prison because one specification annoys me.

It is a phone. I like it, with an asterisk.

Technology discourse sometimes seems completely incapable of accepting something that mundane.

The OS Wars Are Stupid

I have never really understood the amount of personal identity people attach to operating systems.

Mention that you use macOS and somebody will inevitably explain why Linux is better. Say you use an iPhone and somebody appears to tell you that Android lets you install APKs, apparently on the assumption that you bought a £799 phone without first learning that Android exists. Windows discussions somehow become arguments about gaming, enterprise software, telemetry, Linux market share and what Microsoft did to the Start menu fifteen years ago.

I have preferences. Some of them are fairly strong. I still think the whole tribal aspect of it is stupid.

The stereotypes are stupid too.

Mac users are not all technically illiterate people who bought a laptop because the aluminium looked nice. Linux users do not all spend every evening compiling kernels because they enjoy suffering. Android users are not all carrying enormous plastic phones covered in widgets, and Windows users are not all people who have simply failed to discover a better operating system.

The stereotype that particularly amuses me is the idea that choosing a Mac means you must not understand computers very well. I am a software developer. I use Unix-like systems constantly, run servers, work with C and C++, mess around with networking and self-host software for fun. I also use a Mac because I like macOS.

Macs are also hardly unusual development machines. In the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, around a third of professional developers reported using macOS for work. That does not mean a literal majority of all software is written on Macs, because there is no sensible way to support a claim that broad, but an enormous amount of software is developed on macOS every day.

That includes far more than software which only runs on Apple devices. Web applications, backend services, cross-platform desktop software, command-line tools, games and open-source projects are all routinely developed from Macs. If you have spent any meaningful amount of time using modern software, you have almost certainly used plenty of things whose developers were sitting in front of macOS while they wrote them.

And if you develop for Apple's platforms specifically, the point becomes even more obvious. Xcode runs on macOS. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Vision Pro applications are overwhelmingly going through Macs somewhere in their development process because Apple's own toolchain requires it.

The idea that Macs are somehow decorative computers for people who do not know what a terminal is starts looking particularly silly once you remember how much professional software development happens on them.

People choose operating systems for thousands of overlapping reasons: software availability, accessibility, hardware, cost, work requirements, games, familiarity, battery life, development tooling, compatibility with other devices or simply because they prefer how something feels. Trying to reduce all of that to "Mac users are X" or "Linux users are Y" does not tell you anything useful about the person using the computer.

It mostly tells you that somebody has spent too much time arguing about computers on the internet.

I Still Hate Windows

Being tired of OS wars does not mean I have reached some enlightened state where I love every operating system equally.

I do not like Windows.

I will use it if I have to. I used Windows for years and I know my way around it perfectly well. If somebody put a Windows machine in front of me tomorrow and told me I needed it for a particular piece of software, I would not dissolve on contact with the Start menu. I had to use it for college, for example.

I would just rather use something else.

Modern Windows often feels bloated and pushy to me. There is too much going on that I did not ask for, too much encouragement towards Microsoft services and too many moments where the operating system seems unusually interested in getting my attention. I do not particularly want recommendations in my Start menu or another prompt encouraging me to use whichever Microsoft product is currently receiving attention.

I want the operating system to operate the computer and otherwise leave me alone.

Other people clearly feel differently, and that is fine. Windows supports an enormous amount of software and hardware, and for gaming in particular it remains difficult to avoid. None of that changes the fact that I personally dislike using it.

That dislike also does not require me to believe Windows users are idiots. I can hate the thing without starting a religion about it.

Android Was Fine. I Just Did Not Love the Setup.

I feel very differently about Android, because I actually like Android.

There are plenty of things it does well and quite a few things I wish Apple would copy. I like the amount of hardware choice, I like how flexible the platform can be and I like that choosing Android does not automatically mean choosing one manufacturer's entire product stack.

I have also used Android full time before, rather than forming my opinion from somebody else's Samsung phone in 2014.

What eventually bothered me was how disjointed my setup felt.

The phone might come from one manufacturer, most of the underlying platform and services from Google, accessories from somebody else and the desktop from somewhere else again. Every individual part could work perfectly well, but I never felt like the whole thing belonged together.

That is not inherently a flaw. For plenty of people it is the appeal. You can replace individual parts without buying into the rest of one company's catalogue, mix manufacturers and generally choose the combination that suits you.

I discovered that I care more about integration than I thought I did.

Once I had an iPhone and a Mac in regular use, the small bits of Continuity started adding up. Copying something on my phone and pasting it on the Mac is boring until you go back to a setup where you cannot do it. AirPods moving between devices, messages appearing where I need them, AirDrop and the general lack of setup involved are not individually reasons to spend hundreds of pounds changing platform.

Together, they make my computers nicer to use.

That matters more to me than having the theoretically most flexible combination of hardware.

Linux Is Fantastic. It Still Does Not Fit My Workflow.

Linux is the awkward one in all of this because I genuinely love it.

I use Linux. I run it on other machines, I've shoved it onto my Wii U. I have used multiple distributions over the years and my current tastes include NixOS, which should probably establish that I am not avoiding Linux because opening a terminal frightened me.

For servers and development, Linux is fantastic. The amount of control available is difficult to match, the tooling is excellent and there is something deeply satisfying about being able to build a system around exactly what you want rather than what a vendor decided you should want.

I just do not want it as my main desktop at the moment.

Some of the applications and integrations I use every day fit macOS better. I can reproduce parts of my workflow on Linux, sometimes with considerably more control, but the overall result is less convenient for me. I have already spent enough of my life making computers do interesting things; I do not particularly need my main computer to become another ongoing project unless I am in the mood for one.

That is not Linux failing. It is an operating system not fitting one person's current workflow particularly well.

I wish more OS discussions could stop there.

I Like macOS Because I Mostly Forget About It

The M4 Mac mini is probably the clearest explanation for why I ended up this far into Apple's ecosystem.

I really like this computer.

It is small, quiet, absurdly fast for the amount of desk space it occupies and, most importantly, I do not spend much time thinking about it. I sit down, open whatever I am working on and get on with it.

That is more or less what I want from my main computer, and development is a large part of what I use it for.

macOS sits in a particularly useful place for me there. Underneath the Apple interface is a Unix environment, so most of the tooling I expect is either there already or easy to install. I can use shells, compilers, package managers, Git, SSH, containers and the rest of the stuff I spend my time around without feeling like I have switched into a completely different universe from the Linux machines I deploy things onto.

At the same time, I still get the desktop software and Apple integrations that make Linux less convenient for my particular workflow.

There is a reason Macs are so common in software development. They are not the only good development machines and I would never pretend they are, but "Unix workstation that can also run Photoshop, Xcode, the full Apple ecosystem and a pile of mainstream commercial software" is a pretty useful combination.

There are absolutely things about macOS that annoy me. Window management has historically been weird, Apple occasionally makes interface decisions that appear to have arrived from another planet and the company's approach to user control can become irritating very quickly when you run into one of the places where it has decided you should not be allowed to do something.

I still prefer using it.

That preference is not a claim that macOS wins some global operating-system benchmark. I would choose Linux for several things before I chose macOS. Windows remains vastly more practical for a lot of games. None of that makes the Mac mini worse at being the computer I actually want sitting on my desk.

The Ecosystem Happened Gradually

I did not sit down one morning and decide to transfer my entire technological existence to Cupertino.

Things accumulated.

I bought an iPhone because I wanted an iPhone. I bought an Apple Watch because I already had the phone it was designed to work with and was annoyed with how fiddly my Fitbit was. I used my AirPods 4 every day for nearly twenty months, wanted better noise cancellation, and eventually replaced them with AirPods Pro 3.

Once enough of those devices are around you, Apple's ecosystem stops being a marketing diagram and starts being a collection of small things you use without thinking about them.

My Watch belongs with my phone. My AirPods know about my other devices. The iPhone and Mac share enough information that they feel like computers belonging to the same person rather than two unrelated machines that happen to be on the same desk.

I know other ecosystems can reproduce many of those features. That is not really what I care about. I care that the setup I already own works well and requires very little effort from me.

This is also the bit where somebody normally says the words "walled garden" as though I have somehow owned this many Apple products without noticing.

I have noticed.

Apple Does Plenty of Things I Do Not Like

There are some very legitimate criticisms of Apple, and owning its products does not obligate me to pretend otherwise.

The pricing is an obvious one. Apple makes very good hardware, but some of its upgrade prices are ridiculous. RAM and storage do not become mystically more expensive because they are installed inside a silver box in Cupertino. There is a point where "premium pricing" stops being a useful explanation and it is fair to call it price gouging.

Apple's control over its hardware can create uglier problems too.

My old iPad Air 2 ended up caught by Activation Lock because it was attached to an old Apple Account whose password I had forgotten.

The iPad was mine. The account was mine. Nobody had stolen anything.

The hardware itself was still perfectly capable of working, but that became largely irrelevant because I could no longer satisfy the account check required by Apple's servers. In practical terms, I had a functional piece of hardware I could no longer use.

I understand why Activation Lock exists. Making a stolen iPhone difficult to wipe and resell is obviously useful, and I would rather somebody stealing my current phone did not immediately gain a perfectly reusable device.

The problem is that the same mechanism can catch legitimate old hardware. Apple has account-recovery and Activation Lock support processes, including a route involving proof of purchase, but old devices are exactly the sort of things where people may no longer have an original receipt or access to an account they created many years earlier.

When that happens, a device with perfectly usable hardware can become e-waste because its ownership state cannot be resolved to Apple's satisfaction.

That happened to my iPad. I do not find the outcome particularly defensible.

Security matters. So does the fact that we manufacture expensive computers out of finite materials and should probably avoid turning them into bricks while they still work.

I Can Like Apple Without Becoming an Apple Sheep™

This is where the usual OS-war framing falls apart for me.

I spend quite a lot of time working on open software and decentralised systems. I run my own AT Protocol PDS. The entire reason I find atproto interesting is that I like user-owned identity, portable data and systems where one application does not permanently own everything you have put into it.

Apple is not exactly the obvious corporate mascot for that worldview.

I disagree with parts of its platform policy. I dislike its pricing in several areas. I think Activation Lock can create unnecessary e-waste. There are things about iOS that I would happily replace with Android's approach, and there are places where macOS gives me less control than Linux.

I still like using Apple products.

I do not see why I should have to choose between those positions.

Using a product is not an endorsement of every decision made by the company that manufactured it. If that were the standard, nobody would be allowed to own anything more complicated than a spoon.

The same applies in the other direction. Somebody can prefer Linux while admitting that Windows handles some software better. Somebody can love Android while thinking a particular Pixel update is terrible. Somebody can use Windows every day while being furious with Microsoft.

That is normal.

The strange bit is pretending your operating-system choice has to come with a complete ideological package.

I Am Not Buying Four Specification Sheets

One reason these arguments become so tedious is that people often compare individual devices in isolation when that is not how I use them.

Yes, there are Android phones with hardware features my iPhone 15 does not have. I would quite like the 120 Hz display on the iPhone 17.

There are desktop PCs that will absolutely destroy my Mac mini in particular benchmarks. There are watches with much more advanced fitness features than my Apple Watch SE 3 and headphones aimed at people with considerably more sophisticated audio requirements than mine.

I do not doubt any of that.

I am also not choosing a phone, computer, watch and pair of earphones as four completely independent specification sheets. They form the setup I use every day, so how they work together matters.

That does not automatically make Apple's option better. It makes integration one of the things I value when deciding what "better" means for me.

Someone else may care far more about repairability, gaming performance, custom ROMs, upgradeable hardware, professional software that only exists on Windows or the ability to change every component of their desktop environment.

They should buy accordingly.

The entire point is that there is no universal answer hiding underneath all of this.

They Are Computers, Not Football Clubs

That is really why I find the OS "wars" so tedious.

I dislike Windows. Someone else loving Windows does not inconvenience me.

I like Android but do not particularly want to go back to using it full time. Someone else buying a Pixel does not require me to explain why my iPhone is superior.

I think Linux is fantastic and do not currently use it as my primary desktop. This has not caused the Linux kernel to revoke my membership.

And I like macOS enough that I bought another Mac when it came time to replace my previous one.

None of these preferences need defending as universal truths.

OS stereotypes are stupid because real people do not fit neatly into them. I use Apple products, Linux systems, open protocols and self-hosted software. I dislike Windows while continuing to acknowledge that sometimes it is simply the correct tool for something. I can complain about Apple's restrictions in one paragraph and praise its integration in the next without having contradicted myself.

The computer is supposed to serve the person using it, not provide them with a faction to join.

For me, at the moment, that means an iPhone 15, an M4 Mac mini, an Apple Watch SE 3 and AirPods Pro 3.

I have complaints about all sorts of things Apple does, and I expect I will continue having them. If Apple charges a stupid amount of money for something, I will say so. If it makes a bad software decision, I will complain about it. I am certainly not going to pretend Activation Lock turning my old iPad into a brick became environmentally fine because I happen to like my Mac.

I am still happy with the ecosystem overall.

That is the entire position.

The OS wars can carry on without me.