I made the switch to the Apple ecosystem a few years ago. It started with a MacBook – a switch I’d been publicly wanting to make for years and years, as an in-joke among my friends and a public joke on TheServerSide.com, and then I got a job where the MacBook was standard gear.
I was thrilled, and while I’ve switched back and forth since then (I used Fedora as my daily driver for a while in the middle there, and even used … Windows for a bit), my path has been clear: OSX is the most comfortable desktop environment for me!
I then got an iPad; it replaced my beloved Surface (which had replaced a Kindle) as a working tablet. Then came the iPhone, and the Apple Watch. I don’t have Airpods, but I would rather have traditional headphones anyway – and there’s no way I’m going to even think about spending the money on the Apple headphones.
(Wireless headphones… nah. I use wired headphones, because when I’m wearing headphones, I’m doing music, and wireless headphones add latency.)
This morning, I needed to figure out a route to an appointment, and so I cranked up the OSX Maps app… found my route (using the same basic interface as I have on my iOS device), and bingo, everything had it.
I feel vaguely like a cyborg, with my devices working with and for me, as opposed to just being passive tools.
And yes, I know, it’s no big deal, really: it’s just effective user experience, something the industry should be good at creating already (and it’s getting better all the time). In the end, it’s just programs working together, with Apple making a specific point out of doing it well because they have a singular ecosystem.
Google does it too, after all, and so does Microsoft; they just have a much wider hardware and software ecosystem to deal with, so it’s a lot harder to make it happen as seamlessly as Apple does.
I just experienced the seamless interaction between my devices this morning, in a positive way, and for some reason it stuck out to me how convenient and awesome it all is, when it’s not thrown in your face all the time.
We live in a wonderful world. Now we just need to figure out how to act wonderfully to each other.