After 1,000 papercuts, I’m about to do something I never thought I’d do. I’m dropping my iPhone, and buying an Android phone. I’ve toyed with the idea for a while, and I’ll go through some of the reasons, and also document the changes I’ll be making to my tech. I’ll need to find alternatives to iCloud services like Photos and FaceTime; and shared calendars, location, and passwords. But here’s the tough part. I’m not just dropping Apple for Google. If anything I’m even less likely to trust my private data to Google than I am Apple. This is about taking back control of my own data, and giving me the freedom to use whichever phones, computers or other devices I decide to use.
So long walled garden. It’s been a chore.
My Apple credentials
I’ve used Macs since around 2002, when our college design department had a fleet of brightly coloured iMacs. I learned to write HTML, use Photoshop, make Flash animations, and produce high quality printed material in that lab. Having grown up with the cheapest hand-me-down PC hardware, the Macs were immediately appealing to me. They had whimsical animations for no good reason, everything on screen looked fantastic, and the computer got out of the way and let me do my work. Within a few months, I’d bought myself a second hand iMac on ebay, and started upgrading it. The iMac started life with (i think) 128MB of RAM, and a 6GB Hard Drive and ran Mac OS 9. When I finished with it, it had 1GB of RAM, an 80GB Hard drive, Wi-Fi, and was running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.
A few years later, I saved up £1,200 and bought a brand new Core2Duo white flat screen iMac. I’d continue to use that iMac for around ten years, through various upgrades to the RAM and internal disk.
Around 2016, I finally needed something newer. The operating system was getting too old, and I couldn’t update some of my apps. This was a particularly poor time to be an Apple fan, with the “MacBook Escape” generation of Macs with few ports, low RAM, low capacity SSDs, and ridiculous prices to upgrade them. The worst part was although the SSDs were removable, they were proprietary, and third party options were slow to arrive, or never did.
Enter the Hackintosh
I’d already experimented with Hackintosh computers before, when I needed a couple of workstations with accessible SATA ports to hot-plug hard drives. My lack of appealing Apple options led me down this route again. This was a great time for hackintosh computers, as Macs had never been so close to generic PC hardware. I built a nice looking small black tower, with 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM, Quad core i5 processor, and NVIDIA GPU for under £1,000. It fairly closely mimicked the specs of a 2015 iMac, and lasted up to MacOS 10.15.7 Catalina. I’m still using that computer now. To replace it with a current iMac would cost at least £2,199 to have the same RAM and Storage. Yes it would be Apple Silicon, but how are the current storage and RAM options still so bad?!
I could probably comfortably run this PC on Linux for another ten years, so we’ll see if that’s something I switch to in the future. A more pressing issue is my iPhone.
iPhones
My first iPhone was a hand-me-down 3GS. Then I got a 4S when somebody in my family upgraded their yearly phone contract. A few years later I bought my first new iPhone, an iPhone 6S. I went through some hassle with that when it was part of the BatteryGate scandal, where it would randomly shut down at around 30% battery, and then Apple issued a software update to throttle the CPUs. I took the phone to an Apple store because of the random reboots, and got given a replacement phone on the spot.
That phone lasted until 2018, when I bought an iPhone XR. it was £724 for the 128GB one, and I traded in the 6S for a small discount. It has been a great phone. It had two-day battery life, was super fast, and is still running the latest version of iOS in 2024. But it is showing some age now. It feels sluggish, the battery although still getting through the day is running closer to empty by the time evening comes round.
An iPhone 15 would cost a little over what I paid for the XR, so that would be the option. £799 for 128GB.
My options
To get all my kit back up to date, I have options.
Stay with Apple
New iPhone 15: £799
New iMac: £2,199 (with ethernet, 4 ports, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD (yes, the same spec as my 8-year old hack)
Total: £2,998
Or
Move my data out of iCloud to a Synology NAS.
Keep my PC but move to Linux.
Get an Android phone. — Ha! As if I’d ever use one of those junk things.
But then I saw the Nothing phone. And more recently, the CMF phone 1 by Nothing. It started a few wheels turning, so here’s the cost for that:
Synology DS124: £140
8TB NAS disk: £170
8TB backup disk: £140
CMF Phone 1, by Nothing: £179
Total: £629
The hard part will be moving all my cloud stuff away from Apple. Once that is done, I could still use an iPhone, a Samsung Galaxy (yuck), a Windows PC (double yuck), a Mac, A Raspberry Pi, whatever. But I would no longer be tied to throwing away perfectly good hardware, just to get security updates.
The Synology arrives today, and that will be the start. I’ll get that set up and migrate my photos and media over to it. Then I can turn off iCloud photos, and drop my iCloud subs to the minimum.
After that, I’ll see if I can live with the CMF phone. There is something intangible, that I just can’t stand with other Android phones compared to iPhones. Nothing OS looks different, and I hope their attention to design will give me that feeling I’ve come to expect from my gear. (foreshadowing…)
I’ll post the process of setting up the Synology next, and see how happy I am with that as a partial iCloud replacement.
