I completely cut Apple out of my life – it was devastating

“I have two MacBook Airs, one for personal use and one supplied by my work. I have an iPhone that I nicknamed ‘tech appendage.’ My husband and I have a shared iPad 2 that I use at the gym and that we rely on to keep our 1-year-old daughter happy on flights and long car rides,” Kashmir Hill writes for Gizmodo. “Apple is my gateway to almost all things digital. I am physically touching an Apple device for the majority of any given day. Being asked to remove Apple from my life was like being asked to remove a part of my body that was incredibly useful but that I could live without, like a finger or an eyeball.”
“Gizmodo editors were not sympathetic to my reliance on Apple, however, and insisted I include the company in my experiment to live without the tech giants,” Hill writes. “So I cut the ‘tech appendage’ off this week—and damn, it hurts.”
“I immediately run into a pretty big problem: What phone am I going to use? I can, of course, use an Android phone, but I’ll soon be blocking all the tech giants at once, so I’d rather get a phone I can use for the last two weeks of the experiment. Unfortunately, the smartphone market is currently a duopoly. It’s basically impossible to get a smartphone that is not part of the Android or Apple ecosystems,” Hill writes. “I do have a computer, one that I can use for the final two weeks of the experiment: a Librem 13, made by a company called Purism that is fiercely opposed to the tech giants, avoiding them like the plague in a self-proclaimed ‘liberation effort.’ The bulk of my job can be done online, use a browser and some browser-based apps. I can also use it to make calls, video chat, and send texts over messaging apps like Signal. So a laptop is all I really need to get by— theoretically, at least.”
Hill writes, “My only choice at Target for a non-Apple, non-Google phone is the Nokia 3310, a device originally from the early aughts that was re-released in 2017—almost, I think, as a joke…”
The hijinks continue unabated here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good Jobs, the whole thing sounds like Hell on Earth, especially to us, as we’re certainly among the very last people on the planet who can even imagine a life not thoroughly steeped in, much less devoid of, Apple — and very happily so!