I have been a top-tier programmer for 47 years, so I'm experienced on dozens of machines, O/S's & languages. The one platform I absolutely refuse to use is Apple's. Why?
1. Steve Jobs started the policy of charging 100% markup on all Apple products (50% for an iPhone or iMac, 50% for profit). All profit goes to a tax haven in Ireland so Apple pays NO federal corporate taxes in the United States.
2. In my 47 years working for banks & investment houses on Wall St.; digital video TV (I was part of the team that developed the original DVI digital video for PC's with Intel in the late '80s, early '90s, IPTV in mid 2000s (making fiber obsolete in much of the world), 1K HDTV, 4K & 8K UHDTV & other systems), hospitals like the Mayo Clinic (COVID sequencing), Mass General, & others; numerous AT&T/Bell Labs projects, & other corporate clients, I've seen just about every computer since the IBM/360 - yet the only computer I've NEVER seen used to develop professional commercial production systems is the MacIntosh (except sometimes in the art department). It was designed for people who wanted to use computers, but not have to understand how they worked.
3. I went to school with Andy Hertzfeld, leader of the original Mac/Lisa desktop design team. He told me horror stories about Jobs and his contempt for just about everybody, including his own most enthusiastic customers, in '91 when our Intel DVI video beat the first Mac Laptop & first Word for Windows for Best In Show. For example, at a design meeting to discuss how many buttons to have on the mouse, there were 2 camps, the 2-button camp & the 3-button camp (like the Sun early computers). At one point, Jobs jumped up & slammed his fist on the table & angrily blurted out, "You don't understand who we are designing this computer for. They are the sort of people who will have trouble telling left from right - we go with 1 button."
4. Jobs routinely lied about the capabilities of his products. Example, he claimed (truthfully) that the iPhone 4S had a full 1Ghz clock speed like its Android competitors. He also claimed (also truthfully) that the 4S got better battery life - like the older iPhone 4. He lied by omission by not telling customers that, before the phones left the factory, they were underclocked to run at 800 MHz. It's like paying more for an 8-cylinder pickup that claimed it got the same gas mileage as the 6-cylinder model, only to find out the manufacturer disconnected 2 cylinders at the factory.
5. Google makes all of the Android O/S source public through the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) so programmers can take the code as a guide and write scores of custom Android operating systems, both simpler and far more complicated than the official versions. Apple keeps its code confidential & nobody can make their Apple far more powerful & versatile than a "rooted" Android with a custom version of Android, a custom kernel, & hundreds of custom programs that require administrative (SU or SuperUser) access to the kernel). Apple's can only be jailbroken, letting you run apps you don't get from the Apple Store (and they made that illegal until the courts struck it down).
6. Rooting: Android phones are actually running on Linux kernels & you can "root" almost any Android phone to get superuser access to the kernel level, including the directory levels that are not accessible on any store-bought phone of any kind. You can run hundreds of powerful apps (go to Google Play & enter "rooted" to see lists of them). You can also delete or disable ANY application installed on the phone, including the spyware & bloatware all companies & SPs put on their phones. You can then recover that storage to fit more of your own apps. You can even bring up a Linux command box and (with all the Linux commands provided by the BusyBox rooted app) have access to command-line Linux, making your phone a Linux computer. You can back up not only your user apps/data, but also your system apps/data & the kernel - say to your PC so you can restore a bricked phone (try Titanium Pro). Another example is RCB (Root Call Blocker). When you block spam or scam numbers, both iPhone and Android blockers do a pickup/hangup process. This still lets the caller know this is a live, in-use line, which is the objective of maybe a third of all spam calls. Then they still put your number on "active number" lists to sell to third-parties as "verified" numbers. On my rooted phone, I use RCB, which is able to intercept the call before it gets to the phone circuitry and return the "out of service" signal of a dead line. This has cut my spam by at least 75%.
7. If all you want is texting, a camera, email & access to social media (which harvests all of your personal information for advertisers & political interference), ANY phone is fine, including 15-year-old flip-phones which are coming back into demand by Gen Z'ers for their simplicity.
8. Do you really need 20 megapixel cameras if all you are doing is posting to social media or sending .jpgs to friends? The sheer size of these files is vastly greater than 95% (make that 99%) want to deal with. They just eat up storage, take forever to upload & download to clouds & put a major strain on sms & email (most email clients limit the size of attachments anyway). Anything from 600x400 to 1K HD is perfectly adequate & far more practical.
8. Jobs decided at the start to sell Macs via the evangelical methodology with Jobs (who couldn't write a single line of code if he had to) as the original evangelist, creating what my associates call the iCult. Long-time chief evangelist, Apple's Guy Kawasaki, was quoted as saying "Don't worry. Be Crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test ... Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap."
[Actually, that wasn't accurate. The original "Mac" was created in the late 1970s by Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. Jobs took a tour of PARC at the time and saw the prototype, complete with overlapping windows, cascading menus, totally mouse-driven - even the trash can icon for deletion. He said at the time that he saw the future of Apple and then simply waited years until Xerox couldn't sue Apple for stealing their prototype and then built the Mac/Lisa. He even hired one of PARC's designers to work with Hertzfeld. Apple always uses outsourced companies to design their "revolutionary" new electronics. He just plays snakeoil salesman to his cult members.
Facebook
Twitter