The Apple ecosystem is great…
… as long as you stick with Apple’s hardware
I admire the ecosystem Apple has created for its devices over the years. It’s a joy to work with, all the small perks make your life so much easier. Opening up your MacBook, oh look, it’s unlocked because you’re wearing an Apple Watch. Trying to edit a photo, airdrop it from your phone, and your good to go. There’s so much more, but after all, it’s just a delightful way to get work done. But even the greatest ecosystem has its flaws. Let’s dig a little deeper into Apple’s greatest innovation.
Apples Masterpiece
The whole ecosystem is what hooks one onto Apple’s product long term. When you go out to buy an Apple product, most of the time, you have a specific reason for purchasing that exact device. Maybe it’s the camera setup on the iPhone 11 Pro, maybe it’s the new keyboard in the MacBooks. But after the magic of the feature you got it for becomes standard, it’s the ecosystem which keeps you with Apple’s devices over the years. It can be little things like having iMessage so you can chat with all your friends, or maybe you’ve created your perfect studio, including an iMac Pro and an iPad Pro so switching would require a considerable effort.
So for Apple, it is essential to update and improve on their most significant asset continually. Every new product, like AirPods, has to fit perfectly into its niche in the ecosystem, and it has to fulfill its purpose in that niche completely. And most of the products Apple launches do just that. They perfectly fit into the whole ecosystem. But the overlying problem is that with each new product, there comes a new price-tag.
A high price to pay for salvation
Getting into the ecosystem is expensive, especially for anybody who doesn’t own any Apple device. Entering the ecosystem will set you back around 1'200 to 1'900$. 1'900 Dollars is not just a random figure, this is the price you’ll have to pay to get a new MacBook Air and an iPhone SE if you add a pair of AirPods and an Apple Watch, you’re well on your way to shelling out about 2'000$. This definitely is a huge investment for most people. The thing that justifies this investment is said ecosystem. For 2'000 Dollars, you can get better spec’d out Windows Laptops and an equally good Android phone, but you won’t get the excellent integration. Now that’s not an easy decision, do you want to go for the better specs or the ecosystem?
Apple, however, has one advantage in this discussion. The company’s products get updated a ton. Even my old 15inch, mid-2012 MacBook Pro still runs on the latest version of macOS Catalina. As of today, June 2nd, 2020, Apple still provides updates for the first iPhone SE and the iPhone 6s. Compare this to most android phones, which get about two major updates before they are taken out of the loop. So Apple’s products have a much longer lifespan (at least if they don’t have a butterfly keyboard), which inherently leads to a better distribution of the considerable cost.
The problem child, iTunes
With macOS Catalina, Apple got rid of iTunes on their computers. Instead of one application, there are now five to cover all the aspects Apple’s media library had. Where it’s one thing to get rid of iTunes where it was a first-party application, it is an entirely different story for every other computer. Every windows user with an iPhone relies on iTunes. There are a lot of people who do not use an Apple computer. Whether that be because they can’t afford one, need windows in their work environment, or like something else better, iTunes is the program that allows them to sync their iPhones with their PC’s. At the moment, it seems that Apple doesn’t care about these users anymore. iTunes on PC is just one big mess. It is a real hassle to sync photos and docs. Either you use iCloud Drive and run into storage problems almost immediately, or you do it the “old-school” way and backup/sync manually, and you may run into the issue that it takes forever to back up your device.
I’d like to see some effort here from Apple. iTunes was such a powerful and significant program, and there are still so many people that use it on a day to day basis. To just let it slip like this does not represent the Apple experience in any way, but this is precisely what gets people to buy Apple devices. They want that seamless integration, that neat cross-device interaction, which makes working with Apple’s devices so much more satisfying.
Verdict
Apple’s ecosystem is the companies biggest treasure. It is what keeps people hooked. If you happen to have a full Apple setup, every interaction is seamless, and the whole ecosystem is almost perfect, But Apple should not forget the users who don’t have a full Apple setup.
Stay safe and stay healthy out there
Raffael
