I would like to play devil's advocate based on my experience. My wife and daughter had iPhones way before I got one in 2021. They got them in 2019. My wife is still rocking her initially purchased i Phone 11. I was Android hold out until a year ago. I bought a 13 pro for myself. Honestly, being an android user for probably 10 years prior was not an easy move to make. However, I finally got the hang of things. I found it was easier to communicate with my immediate family when I am on the road. a quick face time call here and there makes up for the time I am not there in front of them. Honestly, it just works. I find some things more annoying like cache clearing or cycling an app that is stuck. OTHO, I like being able to use Apple Pay when I'm checking out at places.
This was not our first foray with Apple. Many years ago in 2008, we bought an iPod in which I loaded up a bunch of songs for when my daughter was baby. It ran for years every night with classical music playing to help her fall asleep. It finally crapped out in 2019 after pretty much non stop use between home and travel. When my daughter was little again, maybe 2010/11 the initial crazy of using a tablet to assist in learning became a thing. I called one of my really savy computer friends about what to get her. He said (at the time) get an i Pad. When I saw the cost I was like Holy _____!!! I said i would not be able to afford it. However, I looked around and the local micro center had refurb tablets. I called him back and he said it will work for you. It was like an Ipad 2 with 16 GB of storage for just over $200! She used it regularly with some educational apps. She watched videos of her fav movies and what not. There was a point in which I thought it had expired. It would not charge or turn on. She was older and lost interest.
One day in early 2021, I had to go to Best Buy for something. My wife and my daughter tagged along. While I was looking at laptops, my daughter just went over to the Apple section. She started playing with an ipad. Then she tells my wife that she remembers how fun her tablet was to use. She wished her old worked again. They had some apps on the one of the i Pads. She started messing around with them. By that time, I didn't find what I was looking for. so I found them just playing with the iPads on display. Of course, my daughter has fine tastes. She messed around with the Pro model the most since it had the pencil and the fancy apps. My wife pulls me to the side and says hey it's the more expensive than the other models but it also seems to have everything. She pulls a power move and goes you know how long her last one went. I said OK. My wife got a bonus at work. We used it to buy our daughter a new iPad Pro. Bonus fact, my daughter got excited in the store about the purchase. She used her own money to buy the Apple pencil as her own thing. To this day, my daughter is always using her tablet. Doesn't matter home or away, she always is using it for drawing, writing, watching videos, texting her friends.
Another Bonus fact, I wound up resurrecting her iPad 2. Turned out it had the battery thermal trip. A number of you tube videos showed the use of a heat source to effective reset the battery. I have several different heat sources in the work shop. Guess what. I took a heat gun to that baby. The i Pad came back to life. Handed it back to my daughter and got a big hug in return.
Move along to June of this year. I started a new job. The company put me up at a hotel near a mall for the week to for on boarding with the company. One night I took a walk around the mall, they had an Apple store. Played around with the different tablets. a few months prior was toying with the idea. Went back to the room, talked to the wife for awhile about things. She said if you want it get it. Just put it on the Apple card. I said OK. I bought myself an ipad for the road. I use it all the time. It's great for watching videos. I have the same keyboard set my daughter has. I type out notes which syncs to my phone. So while on the job site, I can reference the notes with ease of my phone. It find it funny that I text from the iPad when someone get ahold of me as well as phone calls. My wife and I fact time each other as I can share screens when we need to discuss matters while I'm on the road.
Prior to this i Pad. I had 2 tablets Fire7 HD and Fire 10 HD. I actually really liked my 7 HD. It was a good size and sturdy. The main issue with it was the fact you needed to essentially a series of programs to run google services on it to make it useful. I found Amazon's eco system pretty bleh to say the least. I really felt it was geared to Amazon and Amazon only. you watch and stream Amazon . You buy from Amazon. So forth and so on. I think my 7HD is from 2016. However, the google service install made it more usable. Come to 2020, there was a sale on Fire tablets. I said OK. She wanted to get an 8 and her 7HD was getting long in the tooth. I said I would get a 10 as it would be nice to have a larger screen. Also the 10's got an update in cpu and ram. She ordered them. Santa stacked them under the tree. My daughter's 10 HD died about 4 months in. It kept having a constant resetting and rebooting issue. She went back to using her 7 HD that we got her a few prior when we got our 7 HDs. My wife liked her 8 as it was the same size for the most part for her book reading and entertainment needs. I got my 10 HD, totally not impressed. I felt it was really cheap. It flexed easily. Amazon blocked the google side loading for a bit. Basically I just put it in the closet to forget about it. Some may say an Fire tablet is not a good experience for the most part. I would tend to agree. I would say the same thing. However, I think you get what you pay for.
Right now, I am typing this out on a Lenovo laptop. My last Lenovo laptop. It has Windows 11 15.6 inch screen with touch on a 11th gen i7 mobile CPU. The memory is 16 GB of soldered on RAM. I think the 1 TB hard drive is upgradable though. I got this new in February. Our other Lenovo was 14 inch was an i5 with16 gigs which I upgraded. and the HDD was 5400 spinner to SSD 500 GB model. We bought it early 2015. It was working well. My wife wanted something with a little bigger of a screen when she was using it to look up things. I found this model at Microcenter. I thought the specs where good. it met my wife requirements. I figured it should last at least the same amount of time as the other laptop. I prepped the older laptop for retirement duty for our trailer. When we were camping and needed a laptop for something . It was there. Office 365 just had to run a quick update once a month. This laptop now is another story. It was pricy with the extra warranty coverage from Lenovo.
What made me re think my future purchases with Lenovo is really build quality. It looked and felt great in the store. After several months of ownership, the hinge broke when I simply opened the laptop. This in turn, broke the touch screen which is part of the display. The mount is part of the display. The other hinge doesn't seem to feel any better. So I contact Lenovo, you know what they say. Sorry that your laptop broke but that is considered customer induced damage. We can fix it for you for $ X amount. If you would like to continue, let us know. I was like "how could a poor design be a customer's fault?" The answer was it just is. So I spent 900 for the laptop on sale. Another $140 for the 3 additional years of protection. I'm at $1,040 plus taxes. On top of this, Windows 11 on this i7-1165G7 doesn't feel smooth. My old work laptop which I still have was an 10th gen HP with 16 GB and ran Windows 10 pro. Felt more responsive and smoother than this laptop.
What bothered me the most was the fact that I decided to look at replacements. It was the first time I have given any consideration to a Mac book in my life. When I saw the prices and compared them to what I paid, I felt I would have had a different user experience. Mainly after owning now several different Apple products, I am realizing I am going to get better build quality for the money I would have spent otherwise. Would the specs be different, yes. I realize the 8 GB of RAM is not really the best. 265 GB of SSD on board storage is really nothing to write home about. However that also can be fixed with an external SSD. $100 later you have 4 or even 8 times the storage. Cloud uploading also helps in those spots too.
The irony in all of this was I really disliked Apple products in general. When I worked in wide format graphics. I had a couple of Apple customers who had a PC to run the RIP station but that was it. I could never remember how to install the .ppd to their computers for the printers since they were one of like 3 accounts. This work only happened like once a year. Even my boss was like I kind of remember how to do it as well. However, in all fairness, my boss was a very much Pro PC and Pro Android person. He really disliked Apple and on top of that, none of the software we needed ran on Apple. He freaked on me when I got my iPhone. He was like what the heck man. I saidwell if someone wants to face time us, I am willing to do it. He went out of his way to say that was not necessary. We will make our customer download an app in which we could video chat with them through our phone software system. There was only one if not 2 RIP engines that could run on Apple or even a Linux box. We would tell those customers they were on their own. The larger players all were PC only. However, with subscription models. SAi Flexi did start working on a Apple based designer software but not RIP. The other large player Onyx same thing. Both are not sub based so that might change. Many of the shops we dealt with had Macs for design work. But output was to a file service.
Getting back to the point, I am now looking at a Mac book for my next laptop. Personally I just want something that just works. If it was going to cost me a few hundred extra to have longevity and better design. I am for it. Does it download the software I need for home? Yes. I can add Office 365. Install Chrome or Firefox or even use the pre install Sarfari, sure. If it makes my life a little easier at home. Great.