My small protest against Apple

February 4, 2026

I'm not trying to escape Apple I'm staging a protest. A small one, sure, but deliberate. The reasons pile up daily: Apple has quietly transformed from a company that built great tools into one that tightens its grip, nudging users toward subscriptions, lock-in, and manufactured dependency. I still use their products. But what I can do is live more intentionally within the system by:

• Using the device with the least amount of lock-in, favoring a Mac over an iPad while accepting the iPhone as unavoidable.
• Eliminating subscriptions that quietly feed Apple's money machine.
• Using open-source, free, or paid apps.
• Keeping my data local instead of defaulting to iCloud whenever possible.

Drafts was my last subscription app, so this morning I set out to eliminate it before its renewal in a few weeks. I successfully replaced it with FSNotes and MarkEdit, both open-source options available for free on GitHub.

This won't change Apple's trajectory. My protest is too small. But that's not the point. The point is refusing to sleepwalk through my own choices, to mistake the path of least resistance for the only path. Every eliminated subscription, every open-source alternative, every piece of data kept local is a reminder that I still have agency that the system's convenience doesn't have to mean my capitulation. It's not about escape. It's about living deliberately, even within the walls someone else built.

Inspired by: Matt Gemmell