When it comes to the device in your pocket and the one on your desk and on your wrist and even in your ears. There are Apple people and there are not Apple people, and Heaven help you if you try to persuade either kind to switch sides.
I do not like Apple products because I like the layout of that products. I think that products are convenient and easy to use.
To be honest, it looks slick and luxury with the iPhone.
Really, I have a Samsung Galaxy so Android device. I've never felt the need to have an Apple product.
Also, it just seems to be cheaper on average.
Some typically strong opinions there of people in London. Apple is especially adept at keeping customers inside their walled garden of hardware, apps and services. Its products are designed to work effortlessly with one another and sometimes less effortlessly, shall we say, with other companies gear. The idea, of course, is to make you never want to leave. I found that a lot of.
The Apples products you needed other Apple products. I think it's just a loop, like you have to have Apple everything.
They forced the youth to buying everything else from them, But it's makes it rigid.
You're just kind of.
Get stuck in the system of just buying the next one as soon as it comes out, and then the next one comes out and you buy that one instead.
So what happens if you do decide to set foot outside that cocoon like Apple ecosystem and venture into the wilds of Android and Windows. That's exactly what Bloomberg's Austin Carr tried to do. He found out just how complicated it can be to leave Apple behind, and he's here to tell the tale.
So I thought, maybe maybe now that I'm switching this Android, Windows and Friends model, this would be a lot more easy for my digital lifestyle. It was not just not easy, it was nightmarish.
I'm West Kasova today on the Big Take. Apple really really hates to say goodbye, Austin. Before we get into your epic journey of trying to leave Apple, tell us about your Apple life beforehand, like what made you want to do this.
I was one of those families that grew up with an old school Macintosh, so I've been using Max for many years, with the exception of the occasional Toshiba PC or other Dell or HP, and that really accelerated when Steve Jobs returned in the early two thousands or late nineteen nineties when he was sort of first made interim CEO. I remember vividly getting that first iPod back in the
early two thousands, and it was a miraculous moment. Other MP three players had existed, but nothing with this clickwheel, nothing that puts so many songs in my pocket, Nothing with those beautiful commercials that had people dancing around with the white headphones if you all remember it, to the U two songs. And I was hooked, and I bought into that ecosystem where you can draw a direct line from my purchase of an iPod to an iPod Touch, eventually to an iPhone when I could afford it, and
so forth. Up until now, we have a very Apple centric household. My wife uses a MacBook, I use a MacBook. We have iPhones. I have an Apple Watch, we have AirPods. I subscribe to TV plus an iCloud. I am that sort of prototypical dream of an Apple shareholder, the one that is stuck on that cycle of hardware and software and subscription upgrades. And I've been doing that now for gosh, I mean, it must have been a decade or two
at this point. And heaven forbid I ever look up how much all this stuff's costs, but I promise you it would fund my new daughters five twenty nine.
And people who are Apple users and people who are Android users really do live in these two different worlds, and you describe it as the blue bubble world and the green bubble world.
This has become quite a stigma, especially among younger generations, like the TikTok generation, if you will, which really makes me sound like a boomer. But I'm relatively my mid thirties, so i still am somewhat with it. But in so far as the bubbles go. You know, I'm sure everyone probably listening has a family member or friends that are mixed on a group chat between Android users and Apple users.
And you've probably wondered why some text are green. It's actually really interesting technical story of why they don't make it easy to text between platforms. You probably grew up with something called SMS that's like a very foundational form of text messaging, and that modified over the years to something called MMS, which is multimedia text messaging. But the issue is that has been stuck that way for so long, and so every time you send a text with a
photo or a video back and forth. The quality of it is profoundly reduced because it's based on a protocol or standard that's many, many years old, and Apple doesn't want to update it because they think, if you want to have the Apple ecosystem, the Apple quality, those blue bubbles that send perfect videos and can share seamlessly with iCloud and all your photos, you should become an Apple user.
And so it's both actually a technical problem, but also a stigma, a social one, in that younger people might feel pressure.
They don't want to be a green bubble.
They want to be part of that community with your friends, because you don't want to get left out of photo sharing, you don't want to get left out of video sharing or heaven forbid a group chat. So there's almost a clickishness, and that was very intentional by what Apple has done.
There's been legal records that have come out from discovery and court filings that have showed that they were very savvy about recognizing, hey, we have to keep this sort of quote unquote lock and model alive, keeping people within the Apple iOS ecosystem, the MacBook and AirPods, that whole thing, and I message is actually at the court of that those blue bubbles.
And so this whole idea that Apple wants to make a blue bubble coveted seems to actually be working.
It seems not only to be working, but it seems to be extraordinarily unprecedentedly successful considering their market cab. And that's not to say I message is at the root of it, but that idea, it's referred to in the tech world as a wald garden. And the idea is that if you're choosing a company's brand, you want the products to work seamlessly together.
This makes sense.
I mean, for example, if you have perhaps a lawnmower that's electric these days, those batteries will be interchangeable with that brand's weed whacker or leafblower.
That's a form of a walled garden.
Or if you have a Lionel train set, you might have train tracks that only work with Lionel for those model trains.
That is a form of a walled garden. This is not a new idea.
What Apple has made new, though, is expanding it so thoughtfully that they've really completed what Steve Jobs wants described as the quote unquote whole which this idea that Hey, if you're part of this ecosystem, whether it's with Blue Bubbles or iCloud or the iPhone or AirPods, they will work so seamlessly together that they will actually be the core platform, not just for Apple, but for all your computing habits. And that's why it's not just limited to
text messaging or Apple products. But when I get into my Subaru outback, you know, I'm plugging that into CarPlay, and that disintermediates Subaru's control of the customer and gives it over to Apple. That's what's so profound about this version of a walled garden. And then the other half of that coin is whether or not you can actually leave the wald garden, which is of course what this story was all about.
So when you look outside that wald garden to the Android world or the non Apple world, a lot of people who use that system like it because it gives them a certain amount of freedom, even if it comes at a certain amount of frustration trying to get all those things to work together.
That's exactly right, Wes.
I think part of the issue is is it is pretty much not a lot of options when you do look outside of the Apple ecosystem. If you want something that's incredibly unified, safe, and also super easy to use, you're inevitably going to run into troubles. For example, Android is pretty much the only other mobile phone platform maker out there. Anytime you're using some of these things on Samsung, or if you see any platforms even that Amazon makes,
they're often based on this Android ecosystem. And that's because of something that happened many many years ago during the early mobile phone wars, when Microsoft and BlackBerry and Amazon and so many others were trying to get a foothold into this market, and it just turned out that Apple and Google ended up winning the platform doopoly. The distinction is on the Apple side, they make phones, they make iPads, they make MacBooks and AirPods.
Google does not.
They make chromebooks, and a Chromebook is not as powerful as a MacBook, So I have to go outside to a Windows laptop if I want something that's more fullfledged, or I'd buy a MacBook, and then I'm stuck with that wallach between the pristine Eden that is Apple's ecosystem and this sort of mess of devices that is essentially an Android slash Windows based operating system. In which I might have a Dell XPS laptop. I might have an
HP or Asus desktop. I might have earbuds from I don't know bos, I might have a phone from Google or Samsung. And so that mix of devices is pretty freeing. It's very liberating to be able to say, hey, I want to buy whatever I want. But it's also not particularly a cohesive package.
And so why did you want to leave?
The ironic thing of this whole process was it was painful to leave. I've not only invested in this Waldgarden ecosystem serious capital, i should say, but I also continue to admire from afar Apple's design ecosystem and their philosophy. And when I do look out at the competitive market, there's not a lot that has that seamless integration, partially because they don't all have a Waldgarden a roach, but also because sometimes they just cannot make products that are
as quality, as esthetic, and beautifully integrated as Apples. With that said, I was feeling claustrophobic. There have been times over the last year or two that I've just grown frustrated with some of the more forced versions of that. I'm happy to be an Apple customer, but I really don't like using Siri. They're trying to make Siri this all encompassing star Trek like AI that helps you along your way with your computing habits.
I don't want that. I don't even want Siri on.
But they make it difficult to turn off, and then they integrate into other parts of your apps and your usage. Ditto other programs that are just superior to Apples. I really don't like Apple Maps. I'm not saying it's a bad program, but my preference is for Google Maps. I cannot make that my default. I cannot text with my Android friends. I have a lot of them, a lot of family members who I want to send pictures of
my daughter to in a high quality form. I can use WhatsApp sure to send those, but I cannot make WhatsApp my defaulting program. So it's really Apple has this very my way or the highway approach, which I'm happy to drive on. I'm happy to take that highway. The issue is when they say, hey, here's also the car
you have to use. And I'm mixing metaphors there, but that's genuinely When we were buying a super out back, I said, oh man, we really do need to pick something with CarPlay, and I've actually grown to dislike CarPlay ironically for these very same restrictions.
After the break, Austin tries to move his digital life into a new home. All right, so you made the decision to climb the wall of the garden. Tell us what it was like.
Well, first fall, it was very funny.
I almost felt like I had to send out disclaimers to some of my friends to say, hey, heads up, in the next couple of days, you might see green text bubbles.
In fact, we might I actually don't know.
We might have to remake some of these groups because it might not keep the thread history on my phone.
And it was funny. Even the response to that.
Some of my friends and family members joked, oh my god, like is everything okay? Like can you not afford a new iPhone? One of my friends just joke like, well, that's the end of knowing you, as if I was dead to them. There is that question mark about why would you ever leave this Apple ecosystem?
Do you not get it?
Why are you not with this program that everyone else is? And I'm talking if you probably pulled every tech reporter out there. I'm guessing ninety percent of them have a MacBook, and that's just that social pressure that leads to that stigma of green and blue bubbles. So actually my journey started by reaching out to people that I admire, or reading reviews or looking up different ways to sort of create something that was corollary.
You know.
I never expected it to be quite as good, But I thought, if I could hack together some mix of a Windows device, the perfect most advanced Android phone, and perhaps a Garmin watch because I like to do more outdoorsy stuff, none of those particularly integrate well with Apple. So I thought, hey, maybe now that I'm switching with this Android and Friends model or Android Windows and Friends model, this would be a lot more easy for my digital lifestyle.
But it turned out not to be so easy.
It was not just not easy, it was nightmarish. And I was really shocked because generally speaking, all my data is in the cloud.
I'm one of those people. I am.
You know, if you've ever seen that TV show Hoarders, I am the digital version of that. I've never deleted a text. I've also really never deleted any photos, any videos, just because I like posterity and I like to have those memories and I pay serious cloud bills as a result of that, especially with iCloud. But generally speaking, the cloud is supposed to make it so you can move your data around very easily, and it turns out Apple iCloud does not make it particularly easy to move your
data out of there. That was my first step is to try before I even bought devices, before I even purchased a new phone, and I ended up going with this very high end Google Pixel phone, which is a gorgeous device, and I was so excited to use the camera. I ended up going with this high end Dell XP yes, which is another gorgeous device that a lot of people think is a very good replacement for a MacBook. But the bigger issue beyond the hardware was my data. How do I get my photos? How do I get my
text messages out of I message? During this process, just to give you a little summary, let's see, I had one hundred and three gigabytes worth of eye messages and file attachments. File attachments being you know, photos or videos I've shared with my friends. One hundred and three gigabytes, So that's a lot of data. There's no way to port that to anywhere. Apple's a very secure platform, it does not want you to be able to export that data. And even if you could, where would you put it.
There's no perfect apples to apples, not to use a terrible pun platform out there that can just seamlessly swallow that information and translate it and suddenly, with this new device, have you up and running with your same contacts as if you've been there the whole time. So that's number one. It's a technical problem. But the second thing is it's a technical problem that people should be able to solve,
but that companies really don't want to. Back in Like twenty eighteen, twenty seventeen, they did try to make this data transfer program more accessible. They're called data takeout programs, in which you can go to Apple or Google and say, hey, I request all my data.
I want it all.
The issue is you will get some weird compressed ZIP file full of a ton of different things that it would take you a lot of coding abilities to be
able to decompress. And even with Apple, just as a funny example, I made that request, it took fifteen days to process my download request for just my ninety two thousand, six hundred and fifty four photos which I had store ancloud, and fifteen days later I got an email from Apple saying, hey, unfortunately we've completed your transfer, but there's been ninety two, six hundred and fifty four errors. In other words, zero
photos transferred. The same happened for somewhere in the ballpark of twelve hundred videos, and the same thing continued to happen again and again throughout this process, whether I went through a data takeout program directly with Apple, or I tried to transfer my data from my iPhone directly to the Google Pixel, which is an option when you sign up to these things, you just play your device is in.
They're supposed to be able to essentially hoover, like a vacuum out all that data into the Google Pixel.
And it took hours and hours and hours and just never worked.
And what does Apple say about how difficult it is for people who want to try out a different product?
So Apple stands on this generally speaking, I mean we should go to the man at the top, Tim Cook, the CEO, who has been part of this expansion of Steve Job's dream of having not just hardware and software combined, but also hardware, software and services and subscriptions.
And he was actually asked that this question.
A few months ago at a conference, there was a Q and A from the audience and someone essentially came up and said to Tim, Hey, you know, my mom's on Android.
It's really difficult.
What are your thoughts on, like, when are we going to get rid of this stigma this class system around green and blue bubbles?
Communication was revolutionized with the eye message, right, How do you think Steve would feel currently about the state of communication specifically between people who aren't within the community of apps and are part of the I message, but more so on the green side of things with Android.
I don't hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy in on that at this point, and so now I would love to continue. I would love to convert you to eyeball.
It's just it's it's tough not to make it personal. But I can't see my mom certain videos, or she can't see me certain videos, and.
So we buy your mom eyeball.
When I reached out to Apple about this, they did provide a lot of information. Apple is very generally speaking, and this is a fact, not an opinion. Apple is very opaque as a corporation, and Apple spokesperson essentially said that they actually have tried to make it easier to transfer your data to other services. Their argument is essentially that three and four people choose to stay with Apple is a reflection of how much they love their products,
how much they're satisfied with Apple. It's not an example of lock in. In other words, they're essentially saying without saying it, if Android and Google want people switching, if Samsung wants people switching, they have to do a better job at making better quality products. Don't blame that on us. They often cite the app market is example not of lock in, but as a way that they help all
these developers in small businesses. They talk about ways that they've made it easier to transfer your data via iCloud and other services to take out data. They did not comment on the fact that I could not get my data out of there.
To be clear, Austin, on the other side of this equation is when you tried to get your data onto your new Android and Windows devices, that if Apple made it difficult to leave that world, on the other side, didn't exactly make it welcoming.
For you to come in either.
That's true. Let's put it this way. I think a lot of companies are to blame for this. You know, Windows could make it here, could be more seamless, but Google. I was pretty surprised at how bumpy the experience was when I was onboarding. And I'm talking about even put aside some of the data issues getting it out of Apple, the onboarding experience for Android was really complicated. When I did sync some of my Apple data, some of it
did transfer. For example, all of my contacts transferred over successfully my iPhone contacts, which is a limited list of people that I tend to text or call most frequently. Unfortunately, they actually merged it with my Google account, which is through Gmail. I've been using Gmail since about two thousand and five when it came out, and so it auto merged all of my contacts with every single Gmail contact I've ever had, and I'm talking there were nine older
versions of myself in my phone. Suddenly the contact list was suddenly thousands of contacts long. It had every contact I've ever had from every Craigslist outreach I've done for apartments as if they were human beings as opposed to just Craigslist lane.
There were so many.
Instances in this and this as I learned from just reporting around Android is actually a big deal. It's called the first impression problem. They have not figured out a way to welcome users to this different style of experience that is a little bit more open. But it was just a very unusual experience for what was originally promised to me by a Google sales rep of saying, Hey, this is going to be easy as copy and pasting on your computer.
It turned out to be anything but that.
And you would think that Google Microsoft would want to make it really easy to get people like you because it's an incentive.
It blows my mind that Google has not invested more in tech support. When I was communicating them on their online chats, tech support or buy email would essentially just copy and paste instructions to me that I've already read
that's on their website. So they actually pointed me instead, ironically to Apple customer service through a one eight hundred number, and to Apple's credit, this really brilliant senior technician hopped on the phone with me for nearly an hour and work through as many fixes as possible.
We couldn't figure it out.
This tech support person, who was very generous and very kind, and ironically knew that he was helping me leave Apple as a customer, but was still willing to help.
We have to give Apple credit for that.
He essentially said, one of the issues is that internally at Apple, they block Android's website, so he couldn't even open Android's website to see what steps I was using or that Google was recommending, because that's the type of barriers that they have between these companies, and we could ultimately not get my data off of it.
All of his recommendations did not work.
When I asked him once why I couldn't just download all my iCloud data, he compared that to me essentially driving to jam fifty thousand pieces of paper into a fax machine and expecting it to fax those pieces of paper faster rather than jam, which I think is an app metaphor, but it also speaks volumes frankly about eye Cloud, that it's more of a fax machine than it is perhaps a modern data sharing tool.
And you had this very funny moment that you write about in the story when you contacted Google.
I thought, originally Google would be totally game to help with this insofar as I was having and I wondered, Yeah, I'm going to be writing about this at this point. To be clear, when I started this, this was just personal. You know, I never expensed any of this stuff. This is all because I really wanted genuinely to try to switch, which I promise will make this different than any story you read if you're going to read one of these
about switching. I had just returned from a reporting trip in Poland and Lithuania in which some of the apps that I was using overseas, especially in Europe, like VPNs, were not working on Apple. I was jet lagged, I was perhaps a little cranky. I was really having frustrations with Apple, and that's when I made the decision to
try to switch. I actually emailed Google to request interviews with some of their executives about my experience switching and whether they had any guidance, and that Google spokesperson accidentally cesed me on his message to his colleagues. He didn't know I was reading, but he wrote, this is like doing a car comparison, but trying to compare a Honda to a car you built from parts you got at
pep Boys. To be clear, he's referring to Honda as the Apple, the unified experience and he's referring to the parts you got at pep boy to using Android and Windows together.
When we come back, Austin starts to have second thoughts. So, Austin, how did this saga end?
This ended with my wife laughing at me for wasting so many months and dollars. Basically, what ended up happening is other than the few glimmers of what I was trying to experience, which was an open ecosystem in which these tech companies act like adults and realize, hey, not everyone's going to have all Apple products. Not everyone's going to have all Amazon products, or Google or Microsoft products or Samsung, that hey, we should work these products altogether.
I realized that I just had no choice but to go back into the Apple ecosystem. I just ultimately returned the Google Pixel, I returned the del xps, and of course I bought a new MacBook.
I bought a new iPhone.
I am wearing currently a new Apple Watch Ultra, and I have new AirPods because my dog chewed on the old ones. And so that's where I'm at. I will say, it's like the end of nineteen eighty four. What's the last line of the book spoiler alert. He says something to the effect is I learned to love big Brother. And that's not to say Apple is dystopian, but I can tell you it's very difficult to leave its ecosystem.
You know.
It was really interesting when I talked to some of the ex Google early Android designers who talked about trying to get people to switch from Apple, and they did early consumer feedback in which they talked to consumers, they walked them through the experience, They took diaries and so forth of their responses they got, and first impressions were
so important. They realized if you couldn't make a good first impression with Android, people were more likely to return the phone and get rid of it and go back to the iPhone. One of these sources told me they remember a sample customer saying I just want my life back, and that's why they switched.
Back to Apple.
And I realized I went through that same experience Google had a chance.
I was that weird customer.
There's not many of them out there that's going to spend a lot of money, that's going to waste a lot of time, that's going to deal with the headaches of switching and as soon as I got that first impression, regardless of whose fault, whether it was Apple or Google's fault, that it was not a seamless experience. The first impression was back and as that old sample customer said, I just wanted my life back.
Do you imagine this is going to change at any time that people will simply demand to have more options, to be able to leave, to have the apps they want on their phone without the big companies telling them what they can and can't do.
I don't think so.
I don't know when that's going to happen or how it would change. I mean, if you think back to what Tim Cook said to that fan in the audience, they don't hear a lot of their customers asking about that. I think the truth is they're just not listening, and they don't need to because they're the biggest company in the world.
They're worth almost three trillion dollars.
The iPhone, the iPad, and we'll see what the Vision Pro does their new headset. But they're blockbuster products and there are not probably enough people out there who are clamoring for this. There's not windows people out there that affect Apple's market share and say, hey, we want I message on this device, Apple just doesn't have to listen to those.
Austin, thanks so much for coming on the show, Thanks for having me, Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Ergalina. Our senior producer is Katherine Fink. Rebecca Shassan
is our producer. Our associate producer is Sam Gebauer. Rafael I'm see is our engineer, with additional production support from Jill Namazzi, Zeno Sidiki, and Moberra. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin I'm West Ksova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take