---
title: "Why I'm Done Buying Apple"
author: "Michael Droste"
publisher: "Windy Town WindyTown.com"
number: 35
date: "2026-06-22"
status: "published"
tags: ["apple"]
categories: ["apple"]
image:
  src: "images/0000035noapple.jpg"
  alt: "No Apple Photo"
seo-title: "Why I'm Done Buying Apple"
seo-description: "Here's the thing nobody in tech media wants to say plainly: being satisfied with your current Apple hardware and being done with the upgrade cycle are two completely different things. Apple spent twenty-five years training us to conflate them — to believe that loving your iPhone meant you should want next year's iPhone too. That illusion finally cracked for me in 2026, and once you see it, you can't unsee it."
---

I want to be clear about something before I get into this, because I know how these articles usually go. This isn't a "Apple sucks now" rant from someone with an axe to grind. I'm not switching to Android. I'm not dumping my Mac for a Windows box. I'm not selling my AirPods on eBay in some dramatic gesture of protest.

My iPhone 16 Pro Max is great. My M4 Mac mini Pro is fast, quiet, and does everything I need for music production and content work without complaint. The HomePods sound terrific in my studio. The 4K Apple TV just works — it streams, it doesn't crash, I don't think about it.

That's exactly the point. Everything I own from Apple right now is good. And I'm still done buying more of it.

Here's the thing nobody in tech media wants to say plainly: being satisfied with your current Apple hardware and being done with the *upgrade cycle* are two completely different things. Apple spent twenty-five years training us to conflate them — to believe that loving your iPhone meant you should want next year's iPhone too. That illusion finally cracked for me in 2026, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

## The Upgrade Treadmill Was Always the Business Model, Not a Feature

Let's be honest about what Apple's hardware cadence actually was for most of its existence. New iPhone every year. New Mac every couple years. Incremental bumps dressed up as breakthroughs. A camera that's "the best iPhone camera ever" — said every single year, somehow always true and somehow never urgent.

For a long time, I went along with it. Not because I needed to, but because the marketing made staying current feel like part of being a serious creative professional. New chip, new possibilities, new reasons to believe the work would be better with newer tools.

Except my work didn't get better because of newer tools. It got better because I practiced more, wrote better scripts, recorded better audio. The trumpet doesn't care what phone I own. Neither does a Studio Notes article. Neither does a podcast script. At some point you realize the tool stopped being the bottleneck years ago, and you were upgrading out of habit, not necessity.

## What Changed Isn't My Hardware — It's Apple's Software

Here's where it gets interesting, and where the actual 2026 story is. The hardware is still excellent. Nobody serious disputes that. Build quality, longevity, resale value — Apple still builds machines that last. People are running M1 Macs from 2021 with zero complaints and battery health still in the high 80s. That's not a knock against the silicon.

The problem is what's happening on top of the silicon.

This year, Apple's own influential community — the people who've defended this company for two decades — turned on the software. Jason Snell's well-known annual report card, which surveys dozens of veteran editors and developers, showed hardware reliability still scoring near the top, but macOS quality cratering by comparison. One of the most respected Mac reviewers in the business called the latest macOS interface overhaul the worst UI update in the platform's history. That's not a random Reddit complaint. That's someone who has reviewed every version of macOS since Tiger.

When the people who get paid to defend your platform start saying the quiet part out loud, that's not noise. That's a signal.

And it's not isolated to the Mac. The pattern repeats across the lineup: gorgeous hardware, increasingly shaky software experience sitting on top of it. A new Apple TV "Pro" everyone keeps asking for never materializes because Apple's focus has visibly shifted away from hardware innovation and toward something else entirely.

## That Something Else Is Subscriptions

This is the part that actually pushed me over the edge, and it's worth being blunt about it.

Apple has quietly built one of the largest subscription empires in consumer tech, and the free tier keeps getting stingier to push you toward it. Five gigabytes of free iCloud storage in the year 2026 isn't an oversight — it's a funnel. It's designed to feel unusably small the moment you take a few photos, so you "upgrade" to iCloud+, which then quietly becomes the gateway to bundling in Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, News+, and AppleCare+, one tidy subscription stack at a time.

None of these individually feels predatory. That's the trick. It's death by a thousand small recurring charges, each one reasonable on its own, all of them adding up to something that increasingly resembles a rent payment on a company you already gave thousands of dollars to for the hardware itself.

I didn't buy a Mac mini to lease my own files back from Cupertino every month. I bought it to own a tool. The industry-wide shift toward subscription software has created real backlash — and you don't have to look far to find it. Spend five minutes in any tech forum and you'll see the same sentiment over and over: people paying continuously for things that don't even reliably work, and quietly promising themselves they're done the second a real alternative shows up.

That's not a fringe opinion anymore. That's the room.

## The Resale Math Tells the Real Story

There's a financial angle to this too, and it's one that almost nobody in tech media bothers to walk through honestly, because it doesn't sell ad space the way "should you upgrade" listicles do.

Apple hardware holds value extraordinarily well. A four or five-year-old MacBook Pro can still retain something like forty to fifty-five percent of its original price on the resale market, which is a remarkable number compared to almost anything else in consumer electronics. A laptop from most other manufacturers is worth a fraction of that by year three.

That retained value is usually framed as a reason to upgrade — "you can always sell your old one." But flip that logic around for a second. If a five-year-old Mac mini is still worth half what I paid for it, what does that actually tell me? It tells me the thing is still good. It's still capable. It's still doing real work for someone. The resale value isn't an argument for buying the next one — it's evidence that the one I already own hasn't depreciated in usefulness nearly as fast as the marketing cycle wants me to believe.

I bought the M4 Mac mini Pro to run Logic Pro, Ozone, and a full Mac-based mastering chain for trumpet and podcast production. None of those workloads require next year's chip. They required this year's chip, and this year's chip is still going to be plenty capable in 2030. The only reason to "upgrade" before then is to chase a number, and I've simply stopped finding that number compelling.

## Why This Doesn't Mean I'm Leaving the Ecosystem

I want to be really clear about the distinction here, because "I'm done buying Apple" and "I'm done with Apple" are not the same sentence.

My iPhone 16 Pro Max does everything I need it to do. It'll keep doing that for years. The M4 Mac mini Pro is genuinely one of the best workstation values Apple has ever shipped, and it's going to anchor my studio for a long time. The HomePods sound the way HomePods have always sounded — warm, full, surprisingly capable for their size. The Apple TV is a dumb little box that does its one job perfectly and asks for nothing.

I'm not rage-quitting the platform. I'm doing something quieter and, frankly, more rational: I'm refusing to participate in the assumption that satisfaction with what I own obligates me to keep buying what's next. That assumption was always marketing, dressed up as inevitability.

## What "Done Buying" Actually Means in Practice

Practically, here's what this looks like for me going forward, and it's a pretty simple framework:

I'll replace hardware when it breaks or when it can no longer do the job, not on a calendar set by a keynote. I'll evaluate new releases on whether they solve a problem I actually have, not on whether the chip name has a bigger number after it. I'll keep iCloud storage at the minimum I actually need rather than letting convenience nudge me into bundles I didn't ask for. And I'll watch the software side of this company closely, because right now the hardware is carrying software that, by Apple's own most trusted critics, isn't pulling its weight.

If next year's release actually solves something real — better Siri that isn't quietly outsourced to someone else's AI model and marketed as in-house, software stability that matches the hardware it's running on, support that lives up to what people are paying for — I'll look at it with an open mind. I'm not anti-Apple. I'm anti-treadmill.

## The Myth That Needed Busting

The myth Apple sold for two decades was that loving your device meant you should want the next one. That loyalty to the brand meant participation in the cycle. That being "all in" on the ecosystem required staying perpetually one generation behind the bleeding edge.

That myth made sense when the upgrades were obviously, dramatically better — when going from a Mac with a spinning hard drive to one with an SSD changed how you worked, when going from no Face ID to Face ID changed how you unlocked your phone fifty times a day. Those were real jumps. They justified the cycle.

We're not in that era anymore. The jumps are smaller, the software is shakier, and the subscription stack is quietly doing more work to grow Apple's revenue than the hardware innovation is. Recognizing that isn't disloyalty. It's just paying attention.

I'm happy with what I own. I'm done buying what's next just because it's next. Those two sentences used to feel contradictory to me. Now they just feel honest.