It finally happened. After the past several years of apple trying their darnedest to lose me, they have.

I bought an iphone 4 when they came out and loved it. But I refused to pay $1000+ to upgrade to another, especially with all the nonsense about changing connectors and such. My iphone4 has officially been an orphan for a while now. Other than hard crashing every few weeks, it seems to be OK. So  as long as it continues to ‘work’, I’ll keep it, but I can see cheap android in my future.

The ipad2 I have just seems to work worse and worse with every app update or ios upgrade, so now it barely able to find the network that a Raspberry Pi has no trouble with. Apps keep getting larger and large with each update. I imagine it won’t be long until it’s orphaned as well. I have no plans to replace it.

With all the orphaning, apple was also intent on making app creation a worse and worse experience. Objective-C was a horrid brute, but it was a language. When they junked it for swift, I refused. I’ll learn something open source, or widely useful, but I won’t waste my time on something so totally proprietary. Last year when the app developer renewal rolled around, I declined. Besides, even with app developer my one and only iphone/ipad app would no longer compile and run on my two devices, so what was the point?

That left my 2012 apple macbook pro (17in version), which was heavy but really nice to use. I had a decent hard drive, max memory (not much, but max) and used remote desktop to control it fairly well from my main PC with the big screen. It too ran slower with each OS upgrade, but at least it was based on freebsd (unix) and I liked it.

Then last week, the final nail in the coffin. I require a VPN to mark exams from my university, and I’d been using openconnect on the mac. It worked and was open source. Sometime between the last week in July and the second week in August, the university broke the link between their VPN (pulse) and the mac. After considerable diagnosis, I was forced to admit defeat and install the pulse client on my win7 box. It worked perfectly.

That meant the last reason to keep the mac running was gone. With the obvious disdain apple seems to have for all things desktop, including the horrible compromises that they’ve been offering as laptops, I had to conclude that apple does not want people like me buying or using their stuff. So I’m gone.

I doubt I’ll buy another apple product again as it truly appears the clock has come full circle and the sculley years have returned. Like the sculley years, they now have more crap and flash than actual product. And as SNL’s Gilda Radner used to say of the phone company, I feel apple saying to me “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re apple”.