I'm in the very fortunate position of being able to afford the luxury of running multiple laptops at the same time, and being relatively price-insensitive. I've supported and recommended Apple as long as I can, but they're repeating their core strategic mistakes when they were riding high in the Apple // era, and I've been to that rodeo before. This time, I'm getting off the bull before it gores me. Last time, I clung on like a limpet long past the time it made sense, and I'll pass that mantle to the younger generations who have the time and energy budgets to do so.

Apple's core strategic weakness is being the dominant market participant for too long. It is as if hardwired into their corporate cultural DNA is the absolute need to be the underdog. Once they dominate for awhile, they start seeking out easy answers, and it takes strong leadership that demands finesse, class and taste in solutions to steer them past the answers within their immediate grasp, and uncomfortably reach for the ones that pleasingly engage customers. This starts with their relationships with partners, then developers, then customers, then it corrupts their products, in roughly that order within their overall ecosystem. We have another decade or two to go before it gets that bad, if it gets that bad (I really hope I'm wrong, their corporate culture otherwise from a customer perspective is highly desirable).

I'm getting out while the getting is still good and migration paths are not quite so painful. Part of this is because the raw hardware capabilities of my dual-track alternative (Dell Precision 5500 fully tricked-out) are a quantum leap over Apple's offerings. I have simultaneously put up with non-Apple trackpads, keyboards and OS's on Wintel laptops I simultaneously carry (hazard of consulting) while my main daily driver is an Apple, so those don't faze me.

There was a brief, glorious period in the 00's when Apple locked in users by being a superlative superset of delighting capabilities above Wintel gear that compelled users like me to share with those who asked me about my quirky non-enterprise choice in the enterprise consulting space, "I use a Mac because it is a very good mobile Unix slab", and they came away impressed and agreeing with the choice, "if only we had the money". As a consultant, I got a pass for having the money to make that choice. Mac laptops for a brief 2-3 years had the densest memory, mass storage and top-of-the-line mobile chipsets, making many light "server-like" tasks upon it feasible. I heavily leveraged those capabilities to run rings around other consultants, able to deliver results in a fraction of the time because while they were requisitioning servers, I was already coding, debugging and running tests. Haven't had that experience since.

I'm hoping I can catch some of that fire again with a Lintel setup. The general lack of developer infrastructure discipline I see across the board is leading many corporate cloud environments to enshroud themselves with all sorts of cost containment approval procedures, and most of my clients have already lost the agility cloud promised. Better security postures within my clients' sites also makes it increasingly difficult to access my own cloud accounts. So my own development deck once again makes sense for my own specific use case.