iQuit: My Hellish Attempt to Leave Apple’s Walled Garden

Four weeks and $3,421.88 into my effort to quit using Apple Inc. products, I felt stuck. Most of my app data failed to transfer to my new, non-Apple gadgets. The same went for 103 gigabytes of messages and file attachments. Apple took 15 days to process my download request for the 92,654 photos I’d stored in its cloud—then returned 92,654 errors. I appeared to be trapped inside the company’s walled garden.

For more than a decade, I’ve been an Apple shareholder’s dream. I owned an iPhone, an iPad and a MacBook. I wore AirPods and an Apple Watch and subscribed to Apple TV+ and iCloud. I’ve sprung for regular hardware upgrades and spent extra on official Apple dongles. I’ve always admired Apple’s industrial design and loved how its devices fit together as seamlessly as Ted Lasso dialogue. I’ve even saved most of the packaging, because it just looked too exquisite to throw out.