Speaker 1: When it comes to the device in your pocket and
Speaker 1: the one on your desk and on your wrist and
Speaker 1: even in your ears. There are Apple people and there
Speaker 1: are not Apple people, and Heaven help you if you
Speaker 1: try to persuade either kind to switch sides.
Speaker 2: I do not like Apple products because I like the
Speaker 2: layout of that products. I think that products are convenient
Speaker 2: and easy to use.
Speaker 3: To be honest, it looks slick and luxury with the iPhone.
Speaker 1: Really, I have a Samsung Galaxy so Android device. I've
Speaker 1: never felt the need to have an Apple product.
Speaker 3: Also, it just seems to be cheaper on average.
Speaker 1: Some typically strong opinions there of people in London. Apple
Speaker 1: is especially adept at keeping customers inside their walled garden
Speaker 1: of hardware, apps and services. Its products are designed to
Speaker 1: work effortlessly with one another and sometimes less effortlessly, shall
Speaker 1: we say, with other companies gear. The idea, of course,
Speaker 1: is to make you never want to leave. I found
Speaker 1: that a lot of.
Speaker 3: The Apples products you needed other Apple products. I think
Speaker 3: it's just a loop, like you have to have Apple everything.
Speaker 2: They forced the youth to buying everything else from them,
Speaker 2: But it's makes it rigid.
Speaker 3: You're just kind of.
Speaker 2: Get stuck in the system of just buying the next
Speaker 2: one as soon as it comes out, and then the
Speaker 2: next one comes out and you buy that one instead.
Speaker 1: So what happens if you do decide to set foot
Speaker 1: outside that cocoon like Apple ecosystem and venture into the
Speaker 1: wilds of Android and Windows. That's exactly what Bloomberg's Austin
Speaker 1: Carr tried to do. He found out just how complicated
Speaker 1: it can be to leave Apple behind, and he's here
Speaker 1: to tell the tale.
Speaker 4: So I thought, maybe maybe now that I'm switching this Android,
Speaker 4: Windows and Friends model, this would be a lot more
Speaker 4: easy for my digital lifestyle. It was not just not easy,
Speaker 4: it was nightmarish.
Speaker 1: I'm West Kasova today on the Big Take. Apple really
Speaker 1: really hates to say goodbye, Austin. Before we get into
Speaker 1: your epic journey of trying to leave Apple, tell us
Speaker 1: about your Apple life beforehand, like what made you want
Speaker 1: to do this.
Speaker 4: I was one of those families that grew up with
Speaker 4: an old school Macintosh, so I've been using Max for
Speaker 4: many years, with the exception of the occasional Toshiba PC
Speaker 4: or other Dell or HP, and that really accelerated when
Speaker 4: Steve Jobs returned in the early two thousands or late
Speaker 4: nineteen nineties when he was sort of first made interim CEO.
Speaker 4: I remember vividly getting that first iPod back in the
Speaker 4: early two thousands, and it was a miraculous moment. Other
Speaker 4: MP three players had existed, but nothing with this clickwheel,
Speaker 4: nothing that puts so many songs in my pocket, Nothing
Speaker 4: with those beautiful commercials that had people dancing around with
Speaker 4: the white headphones if you all remember it, to the
Speaker 4: U two songs. And I was hooked, and I bought
Speaker 4: into that ecosystem where you can draw a direct line
Speaker 4: from my purchase of an iPod to an iPod Touch,
Speaker 4: eventually to an iPhone when I could afford it, and
Speaker 4: so forth. Up until now, we have a very Apple
Speaker 4: centric household. My wife uses a MacBook, I use a MacBook.
Speaker 4: We have iPhones. I have an Apple Watch, we have AirPods.
Speaker 4: I subscribe to TV plus an iCloud. I am that
Speaker 4: sort of prototypical dream of an Apple shareholder, the one
Speaker 4: that is stuck on that cycle of hardware and software
Speaker 4: and subscription upgrades. And I've been doing that now for gosh,
Speaker 4: I mean, it must have been a decade or two
Speaker 4: at this point. And heaven forbid I ever look up
Speaker 4: how much all this stuff's costs, but I promise you
Speaker 4: it would fund my new daughters five twenty nine.
Speaker 1: And people who are Apple users and people who are
Speaker 1: Android users really do live in these two different worlds,
Speaker 1: and you describe it as the blue bubble world and
Speaker 1: the green bubble world.
Speaker 4: This has become quite a stigma, especially among younger generations,
Speaker 4: like the TikTok generation, if you will, which really makes
Speaker 4: me sound like a boomer. But I'm relatively my mid thirties,
Speaker 4: so i still am somewhat with it. But in so
Speaker 4: far as the bubbles go. You know, I'm sure everyone
Speaker 4: probably listening has a family member or friends that are
Speaker 4: mixed on a group chat between Android users and Apple users.
Speaker 4: And you've probably wondered why some text are green. It's
Speaker 4: actually really interesting technical story of why they don't make
Speaker 4: it easy to text between platforms. You probably grew up
Speaker 4: with something called SMS that's like a very foundational form
Speaker 4: of text messaging, and that modified over the years to
Speaker 4: something called MMS, which is multimedia text messaging. But the
Speaker 4: issue is that has been stuck that way for so long,
Speaker 4: and so every time you send a text with a
Speaker 4: photo or a video back and forth. The quality of
Speaker 4: it is profoundly reduced because it's based on a protocol
Speaker 4: or standard that's many, many years old, and Apple doesn't
Speaker 4: want to update it because they think, if you want
Speaker 4: to have the Apple ecosystem, the Apple quality, those blue
Speaker 4: bubbles that send perfect videos and can share seamlessly with
Speaker 4: iCloud and all your photos, you should become an Apple user.
Speaker 4: And so it's both actually a technical problem, but also
Speaker 4: a stigma, a social one, in that younger people might
Speaker 4: feel pressure.
Speaker 3: They don't want to be a green bubble.
Speaker 4: They want to be part of that community with your friends,
Speaker 4: because you don't want to get left out of photo sharing,
Speaker 4: you don't want to get left out of video sharing
Speaker 4: or heaven forbid a group chat. So there's almost a clickishness,
Speaker 4: and that was very intentional by what Apple has done.
Speaker 4: There's been legal records that have come out from discovery
Speaker 4: and court filings that have showed that they were very
Speaker 4: savvy about recognizing, hey, we have to keep this sort
Speaker 4: of quote unquote lock and model alive, keeping people within
Speaker 4: the Apple iOS ecosystem, the MacBook and AirPods, that whole thing,
Speaker 4: and I message is actually at the court of that
Speaker 4: those blue bubbles.
Speaker 1: And so this whole idea that Apple wants to make
Speaker 1: a blue bubble coveted seems to actually be working.
Speaker 4: It seems not only to be working, but it seems
Speaker 4: to be extraordinarily unprecedentedly successful considering their market cab. And
Speaker 4: that's not to say I message is at the root
Speaker 4: of it, but that idea, it's referred to in the
Speaker 4: tech world as a wald garden. And the idea is
Speaker 4: that if you're choosing a company's brand, you want the
Speaker 4: products to work seamlessly together.
Speaker 3: This makes sense.
Speaker 4: I mean, for example, if you have perhaps a lawnmower
Speaker 4: that's electric these days, those batteries will be interchangeable with
Speaker 4: that brand's weed whacker or leafblower.
Speaker 3: That's a form of a walled garden.
Speaker 4: Or if you have a Lionel train set, you might
Speaker 4: have train tracks that only work with Lionel for those
Speaker 4: model trains.
Speaker 3: That is a form of a walled garden. This is
Speaker 3: not a new idea.
Speaker 4: What Apple has made new, though, is expanding it so
Speaker 4: thoughtfully that they've really completed what Steve Jobs wants described
Speaker 4: as the quote unquote whole which this idea that Hey,
Speaker 4: if you're part of this ecosystem, whether it's with Blue
Speaker 4: Bubbles or iCloud or the iPhone or AirPods, they will
Speaker 4: work so seamlessly together that they will actually be the
Speaker 4: core platform, not just for Apple, but for all your
Speaker 4: computing habits. And that's why it's not just limited to
Speaker 4: text messaging or Apple products. But when I get into
Speaker 4: my Subaru outback, you know, I'm plugging that into CarPlay,
Speaker 4: and that disintermediates Subaru's control of the customer and gives
Speaker 4: it over to Apple. That's what's so profound about this
Speaker 4: version of a walled garden. And then the other half
Speaker 4: of that coin is whether or not you can actually
Speaker 4: leave the wald garden, which is of course what this
Speaker 4: story was all about.
Speaker 1: So when you look outside that wald garden to the
Speaker 1: Android world or the non Apple world, a lot of
Speaker 1: people who use that system like it because it gives
Speaker 1: them a certain amount of freedom, even if it comes
Speaker 1: at a certain amount of frustration trying to get all
Speaker 1: those things to work together.
Speaker 3: That's exactly right, Wes.
Speaker 4: I think part of the issue is is it is
Speaker 4: pretty much not a lot of options when you do
Speaker 4: look outside of the Apple ecosystem. If you want something
Speaker 4: that's incredibly unified, safe, and also super easy to use,
Speaker 4: you're inevitably going to run into troubles. For example, Android
Speaker 4: is pretty much the only other mobile phone platform maker
Speaker 4: out there. Anytime you're using some of these things on Samsung,
Speaker 4: or if you see any platforms even that Amazon makes,
Speaker 4: they're often based on this Android ecosystem. And that's because
Speaker 4: of something that happened many many years ago during the
Speaker 4: early mobile phone wars, when Microsoft and BlackBerry and Amazon
Speaker 4: and so many others were trying to get a foothold
Speaker 4: into this market, and it just turned out that Apple
Speaker 4: and Google ended up winning the platform doopoly. The distinction
Speaker 4: is on the Apple side, they make phones, they make iPads,
Speaker 4: they make MacBooks and AirPods.
Speaker 3: Google does not.
Speaker 4: They make chromebooks, and a Chromebook is not as powerful
Speaker 4: as a MacBook, So I have to go outside to
Speaker 4: a Windows laptop if I want something that's more fullfledged,
Speaker 4: or I'd buy a MacBook, and then I'm stuck with
Speaker 4: that wallach between the pristine Eden that is Apple's ecosystem
Speaker 4: and this sort of mess of devices that is essentially
Speaker 4: an Android slash Windows based operating system. In which I
Speaker 4: might have a Dell XPS laptop. I might have an
Speaker 4: HP or Asus desktop. I might have earbuds from I
Speaker 4: don't know bos, I might have a phone from Google
Speaker 4: or Samsung. And so that mix of devices is pretty freeing.
Speaker 4: It's very liberating to be able to say, hey, I
Speaker 4: want to buy whatever I want. But it's also not
Speaker 4: particularly a cohesive package.
Speaker 1: And so why did you want to leave?
Speaker 4: The ironic thing of this whole process was it was
Speaker 4: painful to leave. I've not only invested in this Waldgarden
Speaker 4: ecosystem serious capital, i should say, but I also continue
Speaker 4: to admire from afar Apple's design ecosystem and their philosophy.
Speaker 4: And when I do look out at the competitive market,
Speaker 4: there's not a lot that has that seamless integration, partially
Speaker 4: because they don't all have a Waldgarden a roach, but
Speaker 4: also because sometimes they just cannot make products that are
Speaker 4: as quality, as esthetic, and beautifully integrated as Apples. With
Speaker 4: that said, I was feeling claustrophobic. There have been times
Speaker 4: over the last year or two that I've just grown
Speaker 4: frustrated with some of the more forced versions of that.
Speaker 4: I'm happy to be an Apple customer, but I really
Speaker 4: don't like using Siri. They're trying to make Siri this
Speaker 4: all encompassing star Trek like AI that helps you along
Speaker 4: your way with your computing habits.
Speaker 3: I don't want that. I don't even want Siri on.
Speaker 4: But they make it difficult to turn off, and then
Speaker 4: they integrate into other parts of your apps and your usage.
Speaker 4: Ditto other programs that are just superior to Apples. I
Speaker 4: really don't like Apple Maps. I'm not saying it's a
Speaker 4: bad program, but my preference is for Google Maps. I
Speaker 4: cannot make that my default. I cannot text with my
Speaker 4: Android friends. I have a lot of them, a lot
Speaker 4: of family members who I want to send pictures of
Speaker 4: my daughter to in a high quality form. I can
Speaker 4: use WhatsApp sure to send those, but I cannot make
Speaker 4: WhatsApp my defaulting program. So it's really Apple has this
Speaker 4: very my way or the highway approach, which I'm happy
Speaker 4: to drive on. I'm happy to take that highway. The
Speaker 4: issue is when they say, hey, here's also the car
Speaker 4: you have to use. And I'm mixing metaphors there, but
Speaker 4: that's genuinely When we were buying a super out back,
Speaker 4: I said, oh man, we really do need to pick
Speaker 4: something with CarPlay, and I've actually grown to dislike CarPlay
Speaker 4: ironically for these very same restrictions.
Speaker 1: After the break, Austin tries to move his digital life
Speaker 1: into a new home. All right, so you made the
Speaker 1: decision to climb the wall of the garden. Tell us
Speaker 1: what it was like.
Speaker 3: Well, first fall, it was very funny.
Speaker 4: I almost felt like I had to send out disclaimers
Speaker 4: to some of my friends to say, hey, heads up,
Speaker 4: in the next couple of days, you might see green
Speaker 4: text bubbles.
Speaker 3: In fact, we might I actually don't know.
Speaker 4: We might have to remake some of these groups because
Speaker 4: it might not keep the thread history on my phone.
Speaker 3: And it was funny. Even the response to that.
Speaker 4: Some of my friends and family members joked, oh my god,
Speaker 4: like is everything okay? Like can you not afford a
Speaker 4: new iPhone? One of my friends just joke like, well,
Speaker 4: that's the end of knowing you, as if I was
Speaker 4: dead to them. There is that question mark about why
Speaker 4: would you ever leave this Apple ecosystem?
Speaker 3: Do you not get it?
Speaker 4: Why are you not with this program that everyone else is?
Speaker 4: And I'm talking if you probably pulled every tech reporter
Speaker 4: out there. I'm guessing ninety percent of them have a MacBook,
Speaker 4: and that's just that social pressure that leads to that
Speaker 4: stigma of green and blue bubbles. So actually my journey
Speaker 4: started by reaching out to people that I admire, or
Speaker 4: reading reviews or looking up different ways to sort of
Speaker 4: create something that was corollary.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: I never expected it to be quite as good, But
Speaker 4: I thought, if I could hack together some mix of
Speaker 4: a Windows device, the perfect most advanced Android phone, and
Speaker 4: perhaps a Garmin watch because I like to do more
Speaker 4: outdoorsy stuff, none of those particularly integrate well with Apple.
Speaker 4: So I thought, hey, maybe now that I'm switching with
Speaker 4: this Android and Friends model or Android Windows and Friends model,
Speaker 4: this would be a lot more easy for my digital lifestyle.
Speaker 1: But it turned out not to be so easy.
Speaker 4: It was not just not easy, it was nightmarish. And
Speaker 4: I was really shocked because generally speaking, all my data
Speaker 4: is in the cloud.
Speaker 3: I'm one of those people. I am.
Speaker 4: You know, if you've ever seen that TV show Hoarders,
Speaker 4: I am the digital version of that. I've never deleted
Speaker 4: a text. I've also really never deleted any photos, any videos,
Speaker 4: just because I like posterity and I like to have
Speaker 4: those memories and I pay serious cloud bills as a
Speaker 4: result of that, especially with iCloud. But generally speaking, the
Speaker 4: cloud is supposed to make it so you can move
Speaker 4: your data around very easily, and it turns out Apple
Speaker 4: iCloud does not make it particularly easy to move your
Speaker 4: data out of there. That was my first step is
Speaker 4: to try before I even bought devices, before I even
Speaker 4: purchased a new phone, and I ended up going with
Speaker 4: this very high end Google Pixel phone, which is a
Speaker 4: gorgeous device, and I was so excited to use the camera.
Speaker 4: I ended up going with this high end Dell XP yes,
Speaker 4: which is another gorgeous device that a lot of people
Speaker 4: think is a very good replacement for a MacBook. But
Speaker 4: the bigger issue beyond the hardware was my data. How
Speaker 4: do I get my photos? How do I get my
Speaker 4: text messages out of I message? During this process, just
Speaker 4: to give you a little summary, let's see, I had
Speaker 4: one hundred and three gigabytes worth of eye messages and
Speaker 4: file attachments. File attachments being you know, photos or videos
Speaker 4: I've shared with my friends. One hundred and three gigabytes,
Speaker 4: So that's a lot of data. There's no way to
Speaker 4: port that to anywhere. Apple's a very secure platform, it
Speaker 4: does not want you to be able to export that data.
Speaker 4: And even if you could, where would you put it.
Speaker 4: There's no perfect apples to apples, not to use a
Speaker 4: terrible pun platform out there that can just seamlessly swallow
Speaker 4: that information and translate it and suddenly, with this new device,
Speaker 4: have you up and running with your same contacts as
Speaker 4: if you've been there the whole time. So that's number one.
Speaker 4: It's a technical problem. But the second thing is it's
Speaker 4: a technical problem that people should be able to solve,
Speaker 4: but that companies really don't want to. Back in Like
Speaker 4: twenty eighteen, twenty seventeen, they did try to make this
Speaker 4: data transfer program more accessible. They're called data takeout programs,
Speaker 4: in which you can go to Apple or Google and say, hey,
Speaker 4: I request all my data.
Speaker 3: I want it all.
Speaker 4: The issue is you will get some weird compressed ZIP
Speaker 4: file full of a ton of different things that it
Speaker 4: would take you a lot of coding abilities to be
Speaker 4: able to decompress. And even with Apple, just as a
Speaker 4: funny example, I made that request, it took fifteen days
Speaker 4: to process my download request for just my ninety two thousand,
Speaker 4: six hundred and fifty four photos which I had store ancloud,
Speaker 4: and fifteen days later I got an email from Apple saying, hey,
Speaker 4: unfortunately we've completed your transfer, but there's been ninety two,
Speaker 4: six hundred and fifty four errors. In other words, zero
Speaker 4: photos transferred. The same happened for somewhere in the ballpark
Speaker 4: of twelve hundred videos, and the same thing continued to
Speaker 4: happen again and again throughout this process, whether I went
Speaker 4: through a data takeout program directly with Apple, or I
Speaker 4: tried to transfer my data from my iPhone directly to
Speaker 4: the Google Pixel, which is an option when you sign
Speaker 4: up to these things, you just play your device is in.
Speaker 4: They're supposed to be able to essentially hoover, like a
Speaker 4: vacuum out all that data into the Google Pixel.
Speaker 3: And it took hours and hours and hours and just
Speaker 3: never worked.
Speaker 1: And what does Apple say about how difficult it is
Speaker 1: for people who want to try out a different product?
Speaker 4: So Apple stands on this generally speaking, I mean we
Speaker 4: should go to the man at the top, Tim Cook,
Speaker 4: the CEO, who has been part of this expansion of
Speaker 4: Steve Job's dream of having not just hardware and software combined,
Speaker 4: but also hardware, software and services and subscriptions.
Speaker 3: And he was actually asked that this question.
Speaker 4: A few months ago at a conference, there was a
Speaker 4: Q and A from the audience and someone essentially came
Speaker 4: up and said to Tim, Hey, you know, my mom's
Speaker 4: on Android.
Speaker 3: It's really difficult.
Speaker 4: What are your thoughts on, like, when are we going
Speaker 4: to get rid of this stigma this class system around
Speaker 4: green and blue bubbles?
Speaker 2: Communication was revolutionized with the eye message, right, How do
Speaker 2: you think Steve would feel currently about the state of
Speaker 2: communication specifically between people who aren't within the community of
Speaker 2: apps and are part of the I message, but more
Speaker 2: so on the green side of things with Android.
Speaker 5: I don't hear our users asking that we put a
Speaker 5: lot of energy in on that at this point, and
Speaker 5: so now I would love to continue. I would love
Speaker 5: to convert you to eyeball.
Speaker 2: It's just it's it's tough not to make it personal.
Speaker 2: But I can't see my mom certain videos, or she
Speaker 2: can't see me certain videos, and.
Speaker 5: So we buy your mom eyeball.
Speaker 4: When I reached out to Apple about this, they did
Speaker 4: provide a lot of information. Apple is very generally speaking,
Speaker 4: and this is a fact, not an opinion. Apple is
Speaker 4: very opaque as a corporation, and Apple spokesperson essentially said
Speaker 4: that they actually have tried to make it easier to
Speaker 4: transfer your data to other services. Their argument is essentially
Speaker 4: that three and four people choose to stay with Apple
Speaker 4: is a reflection of how much they love their products,
Speaker 4: how much they're satisfied with Apple. It's not an example
Speaker 4: of lock in. In other words, they're essentially saying without
Speaker 4: saying it, if Android and Google want people switching, if
Speaker 4: Samsung wants people switching, they have to do a better
Speaker 4: job at making better quality products. Don't blame that on us.
Speaker 4: They often cite the app market is example not of
Speaker 4: lock in, but as a way that they help all
Speaker 4: these developers in small businesses. They talk about ways that
Speaker 4: they've made it easier to transfer your data via iCloud
Speaker 4: and other services to take out data. They did not
Speaker 4: comment on the fact that I could not get my
Speaker 4: data out of there.
Speaker 1: To be clear, Austin, on the other side of this
Speaker 1: equation is when you tried to get your data onto
Speaker 1: your new Android and Windows devices, that if Apple made
Speaker 1: it difficult to leave that world, on the other side,
Speaker 1: didn't exactly make it welcoming.
Speaker 3: For you to come in either.
Speaker 4: That's true. Let's put it this way. I think a
Speaker 4: lot of companies are to blame for this. You know,
Speaker 4: Windows could make it here, could be more seamless, but Google.
Speaker 4: I was pretty surprised at how bumpy the experience was
Speaker 4: when I was onboarding. And I'm talking about even put
Speaker 4: aside some of the data issues getting it out of Apple,
Speaker 4: the onboarding experience for Android was really complicated. When I
Speaker 4: did sync some of my Apple data, some of it
Speaker 4: did transfer. For example, all of my contacts transferred over
Speaker 4: successfully my iPhone contacts, which is a limited list of
Speaker 4: people that I tend to text or call most frequently. Unfortunately,
Speaker 4: they actually merged it with my Google account, which is
Speaker 4: through Gmail. I've been using Gmail since about two thousand
Speaker 4: and five when it came out, and so it auto
Speaker 4: merged all of my contacts with every single Gmail contact
Speaker 4: I've ever had, and I'm talking there were nine older
Speaker 4: versions of myself in my phone. Suddenly the contact list
Speaker 4: was suddenly thousands of contacts long. It had every contact
Speaker 4: I've ever had from every Craigslist outreach I've done for
Speaker 4: apartments as if they were human beings as opposed to
Speaker 4: just Craigslist lane.
Speaker 3: There were so many.
Speaker 4: Instances in this and this as I learned from just
Speaker 4: reporting around Android is actually a big deal. It's called
Speaker 4: the first impression problem. They have not figured out a
Speaker 4: way to welcome users to this different style of experience
Speaker 4: that is a little bit more open. But it was
Speaker 4: just a very unusual experience for what was originally promised
Speaker 4: to me by a Google sales rep of saying, Hey,
Speaker 4: this is going to be easy as copy and pasting
Speaker 4: on your computer.
Speaker 3: It turned out to be anything but that.
Speaker 1: And you would think that Google Microsoft would want to
Speaker 1: make it really easy to get people like you because
Speaker 1: it's an incentive.
Speaker 4: It blows my mind that Google has not invested more
Speaker 4: in tech support. When I was communicating them on their
Speaker 4: online chats, tech support or buy email would essentially just
Speaker 4: copy and paste instructions to me that I've already read
Speaker 4: that's on their website. So they actually pointed me instead,
Speaker 4: ironically to Apple customer service through a one eight hundred number,
Speaker 4: and to Apple's credit, this really brilliant senior technician hopped
Speaker 4: on the phone with me for nearly an hour and
Speaker 4: work through as many fixes as possible.
Speaker 3: We couldn't figure it out.
Speaker 4: This tech support person, who was very generous and very kind,
Speaker 4: and ironically knew that he was helping me leave Apple
Speaker 4: as a customer, but was still willing to help.
Speaker 3: We have to give Apple credit for that.
Speaker 4: He essentially said, one of the issues is that internally
Speaker 4: at Apple, they block Android's website, so he couldn't even
Speaker 4: open Android's website to see what steps I was using
Speaker 4: or that Google was recommending, because that's the type of
Speaker 4: barriers that they have between these companies, and we could
Speaker 4: ultimately not get my data off of it.
Speaker 3: All of his recommendations did not work.
Speaker 4: When I asked him once why I couldn't just download
Speaker 4: all my iCloud data, he compared that to me essentially
Speaker 4: driving to jam fifty thousand pieces of paper into a
Speaker 4: fax machine and expecting it to fax those pieces of
Speaker 4: paper faster rather than jam, which I think is an
Speaker 4: app metaphor, but it also speaks volumes frankly about eye Cloud,
Speaker 4: that it's more of a fax machine than it is
Speaker 4: perhaps a modern data sharing tool.
Speaker 1: And you had this very funny moment that you write
Speaker 1: about in the story when you contacted Google.
Speaker 4: I thought, originally Google would be totally game to help
Speaker 4: with this insofar as I was having and I wondered, Yeah,
Speaker 4: I'm going to be writing about this at this point.
Speaker 4: To be clear, when I started this, this was just personal.
Speaker 4: You know, I never expensed any of this stuff. This
Speaker 4: is all because I really wanted genuinely to try to switch,
Speaker 4: which I promise will make this different than any story
Speaker 4: you read if you're going to read one of these
Speaker 4: about switching. I had just returned from a reporting trip
Speaker 4: in Poland and Lithuania in which some of the apps
Speaker 4: that I was using overseas, especially in Europe, like VPNs,
Speaker 4: were not working on Apple. I was jet lagged, I
Speaker 4: was perhaps a little cranky. I was really having frustrations
Speaker 4: with Apple, and that's when I made the decision to
Speaker 4: try to switch. I actually emailed Google to request interviews
Speaker 4: with some of their executives about my experience switching and
Speaker 4: whether they had any guidance, and that Google spokesperson accidentally
Speaker 4: cesed me on his message to his colleagues. He didn't
Speaker 4: know I was reading, but he wrote, this is like
Speaker 4: doing a car comparison, but trying to compare a Honda
Speaker 4: to a car you built from parts you got at
Speaker 4: pep Boys. To be clear, he's referring to Honda as
Speaker 4: the Apple, the unified experience and he's referring to the
Speaker 4: parts you got at pep boy to using Android and
Speaker 4: Windows together.
Speaker 1: When we come back, Austin starts to have second thoughts. So, Austin,
Speaker 1: how did this saga end?
Speaker 4: This ended with my wife laughing at me for wasting
Speaker 4: so many months and dollars. Basically, what ended up happening
Speaker 4: is other than the few glimmers of what I was
Speaker 4: trying to experience, which was an open ecosystem in which
Speaker 4: these tech companies act like adults and realize, hey, not
Speaker 4: everyone's going to have all Apple products. Not everyone's going
Speaker 4: to have all Amazon products, or Google or Microsoft products
Speaker 4: or Samsung, that hey, we should work these products altogether.
Speaker 4: I realized that I just had no choice but to
Speaker 4: go back into the Apple ecosystem. I just ultimately returned
Speaker 4: the Google Pixel, I returned the del xps, and of
Speaker 4: course I bought a new MacBook.
Speaker 3: I bought a new iPhone.
Speaker 4: I am wearing currently a new Apple Watch Ultra, and
Speaker 4: I have new AirPods because my dog chewed on the
Speaker 4: old ones. And so that's where I'm at. I will say,
Speaker 4: it's like the end of nineteen eighty four. What's the
Speaker 4: last line of the book spoiler alert. He says something
Speaker 4: to the effect is I learned to love big Brother.
Speaker 4: And that's not to say Apple is dystopian, but I
Speaker 4: can tell you it's very difficult to leave its ecosystem.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: It was really interesting when I talked to some of
Speaker 4: the ex Google early Android designers who talked about trying
Speaker 4: to get people to switch from Apple, and they did
Speaker 4: early consumer feedback in which they talked to consumers, they
Speaker 4: walked them through the experience, They took diaries and so
Speaker 4: forth of their responses they got, and first impressions were
Speaker 4: so important. They realized if you couldn't make a good
Speaker 4: first impression with Android, people were more likely to return
Speaker 4: the phone and get rid of it and go back
Speaker 4: to the iPhone. One of these sources told me they
Speaker 4: remember a sample customer saying I just want my life back,
Speaker 4: and that's why they switched.
Speaker 3: Back to Apple.
Speaker 4: And I realized I went through that same experience Google
Speaker 4: had a chance.
Speaker 3: I was that weird customer.
Speaker 4: There's not many of them out there that's going to
Speaker 4: spend a lot of money, that's going to waste a
Speaker 4: lot of time, that's going to deal with the headaches
Speaker 4: of switching and as soon as I got that first impression,
Speaker 4: regardless of whose fault, whether it was Apple or Google's fault,
Speaker 4: that it was not a seamless experience. The first impression
Speaker 4: was back and as that old sample customer said, I
Speaker 4: just wanted my life back.
Speaker 1: Do you imagine this is going to change at any
Speaker 1: time that people will simply demand to have more options,
Speaker 1: to be able to leave, to have the apps they
Speaker 1: want on their phone without the big companies telling them
Speaker 1: what they can and can't do.
Speaker 3: I don't think so.
Speaker 4: I don't know when that's going to happen or how
Speaker 4: it would change. I mean, if you think back to
Speaker 4: what Tim Cook said to that fan in the audience,
Speaker 4: they don't hear a lot of their customers asking about that.
Speaker 4: I think the truth is they're just not listening, and
Speaker 4: they don't need to because they're the biggest company in
Speaker 4: the world.
Speaker 3: They're worth almost three trillion dollars.
Speaker 4: The iPhone, the iPad, and we'll see what the Vision
Speaker 4: Pro does their new headset. But they're blockbuster products and
Speaker 4: there are not probably enough people out there who are
Speaker 4: clamoring for this. There's not windows people out there that
Speaker 4: affect Apple's market share and say, hey, we want I
Speaker 4: message on this device, Apple just doesn't have to listen
Speaker 4: to those.
Speaker 1: Austin, thanks so much for coming on the show, Thanks
Speaker 1: for having me, Thanks for listening to us here at
Speaker 1: The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio.
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