As someone who migrated from android pixel to an all in Apple ecosystem I’ll provide my context. As a software developer for cloud most of my software runs in Linux, so having a platform that mirrors it pretty closely is a plus, in addition to being a sturdy and performant coding machine, development on a windows laptop has always been far clunkier and unstable comparatively to my Mac experience. From there a person recommended I get an Apple TV to get away from my Samsung smart TV integrations that were dog shit slow, this was a vast improvement plus I could mirror my laptop to the tv easily.

From there I decided I wanted to do some pen drawing on a tablet, and I looked into things like remarkable etc but my experience with android tablets with pens was lackluster so I went with a iPad Pro with the pencil and it has been a great experience, the fact that it can seamlessly be controlled by the MacBook was pretty stunning the first time I accidentally discovered that feature. Follow that up with being able to plug in the iPad and have it be a 2nd display and it has been a great companion to the MacBook.

I got my wife a iPad Air as well and she loved it so when it came time to upgrade our phones I looked at my history with android, of my last 4 android pixel devices all 4 of them had to be recalled either for a bricked scenario from a patch or battery expansion. I decided I might as well give the iPhone a try, this also allowed my wife to have a universal computing experience as she could open tabs on her phone then migrate to the tablet seamlessly.

When I got the iPhones I decided to get their AirPod pros as well since I heard they can pretty easily transition(without button press) between devices easily, and that it has hearing aid grade audio enhancement(I am old and have bad hearing in certain scenarios. The user tailored enhanced hearing was game changing in certain environments and the transitioning between devices has been in all but 1 scenario a great experience(for some reason my iPhone 16 and the AirPods don’t always get along, requiring a phone restart to get them to operate).

Android auto vs CarPlay is personal preference but I find CarPlay to be a bit more sleek and easier to navigate and more performant.

So the trick at least for me has been how seamlessly it all fits together, the hardware quality and polish(aside from the iPhone/airpod thing that does annoy me pretty hard) and the reduction in overhead I have. Instead of dealing with windows 11 bloat and spyware, android device quality and occasional patching problems, a TV that runs like dogshit because it’s using old phone hardware to drive the experience, I can instead focus on what I want to do with the hardware, it just makes me more productive, less admin work, more time to create.

Time will tell I suppose if I feel the same way when my current stack ages out of the support window, but overall I prefer the low maintenance I encounter with this setup so I can focus my efforts on my docker swarm and other facets of my homelab.

Yeah I was curious if it did anything more than Romm does, but yeah no subscription service for me thanks.