On March 21, 2024, the United States Justice Department and 16 States filed suit against Apple for monopolistic practices in the smartphone market. The main allegation is that Apple has violated antitrust laws by making it difficult for competitors and other third-parties to interoperate with the iPhone (and with iOS), and as a result they have a monopoly on the smartphone market in the US. This was certainly an interesting thing to hear about and it seems to have come out of nowhere. It is a complex case, and despite what others are saying, it is not completely related to the whole ‘‘green bubble’’ situation with iMessage.

So, this post ended up taking a lot longer to put together than I thought it would. I am still using the same MacBook Air (M1, 2020) that I was using 16 months ago when I wrote the first post, and I am still happy with the performance and the capabilities of it. I have owned it since February 2021 and been using it as my primary machine for over 2 full years now. Enough has been written on the capabilities and performance of Apple Silicon chips, so I am just going to talk about my experiences with it.

I have written about my obsession with ARM processors and why I have wanted one in a daily driver laptop many times before on this website. It has been something that I have wanted in a laptop for a long time, but unfortunately the hardware and software options were never quite there yet. I have tried many ARM devices over the last 10 years which promised that they could be a daily driver device, or at least something close to that. I was always disappointed with those devices, and I never really found something that worked reliably for me. As time went on, I realized that I really wanted an ARM-based device as my daily driver, regardless of the form factor.

It has been a rumour for many years that Apple was finally going to ditch Intel and use their own custom processors in all their devices, the exact same ones that they have been utilizing in their iOS devices for the last few years.