When you hold any Apple product, you have a much more premium feeling than with most luxuries. We were truly blessed to experience such feelings from mass market products—or do we?

For the past twenty years, I admired Apple products, engineered with such a degree of relentlessness that nobody asked for. You know — keeping exactly the same rounded corners along all the product line will make any production engineer feel sick. Or the watch’s internal design compared to Google’s. From the computer for designers 20 years ago, quirky but nice, Apple became computers for everyone since the iPhone came out. We now have thousands of the same white background product pages, beautiful packaging for many devices, polished aluminum, and other Sir Ive’s design language codes.

If you go and buy a Windows PC from any premium lineup of any major brand, you will have the same PC shop experience you’ve had 20 years ago. Like frozen in time, like Apple doesn’t exist. It makes Apple supremacy look absolute—or is it?

Three days ago I bought new headphones for the gym: Marshall Major V. My expectations were low — they’re 5x cheaper than my AirPods Pro Max, have no ANC, and other premium features. Meanwhile, I finally upgraded my keyboard to a mechanical split that requires a wired connection. So I was left without one of the USB-C slots I typically used to charge AirPods, which is not a big deal, I was thinking — just use the Apple MacBook charger barely used because the monitor charges my laptop. Nope, it doesn’t work, probably because the AirPods don’t work with a bigger charger. I have to keep that brilliant piece of Apple’s engineering — the Lightning cable to charge the AirPods.

Also, they have this brilliant mechanism where they switch on/off when you put them on and off your head. Or when you put them on the car seat, taking the phone connection from car Bluetooth. Or when you touch your ear, and they switch off. Yes, you can switch them on and off, you just need to press this button for 5 seconds, or that button—I don’t know basically which one, because Sir Ive’s design language is higher than that bullshit of signs.

So yes, three days ago I bought new headphones for the gym. They were charged to 55%, and I used them for 3 days and they’re at 41%. They charge from every USB-C I have around, and I have plenty of them, and they switch on and off like in the past — with a single button so you can just drop them in the car and don’t care that another bump will turn your music off. AirPods are big, beautifully designed with good ANC headphones that are sweaty and slide off when you work out in the gym. Can I say that they have good design? Nope. They have beautiful aesthetics. With recent macOS versions, they have more connection problems than non-Apple headphones.

Does Marshall have good design? They are light, they are beautiful and have nice textures, they can be charged with a USB-C cable, they are non-sweaty. They have beautiful packaging. Modern Bluetooth pairing works fantastically well. So is Apple design a blessing? I started to think from here.

Before headphones, I had a similar experience with Apple Watch. I bought them to track running and training, and it’s literally the things they were unable to do. Yes, sometimes I run for two or even three hours, and sometimes I run and train the same day. An impossible thing to imagine for pension-age executives at Apple, because they think that the most amazing thing I can do with watches is to talk via them by phone like in their beloved Star Trek series or receive spam SMS notifications. The epitome of boomer thinking.

Very soon (after I ran in Cappadocia and my fully charged iPhone together with my fully charged Apple Watch died on the trail run I’d never run before) I switched to the Finnish brand Suunto—very stupid watches in terms of software, but it doesn’t matter to me because I charge them once every two weeks. And with one slider in settings, I can get rid of all notifications on the watch. Still can’t answer the phone on them, what a pity! Apple fanboys will insist that I should buy Watch Ultra Max, but I would recommend as an answer to them to finally adopt product identifiers like AW225 because it’s a logical next step to move from SE Ultra Max and all this modern Apple naming. Another win of superior Apple design thinking.

In the PC world, Windows hell is definitely worse and will not catch up to Apple in years. But I have a lot of beautifully designed and very functional things around in the tech world. I can’t switch from Android because of the OLauncher and true full-day battery life and fast charging. I don’t use any piece of Apple’s bloated software, except macOS itself. Cars now have fantastic Tesla or Google infotainment systems much better than CarPlay because Apple wants to control any screen and is pushing for very complex CarPlay integration while cars with Android Auto can be bought today.

The example I have in mind is the Apple car. Pushing a very complex project to the extremes of self-driving because Sir Ive didn’t want to see the wheel inside drew the project to the death valley. The lack of an on/off button for AirPods Max (Pro Max?) wasn’t enough to do the same, but it made me personally very careful about Apple product purchases. Now under the weight of Mother Nature cult and diversity-praising culture ruled by gerontocrats, macOS is drowning in bugs. The easiness of competition with the Windows world made Apple a non-functional organization. We still praise their design, but it’s nothing more than individual farce in the age of suppressed creativity and competition.