I’m a self-declared Apple fanboy. I got my first iPod when I was 10 (a hand-me-down) and later on my first smartphone when I was 16 and that was the iPhone 4S (another hand-me-down) and the story of each of these products as we all know, were game-changers in the tech industry. There began a long love story with Apple – I still remember the months saving up before the purchase of every new Apple product as they were rolled out across the next few years – my first MacBook, iPad, Apple TV and most recently the Apple Watch.

I still love all my Apple products – but I’ve learnt to become more critical, which is why for once, I’m actually thinking of leaving the ecosystem.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I personally find dongles the most inelegant way to connect devices together. A dongle to connect my MacBook to an external screen? Another one to connect my iPad? And with the removal of a headphone jack, yet another dongle to purchase? On the software end of things, it’s a constant struggle with iCloud in terms of storage and integration with other cloud services such as Google Drive and Dropbox. It’s particularly of great frustration for earlier adopters of the latter services, where a bulk of our work and photos are already stored in the other apps.

Most recently with the Apple Watch, I’ve come to realise how isolated the Apple ecosystem has been from the entire tech scene when I realised I wasn’t able to store offline playlists into the Watch with the Spotify App. The function currently is only available for Apple Music users.

Therein came quite a revelation for me – where a bulk of the apps I now use on a daily basis have become increasingly cross-platform (think Spotify, Dropbox, Evernote and Google’s range of web-services)

Apple no longer has that edge over Android when they first started out. Android has improved their stock layouts tremendously to the point you can pick one off the shelf and it’s very much pre-loaded and intuitively functional. This wasn’t something back in 2010-2012.

Apple still creates great products and I still love my products very much, but I can no longer count on Apple to bring me that “one last thing” as Steve Jobs would have. This has nothing to do with leadership of the firm. Tim Cook after all has brought Apple to greater heights in terms of revenue. While my iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch still stream and sync (almost) flawlessly with one another, for once, it just might be worth it to make that leap of face and break out of the ecosystem.