In 1789, William Blake wrote his seminal poem, Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

Among the themes of this culturally significant piece was a denouncement of the alleged hypocrisy and repression of church and religion. It was about the “yearning of youth for freedom in love” and the “right of children to be treated as individuals with their own desires”.

Fast forward a couple of centuries.

In September 2014, Apple inserted a U2 album debut called Songs of Innocence into the music library of millions of (the predominantly young) Apple users around the world. Rolling Stones magazine called it “a triumph of dynamic, focused, renaissance” and “11 tracks of straightforward rupture.”

Not everyone saw it that way.

“It’s kind of scary knowing that Apple can just add media to your phone like this without your consent, especially since you can’t truly get rid of it. [. . .] Apple needs to realize that our devices aren’t theirs to play with any more. We’re not leasing them, we bought them. If Apple wants to give us something, ask us first, don’t just shove it in and expect everyone to love it.”

Apple Gazette

Within days, Apple had to apologize and quickly roll out an update, allowing users to delete the album (and its cover art) from their music libraries. So much for the “renaissance”.

Fast forward 6 years.

In March 2020, Apple inserted contact trac1ng into billions of smartphones around the world. Did mainstream press write breathless articles about how “scary” that move was?

“This kind of surveillance will be a key component in restoring society to normalcy,” wrote Engadget. Did the masses freak out? Did Apple apologize and roll the change back?

No.

To this day, every time you open the Settings app on your iPhone you are confronted by an ominous “Exposure notifications” label.

That was the initial shock for me, and the first of many.

Loss of innocence

On that day I realized I was in the wrong crowd.

It also dawned on me that all those products I’d bought were not really mine. Apple could unilaterally make my personal devices do things I didn’t understand or consent to.

Yeah sure, contact tracing is “private” and “opt in” . . . until, one day, it isn’t. In March this year, I wrote.

Apple’s mandate ends with mass adoption. Once Apple normalizes a technology—biometric login, health records, digital IDs, and so on—it then becomes possible for governments and authorities to introduce and mandate their own “enhanced” version.

Up until that fateful day, I was your average fan boy. I would lap up everything with a fruit logo on it, and I sang its praises to anyone who’d listen. But in the space of a few days all those Apple gadgets had become a liability.

I immediately sold my new 16-inch MacBook Pro, iPhone 11 Pro, AirPods, and Apple Watch. However, I had to keep my old MacBook Pro and iPhone SE until I could figure out alternatives.

As I was about to learn, escaping Apple is not easy.

The Apple ID handcuffs

Pretty much all my software was tied to my Apple ID. If I were to delete it, I’d instantly lose everything: Final Cut Pro ($299.99), Logic Pro ($199.99), Motion (49.99$), Compressor ($49.99), and dozens of paid 3^rd party apps. None of that software really belonged to me. I didn’t have a software license key; all I had was Apple’s permission.

Fuck that.

I deleted everything. I removed all my files from iCloud and moved them to Tresorit. I de-registered from Apple Music, logged out of Apple ID, and emailed Apple Support to have them delete my account once and for all – a process that took weeks. In the meantime, I closed down Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, LinkedIn, AirBnB, YouTube, Amazon and every other big tech account under my name. None of that was easy—they don’t make it easy—but that’s a story for another day.

When I finished removing “Apple” from my MacBook I ran a check with my firewall (Little Snitch) and noticed that my laptop was still phoning-in to Apple’s servers. I reverted to manual clock settings and disabled automatic updates but that didn’t change much. I instructed Little Snitch to block all Apple domains, to no avail. According to my NextDNS logs, my computer was still connecting to Apple servers. I blocked those servers in NextDNS only to see new ones pop up after a few days.

Apple is hellbent on tracking every last thing we do on our devices and there is not much we can do about it. Privacy, my ass.

I then searched for alternative methods of getting software.

As it stands, you can still download apps directly to your MacBook (without the App Store) but MacOS is making it harder with each new version. Many popular 3^rd party apps no longer offer direct downloads (other than trial versions). For example, Things and iA Writer—two of the best productivity apps out there—are only available via the App Store.

With some effort you can still make it work; the stock apps are good enough and several 3^rd party vendors offer direct downloads. But the writing is on the wall:

The days of installing software without Apple’s permission are numbered.

If Apple doesn’t like an app—on the basis of “misinformation”, “hate speech”, “public health”, and so on—users will have to “suck it up” and live without it. From Telegram in 2018, to Parler in 2021, and Damus in 2023, the list of removals is rapidly growing. Last year, Apple admitted they had removed almost 2.8 million apps “as part of the App Store Improvements process”. That’s 2.8 million apps I am not allowed to use on a computer I supposedly own

Enough already.

I don’t want any politically-correct fucktard to decide what I can and cannot do on my computer.

Linux was the only way forward.

Over the following months I installed several Linux flavors in virtual machines (using Oracle VirtualBox).

Eventually I gravitated towards Manjaro, a beginner-friendly fork of Arch Linux. The appeal of Arch Linux forks is that they are lightweight (especially if you choose the XFCE desktop environment).

I then tried installing Manjaro as the primary OS on my MacBook but those efforts ended in frustration. Modern MacBooks come with T2 security chips and System Integrity Protections that prevent you from installing non-Apple operating systems. And even if you bypass all that, you may still run into d