Matisyahu's Blog

For those who don’t know, I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem going right back to the days of the eMac 1Ghz that was released in 2003 and ever since I made that switch, I’ve been solidly in the Apple ecosystem however recent events and changing priorities has made be reevaluate my decision to go all in. What I have found is that over the years is Apple has slowly moved its focus away from the Mac platform and with that shift in focus has been the slow decline – particularly when it comes to Safari and how it lags behind Chrome (the website wpt.fyi does a good job keeping track of web browsers and their compliance with web standards). I basically held out for as long as possible, but the transition didn’t start all at once but rather the gateway out of the ecosystem was the decision to upgrade to a Samsung S25 Ultra which bought on a bit of anxiety because it was a departure of what I was used to.

I setup a Google Workspace account because that is what i was used to and I’ve been using it ever since I bought the Samsung S25 Ultra however after much contemplation I decided to make use of the money I inherited to replace my laptop – I decided to get the Surface Laptop 7 with the Qualcomm Elite ARM processor, 16GB RAM and 1TB storage. With that I decided to move my email over to an Exchange Online Plan 2 for my custom domain and for everything else I’m using the Microsoft 365 Home plan for my storage, Microsoft Edge synchronisation and integration between my phone and my computer. In the past I found Microsoft 365 considerably more complex than Workspace and the last time I tried using it I couldn’t get aliases working properly but I got it all setup without too much fuss and my free gmail.com email address is purely for buying stuff at the Play Store along with YouTube but the centre of my ecosystem is now Microsoft.

Part of that has also meant embracing Microsoft Edge and what I’ve noticed is that it ‘feels’ more light weight – extensions are approved faster, better integration with Microsoft services and most importantly I haven’t experienced any compatibility issues. I’ll write a bit more about the experience when i get up in the morning.