Pick the Tools That Let You Leave

Anti-lockin, pro-platform, and why the conversion business doesn't pay.

The Apple guy at the coffee shop has a sticker on his laptop lid like a faith.

He sees the Chromebook. His face does the thing. Half smirk, half pity. The kind of face you’d give a dog wearing pants.

Fine.

I’ve got a publishing operation to run and a newsletter to ship by Saturday and three different tribes of internet weirdos who want me to feel bad about my hardware.

Mastodon privacy guys want me on a Pinephone running GrapheneOS.

The Linux purist keeps sending forum links about how I should be compiling my own desktop environment from source like it’s 1998.

Apple cultists want me on the Mothership where the air is filtered, the walls are warm, and a man named Tim is taking thirty percent of everything I touch.

And Windows… well… we just don’t really talk about Windows.

I run a Pixel and a Chromebook. The work happens in Workspace and Drive and Gemini and the rest of it.

A fanboy gives money to a corporation and then defends the corporation when it raises prices. I’m a customer. There’s a difference, and the difference is whether you have an exit route.

I picked Google because the door isn’t welded shut.

A walled garden is a beautiful piece of architecture if you’re the gardener. It’s different if you’re one of the things being grown.

Apple sells you the garden as a feature and the lockin is the whole point. iMessage doesn’t speak to Android because Apple decided your friends should buy Apple too. AirDrop is a private tunnel that only opens for the family. Your iCloud photo library has hooks in the meat.

You can leave but you’ll bleed on the way out and they want you to know it. The exit costs are the product. You’re paying for the privilege of being expensive to escape from. The hardware is incidental.

This is the business model. It runs on fucking tribute.

Google’s not innocent.

Megacorps don’t come in a clean version. They’ve got data centers in Council Bluffs pulling more power than small countries and ad networks that crawl across the internet behind you like ticks. I know what they are. I’m not pretending.

But Google Takeout exports your whole Drive into standard files: docs become .docx, sheets become .xlsx, photos come out as JPEGs with metadata still attached.

The Pixel runs Android and you can flash GrapheneOS onto it the day you decide the privacy guy was right after all.

The Chromebook is a glorified browser, which means leaving it costs you nothing because you weren’t carrying anything proprietary in the first place, and Workspace is built on file formats that work everywhere.

Google decided locking the door wasn’t worth it. Apple decided it was. Two different bets, two different prices.

I picked the bet that lets me walk out.

Then there’s the rent.

Workspace at the entry tier is seven bucks a month for a custom email domain and video calls and a calendar and the whole document suite and 30 gigs of storage, and fourteen unlocks the full Gemini features in the pipeline.

Compare that to twenty for Claude Pro and twenty for ChatGPT Plus and twelve for Microsoft 365 and whatever Zoom is charging small business owners this month, and you’re staring at a stack that bleeds five times the rent for the same fucking job.

I’m running solo and every dollar in the stack matters. The math has to work. The Google math works.

Gemini is the part nobody wants to admit works.

For the daily grunt work, draft this email, summarize this PDF, pull facts out of a Wikipedia rabbit hole, do a quick research pass before I write, Gemini does the job for less money than anything else on the market.

Claude is sharper for writing and ChatGPT has the loudest mouth in the room. Gemini is the F-150 in the parking lot. 200,000 miles, a starter motor that always turns over.

It does the work. It doesn’t expect a thank-you note.

The Apple people will keep being Apple people.

The Linux purists will keep telling their twelve subscribers about new desktop environments compiled last weekend. Somewhere right now a privacy maximalist’s self-hosted email server is eating itself at 3am.

Stay where you are if it’s working. The conversion business doesn’t pay.

I picked the tools that don’t have hooks in me. Yet.

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P.S. If you want to try Workspace, this link knocks something off your first year. Use it or don’t. The door isn’t welded shut either way.