[Aromasin]

Not anything significant to be honest. There are alternative applications and hardware for almost everything nowadays. Convincing people that we need devices all running in the same ecosystem was one of the lasting legacy's of Steve Jobs that I realised wasn't really true in reality.

For searches I occasionally might have to check Google for a niche search term, but Duck.com returns the right thing for 95% of my queries. In terms of hardware, a Pixel phone, Fire tablet, Surface Book laptop, and Windows desktop fulfil all my needs, with only important docs synched with Dropbox and the rest stored on a couple of flash drives I have on me 24/7. For home automation I made my own using a Raspberry Pi and a bunch of ESP8266's, which does basically everything that big brand alternatives do and more (I can water my plants from my bed!) For software I use Outlook for emails and calendar, OpenOffice for word processing, Prezi for presentations, and admittedly mainly Google Sheets for that kind of data handling, as it's good for collaborating which is the only thing I ever use it for. Trip Advisor is great for reviews. BBC weather is all I use for checking that.

Nothing is slower I've found. I just had to experiment with what worked for me, and get the right 'flow' of using them, which I suppose took a few weeks to iron out. The great thing is that doing it this way means I can adapt to my needs, not be forced into using a suite that might not cater to them. It also means most importantly that, for the most part, I don't get snooped on!