Casey Liss perfectly captures my feelings on why I love some products and brands:

I tend to feel… strongly. That applies to most aspects in life, including when I find a company whose product(s) I really enjoy.

Those products tend to share common traits; they are often simple on the surface, but have surprising depth to them. They can mold themselves to fit my needs, but once that mold is set, they get out of my way. But more than anything else, they tend to be reliable. I fell in love with Apple because, back in the mid aughts, their products really did just work.

I think my appreciation for a product crosses the rubicon into love when it regularly and repeatedly demonstrates one trait: respect for the user.

Like Liss, I tend to become a bit of a superfan when a product or brand consistently and reliably solves my problems with minimal intrusion.

I’m all in on Apple (shocker!); I’ll also co-sign Liss’s assessment on the M4 MacBook Air: it’s my number one recommendation. I noted my Anker affection recently. I have two sets of Sonos home theatre systems (purchased at tremendous discounts, thank goodness!); fortunately I rarely use the app, so the fallout from that debacle was minimal. While I was once a strong Eero aficionado (and still recommend them, with the same caveats Liss lists), I switched to Unifi a couple of years ago (and am loving it).

And yes, I happily pay for a Callsheet subscription.

I had been planning to buy a Synology system, but their recent decision to limit which drives they work with turned me off—they almost had my money, but got greedy. I’ll now be looking at Unifi (or QNAP?) for that, and I’m open to other suggestions as well.

Outside of the tech sphere, this “respect for the customer” is a big reason I shop at Costco and America’s Tire, choose DoorDash instead of GrubHub, and, on the flip side, why I strive to avoid Facebook, X/Twitter, Spotify, and Reddit.

It’s a simple equation, really: Respect == Loyalty.