“Apple haven’t been known for their hardware” negates absolutely any credibility to your arguments. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of Apple’s industry and cultural influence.

This statement was true in the late 80s and early 90s before Jobs came back, but since literally the iMac, Apple is absolutely “known for their hardware” first and their also-worthy-of-switching-costs software second.

As a company, they value and pursue these equally, or at least intend to, but from the outside, putting software first, especially for mainstream appeal is just…false.

I use Mimestream. It’s a beautiful, well-made Mac app (for now, iOS coming soon) by a developer who clearly cares about making a quality product that adheres to the platform’s design language and usage idioms.

I absolutely do not begrudge him for wanting to make a living from it, and currently subscription is one of the only effective ways to do that for small devs.

I also don’t begrudge anyone who doesn’t like it. We all get to use our money how we see fit.

I love Unread. Its design goes out of its way to focus on the reading experience, not filtering, not “triage”, just beautiful, readable text of the sites you subscribe to and the basic management features to add or remove.

I also love that Unread has “saved articles” which lets you use that same interface and readability for random articles you find, without having to subscribe.

Used it for years, happily pay the subscription for premium.