I get incredible life on my S5, granted I'm running a custom rom, but even stock it was excellent. Wifi always on (except set to only stay on in sleep when charging, this always made a difference on my other phones back to my S2 as Android has generally had crazy wifi wakelock issues). Sync on, GPS/location etc all on, only thing I have off is bluetooth as don't really use it except once in a bluemoon. Neighbor has a Note 4 and we've gone out deep sea fishing and trolling from early morning till night (both of us work from home
) and do biz stuff while out there, he's never had a problem with battery life, his wife has one too. but it can all vary, you have plenty raving about iPhones battery life yet go figure, our experience has been pretty bad, 4 replaced multiple times and life sucked, 5 replaced twice battery life sucked, 5S replaced twice and still couldn't even make it towards end of the work day without dying. She gets her phones and pick of the litter through work, got the Iphone 6 and then tried S5 and kept the S5. 6 was better on life then before, but she just wanted a change, she's still shocked when she can make it through a heavy day and still have enough life left if going out later etc. Maybe the 6+ was fixed now, but two of her coworkers had them and kept complaining of lag and battery life which was posted a bunch of here before. Only iPhone I never had trouble with was my 3GS (glitches nor battery life), which was also tweaked to the hilt with cydia, still actually have the thing in a drawer. Pretty funny taking it out now and using it, phones today make it feel dated as hell lol
Way I look at it, ***** happens lol, chalk it up to people running different apps with different services, location with networks, who knows.....
. With Android I could at least run BBS and see what an issue was, with iOS we were pretty much SOL (unless that's changed and there are apps that work like BBS?)
Battery life definitely starts tapering off after a year or so, S5 for some reason I've had almost 1 year now and still its excellent. But if something happens, you can replace the battery easily. iPhones, you could, but it was such a pain in the ass disassembling and if you went to Apple to replace they charged an arm and leg. So yeah it will suck if they do non-swappable batteries, thats a turn off as batteries do degrade around the 1-2 year mark. I remember when my S2 was barely making it through half a day, got a brand new sammy battery, popped the cover and popped the new battery right in and worked like new.
Far as switching an all that, no problems here, and I have a desktop and multiple MBPs. But I was never ingrained into the ecosystem, got rid of ipads, got rid of Apple tv which was awful and can't believe I drank some of the koolaid for that lol. Way easier having everything on my desktop for media streaming with home theater in top notch quality and sound and exactly how I want and no limits quality or otherwise. Found same/similar apps on Android so no biggie there, stuff like facetime or imessage never meant much to us, especially with majority of wifes co-workers and company switching to Android (its like 60/40 split now as they offer the choice to employees and got rid of BB awhile ago). I always hated iTunes with a passion, and didn't care for Apples cloud sync and glitches, I way prefer the way I can do that stuff with Android but thats just me, everyones different. On MBP right now that's sync with my S5 for everything from work to files to personal to music.