I started with a 3GS, then a 4S, then a new one every year. Each one brought real tangible improvements - Retina display, widescreen aspect ratio, Touch ID, larger screen... until the 6S, when I couldn’t really tell the difference. I only bought a 7 because my nephew’s 4 couldn’t run Pokemon Go, so I passed on my 6S. One thing that drives me up the wall with iOS is downloading music for my fitness class, which is only available from a website. The iPhone will stream it in the browser, but will not download. I have to download it on a computer, then deal with iTunes to sync it to me iPhone. What, is it still 2008?
Then there’s the cost of the OLED iPhones - £1000!?!! There’s also an element of boredom, so I download the iOS 12 beta. It has some good bits, my favourite is automatically filling 2FA text messages. Siri shortcuts is interesting, but not good enough. The keyboard seems to have changed - I can’t tell exactly how, but I’m making far more typing mistakes than I ever did before.
There’s not enough software improvements, the same frustrations, and insanely expensive new hardware. I’m considering a move. The Apple Watch is good though, there doesn’t seem to be anything on the Android side that compares.
On the computer side, my 2011 11” MacBook Air was great - except for the screen, which was barely adequate when new. When retina screens spread across iPhones and iPads and Macs, it bothered me more and more. I was all set to buy a 12” retina MacBook, but the price was too high. I waited a year, thinking when a new model came out the old one would get cheaper - but there was no new one, and they increased the price of the old one by 30%! This was a slap in the face, so I bought a similarly specced Surface Pro 4 for literally half the price - the Surface Pro 5 hadn’t even been announced, but there were deep discounts anyway - Apple keeps charging premium prices for old technology.
I discovered that Windows 10 is actually good, and started to wonder if Android might be too - in a mirror image of how crappy “smart”phones drove me to iPhone, which made me wonder if OS X (as it was then) was better than Vista (anything is better than Vista!), leading me to Mac and iPad and Apple TV and Apple Watch.
I bought a £40 Android phone on a whim. The hardware is bad, but not nearly as bad as I expected, and the software is good. I bought a cheap Kindle Fire. Then I bought another one. I tried downloading that fitness class track - I can download it, add it to a playlist, and play it all on one device - one £40 device can do something a £1449 iPhone can’t. I also try copying music from my computer - drag and drop, all done in Windows Explorer, no need for and kind of syncing. It just works. They used to say that about Apple...
I start to think about what I actually need from a phone, and realise that £40 Android has nearly all of it. I add some luxuries, like NFC and OLED screens. The field is thinning, but even so Apple is looking increasingly poor value, so I start researching (the £40 device is ok for proof of concept, but it’s too slow to use daily without tearing my hair out). I was waiting impatiently for the OnePlus 6T, then I saw that Samsung had an excellent trade in offer (£350 for my iPhone 7 128gb, the best I’ve seen elsewhere was £190), so today, I ordered an S9 and an overpriced case for a grand total of £358 (and my iPhone 7). I also ordered the new Samsung Watch for £255. So that’s a flagship phone with OLED, plus a watch, for about the same price as an XR with big bezels, a notch, no headphone jack, that can’t download my music. Oh, and I need more storage, I can slot in a micro SD card.
TLDR: Android can do more; do things iOS simply can’t, for significantly less money.
