Yeah we all are bad influences here. I loved the Note series, too. This is really a Note. I don't care what it's called now, it's a Note. And really it was a Note that first drew me and my husband to Samsung for keeps. I'm really glad that One UI is so refined now. Touch Wiz was clunky back in the day.
TouchWiz was certainly not a Wiz at anything. Lol. I had custom roms running back in those days because of how much I hated TouchWiz. Rooted and custom rom firmware back when you could do those things with a Samsung phone. TouchWiz was like Windows UI on Android.
Now Samsung has come so far. Still they add a lot of duplicate apps but the software actually looks good now. Lol
I have my Pixel which I prefer the Pixel UI for the most part but there are now some areas I actually prefer OneUI and that is a pretty amazing accomplishment for Samsung.
I only had one note series, the note 10. It all started with the s4 for me. Plastic frame with chromed edges and the plastic stickers that they still put on their phones, removable battery and SD card. The jelly scroll AMOLED screen. But for the time it was a darn good phone.
We all support each other in our tech addiction. BUT this was a good year for Samsung. I feel like there was a genuine benefit to upgrading even from just a year ago. As much as I like new tech I don't always have that opinion. In fact, I felt the iPhone 14 release this year was mostly a stagnant year which is why I didn't get an iPhone. I do think Apple will be interesting this year again and possibly next and the 14 series is not bad as long as you got a Pro model. It is just if you had a 13 Pro Max I really felt there was no reason to upgrade and of course you really shouldn't upgrade every phone every year but sometimes the updates to a phone year over year are big enough to do it or the refinement along with under the hood updates are big enough.
Samsung really refined and upgraded the internals this year and sometimes that is a better upgrade than a complete redesign with minor internal updates.