I recently made a big change, from the title of this you can most likely guess what it’s going to be. I purchased my first iphone since 2013. I have been an avid Android fan for a decade at this point and I am unfortauntely going back to the walled garden that is Apple. Here are some of my reasons why.
My Android History
I have had several versions of Android phones over my time. Starting with the various off brand cheap phones that I had as a kid that endeared me to the customizable nature of the Android Operating System. While these phones were not much they offered some slick abilities to customize the layout, look of icons, even rooting the phone to access even more power user functions than before. The iOS of this time didn’t even have anything close. You could barely customize anything, you had predefined settings that were suited to someone clearly but definately not me.
My first adult purchase of an Android phone was the Samsung Galaxy S8. This phone was beautiful and powerful at the time.
I actually still had and used this phone as a hotspot/travel phone up until recently when I gave it to a family member to use. It was a fantastic phone and at the time of it’s release it had a cool factor to it that drew me to it. In addition to being Samsung’s flagship phone it had a curved screen and interesting things that were promised that you could do with it. I imagined a world of edge notifications scrolling by and slight animations however, all I got was a side bar that was utterly useless. It was more annoying than anything else by coming up when I did not even intend to use it.
After this phone I moved to a Pixel 5.
This phone I also still have in my possession however instead of letting it sit I will most likely give this to another family member in need of a new phone. I did not dislike this phone and had no imagination about what I was getting into. At the time I purchased this phone I wanted a cheap, reliable phone that ran Android. I had become disallusioned with Samsung’s design choices when it came to One UI. This was refreshing as Google was actually getting pretty good at the integration of Android with some other products, Notably among these were the Pixel buds. It gave me vibes of an ecosystem without all of the walls Apple puts around theirs.
Finally my last Android Phone as a ZFold 4…
This phone is not old. In fact it is quite new at the time of writing this post as my wife loves to remind me. An expensive paperweight in my closet at the moment. I had illusions that I could sell it however it pains me to see how disgusting the resellable phone market is when it comes to private selling a phone. I refuse to sell a device that I paid so much into for less than half of it’s original value. Therefor it sits in solitude in my closet musuem.🤡
I loved this phone however, I loved the idea of it actually. The phone itself had some issues which I will touch on later. For the most part the idea I had for the phone seemed to be to be a good one. I wanted a larger screen phone that I could do some of my mobile Network Engineering work on. Think consoling into switches and the like. Which the phone did very well. Combine a case with a stand and a USB-C cable and you had a mobile workstation to do all manner of network troubleshooting. While my collegues carried laptops I was carrying a cell phone.
It also had the benefit of being a Samsung phone which means it came with DEX. This worked fantastically for what I wanted to do when I was traveling around the school district I worked for. I was able to plugin to ANY monitor along my route for the day and do the work I needed to do.
However it developed issues along the way in the way of it’s screen protector. Once the factory installed screen protector began to come off, I peeled it all the way off and ordered a new one. However the new screen protector did not stay on correctly once the phone folded and unfolded several times. Rather than fiddle with it I moved off of the phone to a job issued iPhone that I already had in my possession. It had recently been paid off so I could have both my personal SIM and the job SIM in the phone at the same time.
Why I chose apple.
The Ecosystem
The Ecosystem that Apple has is by far in a way better than the options avaliable to Android users. Some people will say that Apple’s Ecosystem is exactly the reason they don’t want apple products in their house.
The simple things
I have a few simple things that I believe that technology should just do. However it is incredibly dismaying that we cannot achieve simple integrations between devices. I believe that Apple does this extremely well for the small things. Let me share some quick examples of what I mean.
-
I was sitting with my company issued Macbook one day and walked away from my internet source. This is a typical issue for workers who are mobile needing to roam and such. Well I was astonished to find that when I clicked on the WiFi icon in the uppper right hand corner it had a list of my iPhone and iPad which were nearby, both of which had cellular. I clicked one of these and boom. I had WiFi. I understand that it is simple and could easily be accomplished on other distros but the clean implementation of the Apple Platform just made me kind of think, Why isn’t it this easy everywhere.
-
My second example is the use of my iPad as a Seconday Display. I have a 10inch iPad Air which I purcahsed mainly for on the go remote desktop capability. I have attempted at various points use it as a second display for my Windows and Linux machines and did have some success with various VNC clients, however it was not polished at all and was prone to various issues. In comes the MacOS Sidecar capability for the iPad. It is absolutely brilliant. Using this 10 inch display that while using a Mac almost has no use case for me unless I can use it as a second display is brilliant. The ability to connect it via cable OR network via WiFi is also absolutely brilliant.
These items probably sound like small potatos and I am sure that someone will come and tell me that “oh you can do it this way” and I know that you can. However this post is more about where an ecosystem shines. Where the small time saving measures actually begin to add up.
Where I am now
I have almost moved my entire mobile ecosystem over to Apple. You simply cannot beat the battery life, integration, and ease of use on the go with any other system currently. The M Series chips and integrations really make the difference for a professional on the go. I want to stress that this is for the mobile ecosystem. I still have Linux for my servers and Windows as my primary desktop. I believe that for now atleast Apple is the king of the mobile world and until I see something interesting coming from Android or Microsoft or even a player like Framework (which I am interested in) we will need to continue to give Apple our hard earned money.