I hope no one feels 'not needing to upgrade' is a 'bad thing'
It's a testament to Apple's build quality and long term support that you don't need to upgrade.
Samsung and Android are big on the half baked gimmicks and lackluster supports. Those phones you have to upgrade after a few years as they become more bloated than a Windows 95 machine bought from CompUSA.
> Samsung and Android are big on the half baked gimmicks and lackluster supports
Since when? I have a Samsung Galaxy S7 from 2016, and I honestly don't see any bloatware. It's still running smoothly, and without degraded performance.
Contrapoint: I had an S8 and it was full of Samsung cruft including bixby and would barely let me use the phone without a "Samsung account" (which it often prompted me for... often)- it wouldn't even let me use my CardDAV/CalDAV servers. (which, Apple does. :S)
it was some time ago, but I remember being very angry at this phone and being unable to flash it with another OS which made me even more angry. After coming from OnePlus before (Cyanogen) the software quality was horrifyingly bad.
I had the same experience but somehow managed to circumvent /avoid any such account requirement for the replacement when lost that phone soon after buying it. I actually blamed the Samsung account requirement for losing my phone. At the time I argued that if I hadn't been restricted from using it normally on account of the registration demands Samsung was being so aggressive about, I wouldn't have been so indifferent to where I was keeping my phone about my person and consequently, so I told anyone within earshot, it was their fault that I never kept my new phone in a regular and always double checked secreted location. I would love to be able to force that argument thru court just to vex that company. I really think that I had a fair point even if the ultimate responsibility has fall to me, putting the vendors marketing interests before my ability to even use the device they just sold me outright, is a case I want to hear heard nevertheless.
No clue. As I have been rather happy so far with my phone, I haven't followed newer phones much, outside of some bullet points of new and improved functionalities.
> Samsung and Android are big on the half baked gimmicks and lackluster supports. Those phones you have to upgrade after a few years as they become more bloated than a Windows 95 machine bought from CompUSA.
Am I missing something? What are the phones getting bloated with?
My Galaxy S3 was bloated to hell from Samsung and AT&T. Samsung had half naked eye tracking gimmicks and AT&T would constantly be scanning for WiFi points to connect to draining my battery.
The only way to get out of it was to flash another rom. Samsung never really updated the device while I had it.
For some time the software updates I received on my Note made it worse and worse. It’s like each major update was loaded with crap to run on the new hardware, making the experience terrible for the legacy phones.
IIRC wasn't Apple throttling the CPU because of battery degradation and to prevent sudden shutoffs even when it showed >25% battery? In my opinion, they should've said what they were doing, and made it clear that replacing the battery would fix the issue, but I'd rather have the battery status be accurate versus an always fast phone that shuts off randomly.
I distinctly remember my Galaxy S4 or something introducing the "innovative" feature of waving your hand in front of the front camera to scroll web pages.
But Windows 95 wasn't too bad once you removed the bloatware! In fact I think it's faster to use in daily usage due to the lack of animations and GUI candy than modern Windows.
Also, I have an Android device and have had them since the TMobile G1. Early models were hampered by RAM scarcity, and each Android release mentioned the smoother UI (it didn't get great until 6.0 or 7.0?). But in general they were OK (apart from a dreadful Samsung tablet I bought) and the only thing that would "bloat" them is running too many apps concurrently (but then they were "freeze dried" until relaunch) or having too many services running, which recent Android has started to kill vehemently like iOS.
I agree with your Apple build quality support though - my MacBook Pro is 8 years old no problems, and I'm happy with the Air 2 I own that is still supported and useful at decent speeds 5+ years after I bought it.
> It's a testament to Apple's build quality and long term support that you don't need to upgrade.
> Those phones you have to upgrade after a few years
Shall I remind you that Apple was sued and lost in Europe precisely because it forced user to either upgrade after after 3 years or be condemned to live with a phone that was throttled at like 50% cpu clock?
This is exactly why I never bought an iphone again, I don't want my phone to expire after exactly 3 years because of a forced update.
Apple probably stopped doing this since they lost that case, but let's not talk about a "testament to long term support" as if that was a long standing tradition.
I switched to android 7 years ago because of that and never had that kind of issue, Android upgrades don't brick my phone, and I have not noticed a worse build quality even though I am buying "cheap" (OnePlus).
The only thing that is making me consider Apple is privacy.
The throttling was battery related. They could either have the phone shut off or just throttle down, they chose the latter. The fault is assign there is not communicating what the problem was and how to remediate it. They will still swap out your battery for a new one for something like $80 out of warranty, giving the phone another 3+ years of life.
Batteries are always maintenance parts. The fact that modern smartphones and notebooks don't make changing them a trivial operation is condemnable.
At least you can install new batteries with different form factors now. Technically it would be trivial to just have a lid to install new ones.
Profit orientation is worse than customer orientation. It is also an ecological problem. Instead of changing batteries after 2-3 years, people buy new phones.
One might say that the original fault was to include a battery that was somewhat too small, so that after a bit of normal wear, the battery was no longer able to provide the voltage required for demanding situations (e.g., launching the Camera app).
Fortunately, they learned from that mistake and started to make iPhone batteries significantly more powerful. As a nice side effect, even a two-year old iPhone XR, for instance, still has excellent battery life today.
I'm sure this was true for certain phones, but it that case the 'testament to build quality' is clearly unwarranted.
As far as I am concerned my phone never shut off randomly, I was perfectly fine with it. And yes indeed they made absolutely no effort to tell the customer that they could get the battery replaced for like a 10th of the price of a new phone, I don't believe for one second it was a communication error, and not a simple trick to get people to buy a new iPhone.
It's a testament to Apple's build quality and long term support that you don't need to upgrade.
Samsung and Android are big on the half baked gimmicks and lackluster supports. Those phones you have to upgrade after a few years as they become more bloated than a Windows 95 machine bought from CompUSA.