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Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

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Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#221
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old phones have stale batteries that do not last as long as newer phones. In my experience iphone users carry a powerbank with them.

Has there been some breakthrough in lithium ion battery technology in the last 2 years that Im not aware of? I have 2x 2020 SE's which I've used every day and the battery life is still great. Im always surprised how much time I have before shutdown while using my phone at 1%.

I suspect the phone lies about it's true battery levels and reserves (1% - 10%) to display to users as 1%. Is this true? Does anyone have a source for what 1% really means?

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#222
post #119

I attribute most of this to iMessage and the associated lock-in effect. You don't see the same trend in the rest of the world where 3rd party messengers (Whatsapp, Viber, Line, snapchat, etc) are mostly used for comms. The inability of iPhones to easily host 'cracked' apps also acts as an anchor to adoption - theres a lot of people hooked on their cracked ad-free spotify or youtube apps, or games with 'everything fre…

Wait, you use iMessage instead of Whatsapp in the US? I tried iMessage with some friends and I feel like the experience is so much worse, not to mention not having my entire contact list there.

Yes, pretty much everyone uses iMessage here. If you have a non iPhone and try to message an iPhone user you're stuck with slow as molasses, featureless sms which is a huge pain in the ass.

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#223
post #62
post #31

Are there any "real" (come on, techy people, you know what I mean) reasons for going Apple besides I suppose the genuine convenience of fully interoperable phone/messaging across devices (which I fully concede is probably a big one for a good number of people?) The price differences between Android and Apple still strike me as absurd. On the other side, I went from "picking an Android very carefully for rooting" grad…

In isolation, I don't think there's much reason to buy an iPhone right now. I have an iPhone 12 Pro and a Pixel 6a and they're interchangeable as far as I'm concerned. I also have a Mac, AirPods, and an Apple Watch, though. That makes it kind of a no-brainer which phone I carry around with me.

Access to iMessage so that I can text people in less than 10 seconds is the only reason most people need to get an iphone. Apple's incentives with regards to privacy are also much betters than Googles. Neither are great, but apples strategy revolves around selling marked up hardware, while Googles is 100% about getting people to use google products so that they can be served ads.

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#224
post #211

I was a big fan and supporter of Android all the way from version 2.2 up to version 8. The final straw was when my brand new 800 dollar motorola phone, which was owned by google at the time stopped getting updates barely a year after I bought it. I also noticed that everything I liked about Android was slowly being stripped away, and Apple was slowly adding all the things I felt were missing. Still not the biggest fa…

Opposite view: I will never ever buy an Apple phone after they have been caught throttling. At least on Android I can install another OS.

Their big mistake was how they communicated (or didn’t) that it was happening. The technical reasoning behind it was sound, and it resulted in actually prolonging the life of the device.

As the battery wore down, the phone would still function, just slower for peak CPU demand. Other devices would just die and people would buy new ones, so not throttling had the effect of people buying newer devices more often than needed.

The main issue is they should have alerted people that performance was degrading so they could get a new battery.

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#225

I was forced to upgrade my phone earlier due to my previous phone using a no-longer supported version of Android. I realised when speccing out new phones that I don't use half the stuff that they can do, my main use is messaging, calling, GPS and occasional browsing. 5G and battery life is important too. So I went for a Nokia XR20. Then fact it runs Android had no relevance. I can't justify spending £1k on a phone; i…

How does it run l. I bought a cheap Nokia phone in an emergency a couple months back and got stuck with it. All I know for sure is whatever SoC they stuck in there had no business trying to run android.

For my purposes it seems fine. I’ve not noticed any lagging, but then I don’t play games on it.

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can buy an iPhone for the same price or less than most Android phones. $399/429.

And you can sell an iPhone a year or two later for more than the Android phone, making it less expensive overall.

I am on my fifth iPhone. I sold the first three for respectable amounts of cash, and traded in the fourth for the fifth. For the third and fourth, I ended up making a profit versus the cost of the iPhone that replaced them!

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#227
post #224
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opposite view: I will never ever buy an Apple phone after they have been caught throttling. At least on Android I can install another OS.

Their big mistake was how they communicated (or didn’t) that it was happening. The technical reasoning behind it was sound, and it resulted in actually prolonging the life of the device. As the battery wore down, the phone would still function, just slower for peak CPU demand. Other devices would just die and people would buy new ones, so not throttling had the effect of people buying newer devices more often than ne…

No, no. Not for their communication. They sell you hardware that basically isn't yours.

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#228
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. seriously -- your absolutely content-free justification of a great product implies, e.g. that crack dealers are great developers of a great product. I legitimately find this sort of after the fact justification not just bad, but dangerous.

But it's not after the fact. Go talk to someone at Apple and they will tell you before the fact how much work goes into the tiny little details. But you're asking users why, and the answer is how could they possibly know? Either everyone is an idiot and you're somehow not hitting a trillion dollar market cap with that knowledge, or the company is doing something very subtle that adds up in ways that are not articulab…

Views like the ones you are expressing are dangerous and bad for the world, and I hope you grow to understand that.

The ability that you have to equate affinity/addiction to "good/quality" is downright creepy, and sadly symptomatic of literally the worst bits of all of technology.

If you're operating in real life like this, please stop.

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#229

I attribute most of this to iMessage and the associated lock-in effect. You don't see the same trend in the rest of the world where 3rd party messengers (Whatsapp, Viber, Line, snapchat, etc) are mostly used for comms. The inability of iPhones to easily host 'cracked' apps also acts as an anchor to adoption - theres a lot of people hooked on their cracked ad-free spotify or youtube apps, or games with 'everything fre…

I'd heard about some of the imessage exploits prior to getting my iPhone, and so the first thing I did was uninstall imessage. Happily, the OS allowed me to do this. I haven't missed a thing, frankly.

...So you can no longer receive SMS on your iPhone?

Or does Apple allow third-party apps to handle SMS? If so, that would be news to me...

Re: Apple overtakes Android to pass 50% share of smartphones used in US

#230
post #119

I attribute most of this to iMessage and the associated lock-in effect. You don't see the same trend in the rest of the world where 3rd party messengers (Whatsapp, Viber, Line, snapchat, etc) are mostly used for comms. The inability of iPhones to easily host 'cracked' apps also acts as an anchor to adoption - theres a lot of people hooked on their cracked ad-free spotify or youtube apps, or games with 'everything fre…

Wait, you use iMessage instead of Whatsapp in the US? I tried iMessage with some friends and I feel like the experience is so much worse, not to mention not having my entire contact list there.

To be pedantic, and thus clear: "iMessage" isn't an app. It's Apple's messaging protocol, that only works between Apple devices.

"Messages" is the name of the app, and it hosts both iMessage conversations and vanilla SMS conversations.

Personally, I can't imagine being willing to use a proprietary messaging app owned by Facebook for any significant part of my online communication.

Using Messages, my contacts aren't "in an app", they belong to my phone (and to my iCloud account, since I use that service). Any messaging app that I am willing to grant permission to has access to them.

Also, iMessage conversations are end-to-end encrypted, and Apple has shown, repeatedly over the years, that they have no interest in mining them for saleable data.

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