371–380 of 796 posts
Android phones stopped being attractive to me a few years back. They've become overpriced and it's much harder to make them work acceptably well. iPhones don't appeal to me at all, though. The decline of Android phones is one of the reasons that I've decided go without a smartphone entirely when my current one dies.
yeah... IMO Android 5 I think was more or less the optimum (Nexus 5)
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Apple's real genius is in their marketing. This was clear as day over 10 years ago, and is just as clear today. Back in the early days of iPhone vs Android, there was a huge meme of iPhone users praising Apple for "inventing" features that Android had years ago [0]. I remember (but can't find right now) a screenshot of a conversation of an iPhone user all happy about iPhone getting SwiftKey and then saying "When is A…
> While the meme of "iPhone is better than Android because iPhone can do X" while Android has been able to do X for over 2 years no longer applies It applied as recently as 2020 with iOS 14 releasing picture in picture video, which Android has had since 8 in 2017.
So the real take away is Google is up 48% and everyone else is down with Apple down 5%. Sales have been flat in the USA since 2018 https://www.statista.com/statistics/191985/sales-of-smartpho...
It doesn't exactly seem fair to say Google is up 48% when they went from 2% to 3% of the market. It seems to me that their growth is almost entirely coming from Samsung. The numbers are jumpy enough that I also wonder how much when different phone makers announce their new wares affects the numbers.
I am not surprised because they've been advertising pixel really hard, and they are good phones. Still, it seems a lot more likely to eat into Samsung than Apple market share.
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Because they're hostile to general purpose computing.
General purpose computing is a concept that computer scientists appreciate. The vast majority of consumers buy products based on their cost/benefit of their features and overall experience, not ideology of their technical construction. You won't see too many people who decide to hand wash their dishes because they can't find a dishwasher with an unlocked bootloader. It either satisfactorily washes the dishes or it do…
Apple killed it by turning computers into "devices" and "platforms". And now Google is killing the web.
Fuck these two companies. They're too big, too unilaterally powerful, and their greed to control knows no bounds.
Android’s problem is Pixel is the only good one, and it has not been flagship quality since the Pixel 2. The 3 had odd issues, the 4 had a laughable battery life, and 5-7 are a weird mix of midrange and flagship capability (trending towards flagship, but not in the club yet). All other Android vendors are on a continuum of crap, between these points: 1. loaded with bloat and customizations that aren’t better than wha…
Meanwhile, Google steps on the rake of not putting enough battery in the phone every single time. I swear I've not seen a single flagship pixel review that hasn't mentioned bad battery. If it's bad out of the box, how bad will it be in 2 years?
The one thing that eats the battery alive is Instagram, which is great as it gives me one more reason to avoid it.
I wonder if the 15 and USB-C might be a surprisingly big upgrade driver?
IMO, outside of the tech world, nobody really cares about USB-C - or at least - not enough to drive upgrades. It's just what one end of the power cord looks like.
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I'm constantly amazed by how people spend so much of their income on Apple products; it's almost like their lives are ruled by the status they feel an iPhone brings (and the consequential sacrificial purchasing). It likely varies by area and average income, here it's almost an inverse correlation - the less-well off kids at school tend to have parents on iPhones and the comfortable parents are on whatever works for t…
It isn’t any different than buying Nike, Gucci, or Michael Kors. Many folks are extremely brand and status conscious. Appearing high status is more important than many other expenses.
Battery life degrades and it slows down a tad, but there isn't the same pressing need to upgrade of yore.
"I don't see how anyone still buys an ____. How can you not see the overwhelming evidence that ____ is unequivocally the better phone?"
If either device can fit in either blank, as it has all over this thread, perhaps that's because there hasn't been any undeniably impactful feature improvements on either platform in the last decade.
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Which bloatware and what problems does it make you? For me, I don't really consider Microsoft Office as bloatware as I can use it, plus, what's bloatware for you might be useful apps for others, and I found it stays out of my way once I push it to the side if I don't need it, so it's existence is a non-issue for usability. Samsung bloatware used to be bad in the past but now it's decent IMHO, and I think people are b…
I don't want the OS to have any material differences at all between devices. Android should be like Windows, which is the same no matter where it's running. Even the "good" changes that manufacturers make are unwelcome, because they dull much of the appeal of an OS like Android where hardware vendors are interchangeable and can be switched on a whim without software downsides. I don't want to become dependent on some…
Go to AOSP source and the "phone app" you'll find there is deprecated, ugly crap that no one ever uses.
The 'nice' one is just a google app that's not only closed source, but equally bloated as the samsung's one.
People give google's apps this weird pass, as it's not the same kind of bloat as the manufacturers one, but there is no reason to treat them differently.