I was an immediate Android adopter with the Dream/G1, then the G2 when it released. Then my partner got an iPhone. I played with it for like a half hour, and was like “this is so goddamn smooth.” I switched to an iPhone 5, and used it for ALMOST FIVE YEARS! They did give me a free battery replacement, but after five years, it still worked just fine. I’m a hardcore PC enthusiast (currently have three machines I’ve built, one more in progress, and a SFF in planning) but I’m never switching back from iPhones. My G1 got hella slow after like a year (understandable; it’s new tech) and custom ROMs helped. Same story with G2 (nightmare to install custom ROM on that…)

I also work on computers all day, and play on computers at home. I just want a phone that goes fast, can handle me never deleting a single text, and can go fast with 10k+ photos, even 3-5 years old. iOS DOMINATES this. I never have to do a full format, I restart my phone maybe once every two months. I don’t like or use iTunes except to make the easiest fucking incremental full system images ever. When I finally got a new phone, I plugged it in, clicked NEW PHONE, and it made it EXACTLY THE SAME as my previous phone. Zero effort. I’m on an XS max now and I’m only considering upgrading because the new models have 120hz screens, which ugh… yum. Also would be nice to have less ISO grain when taking low light cat pix.

[–] dojan@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Haha I feel this. I have to say I rather miss early smartphone days. Just looked up the Dream G1 and it was such a fun design. There's almost no innovation nowadays which makes sense, market segment has stabilised. At most we see those rubbish foldables with screens that break over a weekend.

I'm likely sticking to Apple too. I absolutely have my gripes with them, but when it works (which is most of the time) it works really well. I had an Android/Google smart TV box on my dumb TV, and it was okay. Super laggy, very unresponsive, crashed every so often, but once it worked it was mostly fine. Sometimes there were audio sync issues and whatnot. Got an Apple TV a while ago and it's dreamy by comparison. It also slots in with the rest of the Apple ecosystem, so I can watch films and whatnot late at night, with surround sound in my earbuds, while my roomie is sleeping soundly in the other room.

My gripes are mostly with the platforms being so locked down. I wish I could get xbox game stream on the Apple TV, but because of the vetting process it's not allowed on iOS at all.

Funny thing about upgrading phones, I was thinking about maybe swapping to the new phone this year, not because I strictly need it (though my camera has some sort of blemish) but the potential USB-C port is very tantalising. Now I'm thinking about holding off until the self-swappable batteries might come. Unsure if my XS would hold up until 2027 or beyond, but I wouldn't be too surprised. The battery has under 80% health, but still runs at peak performance so I've not bothered having it changed. Changing it would also only cost about $70 so it's not a huge deal either.

Sure, it's a walled garden. A very well protected one at that, almost like a prison. But it's a damned nice garden. I'm still entertaining the thought of buying one of the new ARM minis.

[–] Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago

I’ve considered an Apple TV! But we went with just tons of desktop computers instead. Every screen has a computer on it, so we can stream/torrent/do anything we want.

One is old and has one 80mm fan only. Phenom II, for reference. It’s LOUD. but it worked well enough.

We’re actually replacing that with an M2 Mac Mini next week. The cheap one, but with the dock w/internal SSD port (1TB=60USD) and an external HDD to back stuff up with. We don’t NEED that for just doing general computer tasks, but we DO something to manage our 120k-150k photos we have. And I hate to say it, but nothing comes close to iPhoto for sorting that many photos.