I can't disagree that Brand Prestige is a big part of their marketing and branding. I used Android phones and linux or MS operating systems on PCs exclusively for my entire life, until the last 2 years or so. I was also quite zealously anti-Apple and anti-Apple-fanboy, and I considered their 1984 ad to be incredibly ironic.
Once the fifth android device in a row bricked on me I made a decision to try an iPhone 11. I couldn't be happier. It just worked, never crashed, and certainly didn't brick during the time I used it, just under 2 years. I recently upgraded to an iPhone 13 and am still thrilled with it. I never had an Android phone that lasted longer than a year before issues started to surface, and I never had one make it 2 years ever.
The performance of the iPhone made the take the plunge to try a MacBook Pro for my personal use. Couldn't be happier with that, either: it offers a linux-like experience on the command line, and provides a mostly great UI (I don't care for Finder--but I haven't any other real complaints).
Edit: my Android phone purchases were top-of-the-line models: Nexus and Pixel phones purchased off Google directly.
I am not sure what budget range you were choosing for these Android phones you mentioned. If you spent the same amount of money that you spend on an iPhone 13/11 on an android, it wouldn't brick. My Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and S2 are still working. They aren't fast but they could be used if I was desperate. I am glad iPhones worked out for you, but I have to say I haven't had any problems with the Androids I have used. I also like that I can root and customize the OS at a deep level. I have an iPad mini and iPod touch. I am familiar with both ecosystems. My iPad mini 4 has crashed on me and it is getting worse with every iOS/iPadOS update. Ram seems to be the limiting factor.
I've had plenty of bad experiences with flagship Android devices. Nexus 5x bootlooped after about 12 months. I had an Essential phone that decided to be off, but not respond to the power button; a known issue with no fix other than to wait until the battery drained itself all the way (which isn't fast because the device is mostly off). If you wait long enough to find out if an Android device is long term reliable, it's not going to be available as a new devicd anymore, and even if it was, you will have a much shorter period of updates after purchase.
All that said, if you want value for money, you embrace the disposable nature of Android devices, and buy around the $200 mark. They may not consistently last much more than a year, but $/year on phones is much less. If you can get upstart flagship phones when they've crashed down to earth, even better: Fire, Robin, Essential was a nice period of commercial flops that made decent phones (baring that power state issue). And Mr. Rubin is rumored to be working on a new upstart phone, so maybe another good buy is coming up soon. (Hopefully with a headphone jack this time)
The definition of flagship is specious at best. Recent Pixels have been coming out with budget mid-range processors and less technological prowess as compared to their brethren from Samsung etc, and the camera is at a standstill since the Pixel 2.
On the other hand, devices like the Nexus 4 had a big emphasis on powerful CPU and midrange price. Safe to say that Google's strategy is fluid, to put it charitably.
That is like saying the 601 limousine was Trabant's flagship product. Sure, yes, you are technically correct but... no. The Nexus devices were less than half the price of actual flagship products.
Back when the Nexus came out, the top iPhones were selling for $599, if I recall correctly. So at $400 it was more than half, but that's splitting hairs because it was Google's flagship. By sales volume a bit player, but it occupied tremendous mindshare because of the brand.
I paid $400 (or more?) for what was billed from google as their premier nexus device (I just got whatever the lowest RAM was). I got it for a testing device. What was lauded was "doesn't come with carrier bloatware/apps". OK. Fine. It was a middling experience at best, but was presented as Google's 'best' at that time.
> If you spent the same amount of money that you spend on an iPhone 13/11 on an android, it wouldn't brick.
In my experience that has not been quite true. Do you consider it fair to consider top of the line Pixels with mainstream non-Pro iPhones? I'd say they are roughly in the same price class. If so, I can tell you almost every other if not every single Nexus/Pixel generation has major and widespread issues after a year or so. iPhones usually have none of that and they have longer software update cycle.
Huh? What kind of issues are you talking about? The person above said 5 bricks in the row. You have to try really hard to get that even with cheap noname Android phones.
As for non-critical issues, the debacles with "holding it wrong" and forced low performance mode are quite memorable. I don't remember anything quite as bad as forced slowdown in the Nexus/Pixel line.
We have a box of bricked Google branded handsets in the office. It’s quite normal. They’re not worth repairing or replacing. Conversely we have no dead iPhones at all (apart from where some idiots cratered them). We’re rolling out iPhone 12 and 13 to replace the androids. In fact a friend of mine’s flagship galaxy that is 11 months old dropped dead in the middle of nowhere the other day and left her up shit creek. She went to the apple store on Monday and bought an iPhone 13.
>We have a box of bricked Google branded handsets in the office.
And here's why:
>It’s quite normal. They’re not worth repairing or replacing.
People have bricked and broken iPhones fixed all the time. In my small 50k citizen town there are three shops that only fix iPhones. That's all they do for a living. There's exactly zero "Android repair shops". At best you could ask one of the iPhone shops if they can help. Please stop this myth of Apple devices not breaking. They break all the time.
It kind of depends on the user. My iPhones never break. My daughter's - who actually USES them - are a consumable. Mostly they die due to physical damage or because of the battery croaking after multiple charge cycles per day, but I think she had one where she broke the flash before physically breaking the phone beyond repair.
Now to nitpick on your post: is it possible that there are a lot more iPhone users than Android users in your town? In mine there are no iPhone repair shops, just generic phone repair shops that fix everything if they can.
Edit: there's a discussion further down about plastic laptops vs aluminium laptops and someone saying his plastic laptops never broke. He should take a look at my daughter's laptop :)
Never been a brand zealot, never will be, but also almost never seen what you say either. I used Androids for almost 6 years before jumping to iPhones. Androids were consistently unreliable and had to be repaired or changed often -- severely lagging just mere months after a buy, bugs that go unfixed for a full year, displays randomly getting super dim, batteries getting hot and going to 60% of the original capacity in just several months, volume buttons breaking etc. I am on my 3rd iPhone and I completely forgot that my phone can be a source of trouble. I have no reason to make this up. I am a normal consumer who goes after reliability.
I understand that many people are somewhat offended by Apple's mere existence (because they indeed do plenty of shady stuff) but please strive to be more objective. Not everything that Apple does is bad and your generalization is not helpful.
And as another poster said, any smartphone will break if you're rough with it. I've seen my fair share of drunk girls dropping their phone on a concrete floor, clumsily trying to pick it up, proceed to fall ass-first directly on it, and then rage how the phone is "trash for breaking as easily".
> In my small 50k citizen town there are three shops that only fix iPhones.
I live in a capital city (~2.5M people) and I know a smartphone shop owner who also owns 2 service/repair shops. He gave up on repairing Androids because Android users are very price-sensitive (his words): "they buy a phone for 220 EUR and when they hear a replacement for the display they broke is 90 EUR they just say: screw that, I'll buy a new one, or just grumpily leave". He was paying 2 Android phone technicians to basically sit around twiddling their thumbs all day, for basically 4-8 repairs a month, so he let them go and paid for his iPhone technicians to learn Android repairs for the occasional customer who needed them.
The iPhone "repairs" were mostly routine work in comparison: many people, myself included, routinely swap the battery when it reaches 80% capacity (because at that point you do notice a reduced battery life). Often people break their displays so they need new ones. Very rarely they had to actually replace a logic board or anything else internally.
The shop owner also told me that he can count on the fingers of one hand the iPhones he has to completely replace in warranty during any given 3-6 months period.
As is the case with 98% of everything, the reasons for a phenomena are economic. No grand conspiracies or big bads.
I mean, I am sorry, but I find it extremely hard to believe in 5 bricks in a row. Even if we optimistically take that 1 of 10 devices bricks on its own, the parent would be pretty unique at 1 per 10000. That just does not add up. Some significant part is missing from that story.
The nexus line cost less than half of actual flagship products. Besides, I disagree they had widespread problems. I owned almost one of each type and all are still functioning 100%. My girlfriends old iPhones on the other hand are broken, every single one of them. Now she buys Android phones and they work just fine. See, anecdotes are useless.
I have bought flagship android devices from many brands. The most expensive Samsung Galaxy native Google Maps app would be more laggy than an iPhone SE in the web view gmaps (and the native app would be even smoother).
The only exceptions I've had where performance was reasonable given the price are Sony's phones, the LG G1(?) and some of the pixels. But generally speaking everything on Android stutters _so much_ it's really painful.
I have always had this silly theory that this is somehow a Java thing, because there have been very motivated people trying to get low latency stuff working on Android and are just unable to... but it's just unavoidable no matter how much money you spend.
I am not an Android developer myself, but my understanding is that you can write extremely performant code, so it's probably not true that Java is holding back developers who want to write stutter-free apps.
So this might have changed, it's been a while since I looked into Android dev, but I think that some of the C++ integration stuff ends up hitting FFI latency. So you can get good performance, but you're still bound to (for example) latency in the input layer because your hooks into the OS HID layer is still going through the same stuff, _and_ you have some FFI nonsense.
I imagine that thanks to people at Epic and Unity that things will have improved much on that front, it's not like games don't exist on Android after all.
All in all, Google just made a big disservice to the Java community with their Dalvik and ART forks running Android Java, and the sooner they are on their coozy Kotlin universe with Android running on top Kotlin/Native (Kotlin is after all so much better than Java /s), the better.
It's also about controlling both the hardware and the software and the resulting integration. Like people were able to create not stuttering games with 8 bit CPUs in the 80s.
I was purchasing them right off Google: Nexus and Pixel phones, very much the same price point as iPhone. I assure you, they were very poorly made (one Nexus had a faulty power button that caused the phone to constantly power cycle) and the software was terribly unstable besides. I suppose I got statistical outliers every single time, but while it's possible it's not likely.
Nexus phones were cheap compared to iPhone, that was their whole differentiation. For example, Nexus 5 launched at $349 while at the same time iPhone 5 launched at $649. There's nothing comparable in those prices.
If you really did buy all of these, then you certainly didn't pay the same price. And after that, there was 3 years break before first Pixel - so you used a bricked phone for 3 years? Or it worked fine for 3 years?
Unless they stated otherwise elsewhere, why are you assuming they went from the Nexus 5 straight to the Pixel? There’s also the Nexus 6 (2014) and 5X/6P (2015) before the Pixel (2016).
Only one of my flagship android phones bricked iself: a Samsung S3.
The rest just became painfully slow.
When I tap camera and the flagship phone seems to have to finish a conversation with some server somewhere before camera opens and the moment is gone then I get annoyed.
So after iPhone got user replacable keyboards I dared to try it and it has been better for me.
> My Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and S2 are still working.
My Galaxy S4 and Note 4 were working quite fine ~18 months later, but only technically. They were aggravatingly slow and I was factory-resetting them each every 3 months, also rooted them and de-bloated them quite thoroughly. This rejuvenated them for a while but then some mere 1-2 months later they were back to a crawl.
We can throw anecdotal evidence around until the end of time but to say older Samsung are working only applies in very strict dictionary terms and not what an average user would find acceptable (f.ex. various functions were routinely taking 2-3 seconds before the device responded). Several acquaintances had the same experiences.
I believe generalizing all Android phones without differentiating between a flagship experience and budget price experience to be a dishonest representation.
Is it though? You have a reasonably consistent and good experience from iPhone SE to 13 Pro Max. Why would it be unreasonable to expect the same from Androids?
(Personally I have found the real differentiator is not the price, but the amount of crap the vendor adds. There are crap 1k+ phones running Android and often you can find some cheaper ones that have a better software experience)
You have a fairly reasonably consistent experience going from one Samsung to the next, or from an LG v20 to LG v60. But, going from a Samsung to an LG? Yeah, there's differences. They're skinned differently, some have their own custom apps by default that aren't stock Android. Each does certain things slightly better or worse.
As an example, in my experience and preference, I've preferred the audio on my LG phones to my prior Samsung phones (I don't use my current Samsung with headphones at all, as it doesn't have a 3.5mm plug and I don't have an adapter and I don't want wireless headphones, pure personal preference there on no wireless and I've had no need for an adapter for the duration I've had the Samsung this last 9 months). I'd say for my personal taste and use, the audio experience has been a fair comparison as I've used the exact same headphones and largely listen to the exact same music files across the different phones (literally by moving the SD card from one phone to the next, no copying involved). I'm sure someone out there will disagree, though, and that's fine.
But, there you go and counter an anecdote with another just like OP pointed out. I can counter the counter too: I have all my old Android phones - all the way back to my Sony Mini (with sliding keyboard!) and they all work just fine. All of my girlfriends old iPhones are broken or bricked. I'm sure that wasn't what you meant with a reasonably consistent experience from Apple devices. There are a ton a Apple repair shops in any town so its not unreasonably to say that it isn't a rarity that they break. These are anecdotes and you simply cannot use it to compare.
IMO that Apple devices break less are a myth. They just get repaired instead of thrown out hence last longer on average.
Also the SE cost twice what most Android phones cost. It is not a budget phone.
iPhone SE (which you seem to describe as "budget price experience" considering the message you're replying too) base price is 489€. I can buy 2 very decent budget price Android devices for that amount of money. 6 if I don't go with decent.
Prestige is great and can really juice sales, but it only works for so long. If your product isn’t good the prestige won’t last.
I’m not saying your product has to be the absolute best, but it needs to somewhat earn its reputation.
Brands have lost their prestige in the past for this exact reason. Some probably are right now.
Apple has been a juggernaut for ~20 years (since the first iPod). The “people just buy for the prestige” argument can’t hold that long if that’s all a brand has.
macs make up 10% of apples quarterly revenue[1], with iphone being pretty much always at least 50%.
with something that makes up a practically annual or semi-annual purchase (iphone) vs mac (maybe every 4-5 years?) i think the social value plays a massive role, and the actual product simply has to have plausible deniability of being "good enough to justify the price."
frankly, iphones being $1k+ is part of their social perceived value.
nobody is saying iphones are bad. but apple throws its weight around in bad-faith ways. and they get justified by the apple bloggers. the "walled garden" is part of the prestige.
oneplus 6t - Nov 2018 to present, and i can't justify buying a new phone yet. i will probably need to replace the battery soon though.
my laptop is a mid 2014 macbook pro i traded my unused vacation for when i left that job. still going strong. amazing actually, considering it's 8 years old now.
I’ve got the same mid-2014 mbp. I had to get the battery replaced, but otherwise it’s been the longest lived laptop I’ve had that still gets regular use.
I had a nexus 6, too. I was doing some mobile development at the time and figured that a flagship product would be a good introduction to android ecosystem. It wasn’t a bad phone, but I was surprised that the build materials weren’t on par with anything Apple had at the time. The screen was good and responsive, but seemed plasticky and 2nd rate compared to the glass that both high-end Samsungs and Apple used.
Similar experience with the nexus 9 tablet. Good idea, meh execution.
Maybe things have changed, but the nexus line, considering it is (was?) a flagship product, didn’t seem to live up to expectations.
Nexus were never premium. It was cheap-ish high-end SoC best demonstration of Android OS.
However, Pixels are definitely meant to be flagships, and IMO they are still not worth that name.
Anecdata: my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 fell quite literally hundred times more than my Pixel 5 (I was very clumsy/drunk by then, and got better), and is still perfectly alive , while my Pixel 5's display broke very easily (it's not even the glass that is broken, it's some internal circuitry). Maybe phones were to be tougher back then? Well, I also have a Samsung Galaxy S10e, it survived many falls just fine (well it does seem a tad worse than my Galaxy Note 2, because paint goes off where it fell).
I had the successor to the nexus 6, the nexus 6p, and it had a noise cancellation issue that canceled out voices instead of the background. Made the phone completely unusable as phone. I rarely made phone calls and didn't realize the issue wasn't just sporadic until out of manufacturers warranty. Haven't bought an android since (I also really disliked the hey google stuff they were integrating at the time.)
The bricking might have been your usage of it. I own an old Android phone (moto g 1) and it still works just fine. How old is that now? 10 years? Probably. It only has become a bit slow, as apps require more performance.
> my Android phone purchases were top-of-the-line models: Nexus and Pixel phones purchased off Google directly.
So the problem is with Google's phones not with Android in general. Anecdotally my Samsung Galaxy S2 failed after 6 years (which is sad but fair IMHO), my Sony Xperia Compact still works after 5 years, same for a Samsung A40 after 3 years.
I think you have encapsulated the concept of FOMO.
Undoubtedly, for the money Apple devices cost - they better damn well work flawlessly for the next 10-15 years. But they don't. I use a MBP and iMac for work and I hate it.
The price difference between iPhones and high-end, official Android (e.g., Nexus, Pixel) phones is negligible.
It's simply not possible as far as I've seen to purchase a PC laptop with similar construction quality (when they're not plastic garbage they're poor imitations of the metal body and interior layout), but one can pay almost as much for a MacBook Pro to get a PC laptop with similar or somewhat superior performance characteristics. That construction quality is worth a premium price point.
I prefer plastic and other material than aluminum unibody. They are lightweight, solid enough, not become too cool, not edgey, and soft. Don't link aluminum == premium.
It’s inferior in every respect, quite aside from any “cool” factor. It breaks easily and it doesn’t support the non-plastic pieces (e.g. the monitor) well are two of the most important factors.
I guess the point is "citation needed". What you said is "common sense", but the source of that "common sense" is mostly marketing material. At least I don't recollect seeing any hard data, that would support either of those claims.
FWIW, I'm reading this on an early 2013 MBP. I think it would still have years of use in it, but new MacOS versions don't support it any more and I have this gut feeling that Linux maintainers aren't okay with the idea of supporting decade old hardware from the hateful enemy.
Not quite sure what you were doing. I have been using Android since the HTC Desire Z (T-Mobile G2 in the US) in 2010, I’ve been rooting and installing multiple custom roms (only on my last phone did I switch to just staying on official LineageOS), and I never had a single phone get bricked. I have no idea how you managed to do that while staying on stock, not have I ever heard of people having such issues.
None of my Android phones lasted under 2 years, my last one lasted almost 5 years and only got replaced because I wanted a slightly better camera, and both the battery and USB-C connector started to fail.
> We have a box of bricked Google branded handsets in the office. It’s quite normal. They’re not worth repairing or replacing. Conversely we have no dead iPhones at all (apart from where some idiots cratered them). We’re rolling out iPhone 12 and 13 to replace the androids. In fact a friend of mine’s flagship galaxy that is 11 months old dropped dead in the middle of nowhere the other day and left her up shit creek. She went to the apple store on Monday and bought an iPhone 13.
But maybe the issue is just with Samsung or Google phones, Samsung I dislike as much as Apple, Google phones (the Pixel ones, I had the Nexus) seem overpriced for my needs.
Maybe, but what you consider bricked, and what a layperson would consider a bricked phone will also differ. Which drastically reduce the chance of a truly bricked phone. Getting an android to the point of being unrecoverable is definitely harder than an iPhone. But that is irrelevant for $MYMUM
Yeah, I’ve had 2 or 3 soft bricks or bootloops. *Always* after doing a mistake when flashing a new ROM. Even with custom roms, the worst thing during normal usage I encountered was an unexpected restart.
Once the fifth android device in a row bricked on me I made a decision to try an iPhone 11. I couldn't be happier. It just worked, never crashed, and certainly didn't brick during the time I used it, just under 2 years. I recently upgraded to an iPhone 13 and am still thrilled with it. I never had an Android phone that lasted longer than a year before issues started to surface, and I never had one make it 2 years ever.
The performance of the iPhone made the take the plunge to try a MacBook Pro for my personal use. Couldn't be happier with that, either: it offers a linux-like experience on the command line, and provides a mostly great UI (I don't care for Finder--but I haven't any other real complaints).
Edit: my Android phone purchases were top-of-the-line models: Nexus and Pixel phones purchased off Google directly.