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Comment by ebiester | Hacker News Reader

My apple phones have consistently been good for 3-4 years, making the yearly outlay similar. The differences aren't in the CPU features but rather the screen and camera features. The high end apple phone from two years ago still has a better screen than the budget android today and the camera is probably better as well - perhaps equal at worst.

No, I don't have a headphone jack (and yes, it is annoying) but it isn't the only tradeoff. (For example, being left handed, my palm triggers the back button on many android phones when I reach for something on the screen.)

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> My apple phones have consistently been good for 3-4 years, making the yearly outlay similar.

That depends a lot. The sum total of every smartphone I've owned since 2012 (4 phones, ~$1100 Canadian before tax) is comparable to the cost of a single current generation iPhone.

That's a good way of looking at it. In my case, the total is $600 (US) across three phones since 2011, thanks to Google's discounting of off-contract phones on the Play store for Google Fi customers. I've been consistently happy with these phones, and they're flexible in areas that I think would frustrate me if I tried to use an Apple device.

I may revisit Apple devices once they're done with their headphone jack fiasco. I like their recent privacy focus.

I had used them in the past and even tried to take them into their third and fourth years, but they felt sluggish and had more and more app crashes as I fell behind the adoption curve. At their price point I'm absolutely expecting a 4+ year lifespan. I think Apple has a different vision though and is aiming a little more upmarket than where I am.

Not sure what you mean. Headphone jacks are never coming back to Apple devices, but Apple’s improvement of performance for older models has gotten better. iOS 13 will significantly benefit devices going back quite a few models.

Latter stage CPUs in iOS devices hold up better than they tended to 5 years ago. I have an iPhone 8 in my house that gets used every day. Not a struggle.. I do remember when a 2 year old iPhone would feel crippingly slow around the time a new model was released. Not the experience these days.

Apple is well known for removing things: floppy drives, optical drives, serviceable storage and RAM, serviceable batteries, F-key rows, FireWire ports, Ethernet ports, MagSafe, USB-A ports, matte-finish displays, etc. There’s always dissent. Yet they never reverse course.

"Yet they never reverse course."

That's because they don't have to. A lot of Apple customers don't even consider competing products. Apple could release a Macbook without a keyboard and there would still be a contingent of users willing to stick with it and explaining that you start to prefer it after a while. A lot of their decisions were good, or at least made sense in the long run (and were just introduced earlier than customers would have preferred,) but they're pretty much unaccountable at this point, I think.

> Yet they never reverse course.

The “trash can” Mac Pro would like a word...

I guess that depends on whether or not the new Mac Pro is reverting to what they had previously or they simply ended a design and replaced it.

> I like their recent privacy focus.

“Recent”? Apple has been focused on privacy for quite awhile , they just didn’t make a big deal about it. Apple has had my personal information including my credit card on file for almost 29 years and I have never received marketing emails from 3rd parties nor has Apple suffered a hacker security breach.

Slightly OT: The new Android 10 gesture navigation would likely solve your back button problem.

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