Hacker News Reader

Comment by RHSeeger | Hacker News Reader

Apple makes some really nice devices, but there's a lot of people (myself included) that have a strong aversion to their "you don't want this, you want this other thing that we decided" mentality. Their software commonly does something totally different than what you tell it to do, because they decided it's better. Because of that, I will never own an iphone.

Its frustrating that all the big companies act like "we're big, so we'll do what we want, no matter how annoying it is to the end user" ... and the small companies really can't compete/disrupt the market because they're not big enough.

View on HN

I get this, but honestly it's more important for me to have a phone that works... I can deal with inexplicable software changes, I make some of my own. At one point I had the same iPhone for 4 years.

When I tried Android I couldn't get the same device to stick around for more than a year. After my 5X bootloop fiasco I tried another manufacturer and found out I couldn't even upgrade my software to patch a security issue because I had to wait on the vendor to add their crapware before releasing the update. I waited 6 months after Google released their update and then gave up... I don't know how Android users deal with the update nonsense.

> I get this, but honestly it's more important for me to have a phone that works

This right here is what sums this topic up for me.

Different experiences for different people.

I had my last Android phone for 5 years, and never had a problem until the last month; when it was just too slow and would reboot every now and again. It had security updates for the first 4 years.

My wife just switched off her iphone to an android because there were just too many places where it would ... just do it's own thing instead of what she told it to (like I noted in another response; placing songs on the cloud instead of on her phone like she told it to). It didn't "just work" in a lot of cases, for any sane definition of that phrase.

> It didn't "just work" in a lot of cases, for any sane definition of that phrase.

I was thinking about this the other day, and how Apple's departure from skeuomorphism made a lot of "just works" analogies a lot more dilute. I've never been particularly fond of Apple's design chops, be it from 2008 or 2018, but there's something to be said about how digital Corinthian leather and wood textures makes a person perceive a device. It also made their design philosophy fairly straightforward: if you're designing a digital bookshelf, it should work similarly to a physical one. There was no ambiguous frosted-glass layer of UI, nor "lickable" candy buttons littering your experience. It was just... functional. Modern Apple seems pretty disinterested in that stuff though. Relative to the rest of the tech industry, they're the same clowns in a different circus.

I guess I'm at the point where I just don't care to futz with the device much anymore and try to limit my use of the phone. In the early days you'd load custom ROMs and tweak things and that was a lot of fun. Nowadays I just want something that is secure and works. Nexus and Pixel devices have always been very good at that for me. But now that I don't care so much about that it means the focus is on device lifetime, security and long-term cost. Apple wins those.

But also so many of the people around me use iOS devices now that I end up having to learn how to use them anyway. Yikes I sound like an Apple shill... but the opposite is true. lol

As a more mundane example...

My wife went into iTunes and moved a bunch of songs onto her phone. Then she went out and tried to play those songs... and it tried to download them off the cloud (using data, which is a limited resource). Apparently, copying to the phone didn't _actually_ copy them, just put sort of "shortcut" there pointing at it on the cloud. That was definitely _not_ what she wanted, but the software decided otherwise.

Similar pet peeve: how you can have a tab open on iOS Safari, even for a static page, leave it for 20 seconds, and come back, and then it has to re-download the entire page. It somehow won’t even cache what you had to local storage.

I mean.. that's not a feature. That's a bug (likely due to RAM being full). I rarely if ever have this issue, but I do remember it happening at some point, but that's definitely not a feature that iOS thinks is better.

Really? I mean, I've seen it over ten years of usage, and it's never been any other way, so that sounds like a deliberate decision. At the very least, not using internal storage -- when RAM is needed for something else -- is a decision.

Mobile device OS's do not swap to storage because the typical mobile storage is bottom-of-the-barrel eMMC and the wear-and-tear of swapping on the flash would be a killer.

It would only need to do it in the few occasions when the tabs have filled up the available RAM and they're large enough to be worth dumping. iPhones use bottom of the barrel storage?

I see that sporadically but it's uncommon enough to be noteworthy on an iPhone 11. Do you have an extension installed or are switching to a very RAM-hungry application? I typically only see that if I switched over to do something like edit a video.

No, nothing RAM hungry. Only extensions are adblockers. And it's an iPhone 8, which, yes, I know, is from the Dark Ages where no one could ever expect any amount of data to be stored ever, but this has happened with every iPhone I've had back to 2012, including ones that were bought close to release.

> Apple makes some really nice devices, but there's a lot of people (myself included) that have a strong aversion to their "you don't want this, you want this other thing that we decided" mentality. Their software commonly does something totally different than what you tell it to do, because they decided it's better. Because of that, I will never own an iphone.

I feel like this gets talked about a lot in the abstract but it's rare that I actually run into a limitation in normal usage, and when it is I usually agree with the decision behind it (e.g. limiting cross-application data access for security reasons or moving away from kernel extensions). I think the best example is not supporting different browser engines but I have very mixed emotions there because I'd love to be able to use Firefox but iOS is basically the main thing keeping “the web” from meaning “what the Chrome team chooses to support”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com