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Comment by beanjuiceII | Hacker News Reader

When I get my new pixel, I just login and everything is there, I assume apple is same way? this seems common these days

It is, but it didn’t used to be. Way back at the dawn of the smartphone era I was working in consumer telco here in Aus, and half of my day was spent making sure people kept their data between phones. Even going from one android phone to another wasn’t a great guarantee, and for iPhones we used to have a computer to take a backup via the 30-pin.

These days cloud backups and the like make it pretty simple on both operating systems.

I’ve had an iPhone since the original 4G. It’s always been an easy transfer.

I have voice memos that have migrated since that very first one.

The other day I thought of that... I was wondering if there would be people walking around with an iPhone 14 with photos taken with the camera of an iPhone 1st gen which they transferred every time they upgraded.

Not the 1st gen, but my 3G, I absolutely do :) its fun scrolling all the way back

Me. Unfortunately, back then the photos didn't have much metadata, mostly just time and date. No geolocation.

Since i like to search for photos on the map on the macOS Photos program, this can be problematic. So when i was looking for a specific photo the other day, i had to scroll back by date to find it and that's how i found out it was taken on an original iPhone.

Interestingly, my photos didn’t make it. But the voice memos and other app settings did. It’s actually neat because it’s the only recordings of loved ones who are no longer living and discovers serendipitously.

Originally it was syncing through iTunes but the past years it’s been iCloud syncing.

For you and I, definitely. For your average consumer back in the late 2000s? Nah they struggled with it and lost data constantly despite the fact that Apple tried to make it easy.

Honestly the whole cloud backup thing wasn't all it was chalked up to be, at least during my time at Verizon, since it's so easy to reach the max on the base level cloud account they give out for free(at the time, 5GB?) We almost always just used an app(for iOS and Android) that did the data transfer.

The actual iPhone backup when you switch to a new device is actually now entirely ignoring the 5GB limit. (But it’s possible it wasn’t the case in the past) https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT212732

I trust Google with my data so little I go out of my way not use their services if I can help it. Apple has a pretty good track record for privacy and reliability and that's worth something to me.

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