Don’t throw them out yet if they work flawlessly. Give them to someone you know or just leave them somewhere. Also, you might need your old iPhone for some reason and so you should probably keep one (possibly semi-broken) cable.
Size-wise the iPhone XS is much smaller than the Pixel 6. When I travel for work, I chuck my work phone in the backpack, and my personal phone goes in the pocket. Both fit in the pocket should I want to, but the Pixel 6 just feels really cumbersome. The iPhone is still a bit too large to comfortably reach the top of the screen without stretching though, but that’s solved with software. If I swipe down on the bar at the bottom of the screen, the entire screen kind of “scrolls down” allowing me to easily reach whatever is at the top of the screen without stretching, using multiple hands, or holding the phone awkwardly.
iOS is full of small but nifty features like that. Like being able to use the touch keyboard as a sort of trackpad to navigate with the text cursor. You can press and hold on subjects in photos to extract them. If you tap the status bar when scrolled down in a page, it scrolls to the top.
Most of all though, it’s very unintrusive. I loved my OnePlus One, but towards the end of its lifetime I was struggling with it a lot. OS updates stopped years before I stopped using it, so I had to manually flash stuff, that was a hassle. Enabling NFC payments after that was a pain. Every so often apps crash or become unresponsive, and the OS slows down after a while.
Even my Pixel that I really only use as a wifi tether, app development, and as an authenticator for work isn’t that snappy. If I’ve been in an app for a while getting back to the homescreen has a slight delay, the gestures throughout the OS are basically the same, but they just feel a bit off, the fingerprint reader doesn’t work reliably all of the time.
These are issues I just don’t have with my iPhone. It’s crashed once in the three years I’ve had it, not counting the testflight (beta) apps I’ve had. Everything feels really polished too. The design language is mature, the apps all look and run great, there are no delays when swiping or clicking inputs, gestures don’t have weird “lock on” points. There’s a lot of really subtle things that Apple does right, like the haptics, that just don’t feel or work as well on my Pixel. The widgets are fantastic too, and customisation has gotten better over the years as well. I love the lock screens.
When I first bought my iPhone I wasn’t entirely sold. I really missed the ability to have two apps on the screen at once, and I honestly still miss that. I don’t really miss anything else though.
That said, I have my Pixel because there are things it can do that my iPhone can’t. I’d need to buy a Mac if I want to setup development on it, and that just feels like a hassle. I’ve also been hoping for better dictation and such to arrive soon, since the Pixel has really stellar dictation features. I also think I’d make use of the voice recorder app more if it had the ability to transcribe what I say to text, though even there Android falls a bit short since I’m a polyglot, and it only supports a singular language at a time, and not even my native tongue.
I guess in short, my phone just doesn’t get in the way. There’s nothing about it that ever bothers me, and most of the time I don’t even think about it when I use it. It does what I need it to, when I need it, and it’s never failed me in that aspect in the three years I’ve had it.
Regarding the reasons why you like your iPhone, I can guarantee you would love macOS.
Strangely enough to me, the thing that clicks the most for switchers is the ability to send text messages from the Mac, but the one that clicked for me back in 2007 when I was still an Apple hater was Preview. Select any file and hit the spacebar and you’ll get a window displaying its content instantly.
Another thing was the real plug and play. Not a single fucking driver to install, everything just works. For instance, I bought an external sound unit to plug my guitar to my PC in 1998. Two years later the company goes out of business and my hardware misses compatibility with Windows 2000, so it’s s basically bricked. When I installed OSX Leopard on my Dell PC in 2007 I plugged it and it worked seamlessly (Real Time Audio kernel is craaaaaazy stuff too on Apple gear if you are a musician)
And there are tons of fine-tuned features like this.
Anyway, I couldn’t recommend you more to test macOS.
Oh absolutely. I used Tiger through to Mountain Lion on my old MacBook. No idea what versions I had at my old job. I’m familiar with Mac and definitely enjoy it, been thinking about getting an M2 Mac Mini for personal use. It’s funny you mention preview because I remember being blown away by that around the same time you were. I also recall how nicely integrated drag-and-drop was in everything, and how it was contextual based on what you were dragging and where, in a way that just makes sense. Even today Windows’ ability to do drag-and-drop stuff pales in comparison to even OS 10.5
Since I got my iPhone I’ve gotten more invested in the Apple ecosystem, and it’s easy to tell why people go for it; it just works. My bluetooth headphones broke, and so I got a pair of AirPods Pro. Loved them. Then I got annoyed with my Android/Google TV dongle, so I swapped it for an Apple TV, which was just as brilliant.
Sure, Android/Google has that Casting and whatnot, but it doesn’t work nearly as smoothly as Apple’s implementation does. If I’m sitting in the sofa and I put my airpods in my ear, the TV asks if I want to listen through them instead. If my roomie does the same, who is wall-to-wall with the living room, he doesn’t get the prompt. Google TV never asked such a thing, not even sure it’s a feature. Since my roomie goes to bed really early, Apple TV’s ability to let me watch stuff and listen in surround sound on my earbuds is fantastic.
And that’s not even getting into the fact that the entire Apple TV experience is smooth, pretty much instant, and lag-free. My Google TV had a tendency to sit and wait for a few seconds when you opened an app.
All the polish, the little animations and whatnot really do add to the experience. A while back I got a high-refresh rate monitor for my personal computer, and I realised that Windows animations aren’t actually laggy/jittery, they just appear that way because they aren’t interpolated. Apple interpolates the animations on OSX, so even on low refresh-rate monitors the animations look smooth.
It’s crazy how the small things make the whole thing with Apple stuff.
My company recently switched from a 90% PC to a full Mac equipment (about 100 people) and it kind of annoys me that most of people still want a mouse, and rage because “it’s not like Windows see?”
Fuck, I cannot see the point of switching without a proper training.
But hey, Macs are just overpriced PC without viruses and stuff right? Why can’t I run my cracked Photoshop.exe on Mac then huh? Why everything looks like my very open source not at all copy pasted OS but better because you know I love to spend hours tweaking my GUI?
I would be in favour of this if you needed to enable a special mode on iOS that would block people from using Apple ecosystem apps and services. No App Store, no iCloud, etc to prevent un-curated 3rd party apps from potentially exploiting those services.
So people have the choice to use Apple ecosystem and no sideloading, or you can enable “side load” mode (with lots of warnings beforehand), which locks the phone out of the Apple ecosystem until the phone is completely reset.
Would help keep malware and such at bay, while still enabling those that want the flexibility for their own devices, and also means that I don’t need to worry about my parents messing up their phones because they’d never enable side load mode.
Why not install GrapheneOS since you already have a pixel. It’s better privacy and security than either a stock pixel or an iPhone.
Going from Google to Apple because of the DRM push from Google doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Apple is at the frontline when it comes to proprietary hardware and software. You won’t even be able to use Firefox on an iPhone, you’d be locked into Safari.
All 3rd party browsers on the app store are mandated to just be wrappers around Safari’s engine. If Apple decides to adopt the web DRM, you will have no choice but to support it.
I mean, we knew they were going to have to make usb-c phones since the EU and the Saudis both are going to require it. And they’ve been making usb-c iPads for a while, I have a hundred of them at work
Apple knew it too. Even without pressure from the EU’s upcoming laws around USBC, they knew we would all riot if they clung to Lightning. iPads, Macs, have all moved on.
Just. USBC all the things. Let me die in a world with one fucking cable. Please. Can we at least do that as a society?
C’mon, Apple doesn’t give a shit if people riot over USB.
The ONLY reason this is happening is regulation. Apple would keep their shitty proprietary wire forever if they could. Compatibility with other hardware does not matter to a company with a fully closed ecosystem like Apple.
It’s really frustrating how stubborn and backward Apple has been with the iPhone. It’s 100% just so they can use a proprietary cable.
The crazy thing is they were on the consortium that helped develop USB-C and had one of the very first computers to even have the port! MacBook Pros were ALL USB-C at a time when there were close to zero accessory makers supporting the then brand new cable.
Anyway, extremely happy that lightning will finally die.
Am I one of the few who is not a big fan of USB C on phones? I’ve had the ports on multiple phones go bad. They get filled with pocket crud and are extremely difficult to clean out. Never had this issue with lightning. Wish there was some sort of magnetic charging standard. Wireless is good but its just slow.
I have had dozens of devices with USB C and have personally have never had this issue. On the other hand, I used to work at an Apple repair shop and have seen plenty lightning ports filled with lint.
It's surprisingly difficult to find a source which treats RCS as a Google product. It seems like most pieces of information about it is carefully curated to give the impression that RCS is an open standard.
It might be owned by someone else, but google is the only one pushing it and the only one supporting it. Technically it’s open, but it’s googles standard.
Does anything outside of Google use this standard? I haven’t even heard of open source apps that use it. The only major player backing it is google. It’s their standard, just like iMessage is apples.
The whole iMessage/RCS conversation is really only relevant in the US; in other countries basically everyone uses WhatsApp or Kakao or LINE or whatever the local favorite is. In the US, there is no industry-standard RCS. It's theoretically a carrier-based messaging service but all of the carriers outsourced it to Google so, as an alternative to iMessage, the option is a proprietary extension of RCS running on Google servers, something that is exactly as open as iMessage itself.
If you want a true industry standard way to send messages to people, the iPhone has had that since 2007: email.
RCS the open standard is missing critical features. Google's implementation fixes that, but is not open. I don't think we should give a pass to RCS just because it's open. SMS is a legacy format but it's unconscionable these days to release a new messaging platform without E2E encryption. That's a minimum viable product feature, not a maybe nice to have in the future feature.
Email doesn't even require a cellular plan to begin with but, again, the context of my comment is the US and the relative merits of iMessage vs. RCS. It's all just data. Who is using SMS over iMessage due to data plan costs? Unlimited cellular data plans are the default.
Industry-standard RCS does not support E2E encryption. Google's proprietary extension of RCS, which it operates, supports E2E encryption. As part of its marketing campaign for it, Google intentionally blurs the line between the theoretical open standard RCS, which nobody uses, and the real-world version of RCS that Google has implemented, which is not an open standard.
It’s a bit more complicated than that unfortunately. RCS wasn’t made by Google, but they did join the GSMA that manages it. They are pushing it as an alt/war against iMessage, but it doesn’t go through their servers as far as i know, it’s still a Mobile Operator service (like SMS), so it goes through your provider (and I guess Google’s if you use Google Fi).
I kinda think the smart thing for Apple to do is to implement RCS support (make the bubbles orange/purple or something) and then they’ve done it and can continue working on iMessage if they like.
Google version or Verizons version or samsungs version or… lmfao
End to end encryption shouldve been enforced by RCS theres no point for apple to implement it when android hasnt even made it so anyone can make an rcs app with E2EE by default other than Google
I hope they don’t do that until they force car manufacturers to be using wireless CarPlay for years. If they drop a port, a lot of car owners won’t be able to use CarPlay.
I think that might have been the plan years ago, might even still be long term. I think people like Ive really like the idea of a portless device and they were trying to get there but the realities of wireless charging and connectivity have gotten in the way.
AirPower proved to be so much trouble they just scrapped it, MagSafe has been a hit but real world charging speed is a lot slower than wired. Plus people love CarPlay and most don’t have wireless capable cars. Apple probably realize full wireless is not going to be ready in the near future and have put plans on hold.
The term Brussels effect was coined in 2012 by Professor Anu Bradford of Columbia Law School[1][2][3] and named after the similar California Effect that can be seen within the United States.
The Brussels effect is the process of unilateral regulatory globalisation caused by the European Union de facto (but not necessarily de jure) externalising its laws outside its borders through market mechanisms.
The California effect is the shift of consumer, environmental and other regulations in the direction of political jurisdictions with stricter regulatory standards. The name is derived from the spread of some advanced environmental regulatory standards that were originally adopted by the U.S. state of California and eventually adopted in other states.
The Brussels/California effects are when the EU/California make a law that applies to the EU/California but for various reasons is followed globally/across the US
Am I the only one who still has nothing using USB-C?
I have a single USB-C cable for my laptop display and that’s really it. Charging is still done via barrel plug. Headphones/phone/iPad are lightning, watch is it’s own thing and all my pc peripherals still use micro-b. I seem to have more devices using usb-A than usb-C.
I’ll probably end up sticking with my 14 because lightning is less of a hassle than switching all my cords and not being able to charge things I need.
Yeah you might be the only one. Btw your laptop can also charge over USB-C instead of the barrel jack.
You could buy one high powered usb charger and attach a USBC to lighting adapter to the end of it and you’ll only have to carry one charger when traveling.
Btw your laptop can also charge over USB-C instead of the barrel jack.
Charging laptops through type C is one of the biggest conveniences ever introduced. Now I don’t even want to take my 2015 notebook from my in-law (despite being faster) because I can’t hook it into an all-in-one dock unlike my 2021 lappie.
Laptop actively loses power when plugged into the monitor, so not really.
I barely travel. It’s about replacing the 10+ chargers I have in my house, car, work and bags. I also don’t get the want for one charger. It’s annoying as hell to only have 1 charger. I’d rather have an individual one for every device tbh
I mean I definitely travel with more than one, but it’s nice knowing that I don’t have to worry about forgetting to pack a specific charger for that one specific thing and only realizing it when it’s too late.
Your monitor might not be supplying your laptop with power, but that doesn’t mean it can’t do it. If it can output to a display, then it is a thunderbolt port and can definitely charge it.
Monitor can’t provide enough power for the laptop. It was explicitly labeled as not power delivery when I bought the monitor. The output isn’t enough to charge a 2017 gaming laptop with a D-GPU.
It’s less about having one physical charger and more about having one charging cable standard so you’re not wanting for one cable when you mistakenly grabbed another…. You can have 50 charging cables and 50 bricks for all 50 of your devices if you’d like. The convenience comes with the fact that they all take the same connector. Standardization simplifies life and actually will make upgrading cheaper because you’re not locked into a proprietary standard.
I can completely empathize with not wanting to update all of your chargers, but as someone who has recently gone through part of it, I’m 110% onboard with everything being unified like this.
I like everything having their own tbh. Everything has its own charger in a specific spot. I don’t really find any convenience in having one connector. I genuinely would rather have individual connectors.
I just bought a portable fan for my tent that charges via USB-C. Almost everything is on it now (headphones, earbuds, battery bank, laptop, GoPro, drone…) except my iPhone and an old, mini keyboard/touchpad.
I can believe it if the only devices you have upgraded in the last 5 years is your iphone. Everything else has been on usb C for a while. Including mac books, iPads, android phones, windows laptops and even game consoles
iPad bought 2 years ago and iPhone this year are the only major wireless devices I own. Bought my first Gen AirPods Pro’s years ago. All of them are on lightning.
My laptop is from 2017 and I really don’t plan on updating it. I’m a PC gamer, so wireless stuff isn’t something I see or buy frequently. Everything is hardwired with USB-B when I get things.
Yup, you’re the only one. I’ve been on USB-C for five years now. Just gotta replace my cannabis vape, and I’ll be free of Micro-USB for good. Even a good portion of my PC peripherals use USB-C now. I’d ditch USB-A entirely if I could but unfortunately my motherboard only has 4 C ports*.
That’s great if you have usb-c devices already (which somehow most people do). I’m going to have to replace every charger in multiple places (3-7 at home, 2 in the car, 3 at work) with entirely new ones. I literally have nothing that charges from usb-c.
That’s great if you have usb-c devices already (which somehow most people do).
Are you really surprised that most people have some sort of device with a connector that came out 8 years ago? This isn’t exactly new technology, It’s so common now it’s even on super cheap stuff. I bought an electronic lighter from Amazon last summer and it charges with USB C.
Honestly yes. I didn’t realize so many people have things that need to be charged. I don’t particularly update my tech unless it breaks, so literally nothing has moved for me.
I hear you, but I think a lot of us just amortized that cost over time as we’ve gotten those devices, same as you will now, but at least it’s cheaper to start now than 5 years ago?
Bet you they will make their cable charge non iPhones slower… adding some proprietary tech inside the charger, phone or cable which only allows fast charging on Official Apple Certified products etc.
Yep, and Samsung (basically the apple of android) already does this. It’s annoying having all these old proprietary Samsung fast chargers around now that I’ve switched to google. They still charge decently, I just wish everyone would use the free fast charging standard
I don’t know why people think this. USB-C is on every Apple product except iPhone and AirPods, and they were quite an early adopter of it, putting it on the MacBook in 2015. For comparison, the first Samsung phone with USB-C was the Note 7, 1.5 years later.
They’ve done nothing proprietary with it in all that time, and Apple products with USB-C have followed the spec quite closely (unlike offenders such as Nintendo). Outside of unsubstantiated rumours and FUD, there’s no reason to think they’ll do anything different.
They also had no reason to use sms for texting android users even when rms exists and they also had no reason to resist USB c in the first place as well it really blows my mind just how pretty apple is with random ass issues
They do have a solid rumor that they’re sticking with USB 2.0 speeds for for the USB C iPhone and that non-MFI certified cables may be slow charging only, so while I’ve got my finger’s crossed that’s false since I’m an iPhone guy, Apple still seems to be looking for a way to skirt the EU and still get the accessory cut.
USB 2.0 I would buy, I’m sure they have the telemetry to tell them that like less than 1% of iPhones are ever plugged into a computer or data accessory at this point. USB 3 would be nice but it’s not a dealbreaker for almost anyone.
MFI certification I don’t. They didn’t do it with iPads or MacBooks, why with iPhones? It just doesn’t pass the smell test. Just one product that shares the same connector with all their other products has an MFI program but all the others don’t? Even though when it was Lightning, MFI applied to all of them?
It’s possible they will launch a program, but it will just be one that allows you to put the little “MFI” icon on your box. It won’t be one that will limit charging speeds. I get the uncertainty if this was the first Apple product to switch to USB, but it’s the last major one. Just wouldn’t make sense.
MFI certification I don’t. They didn’t do it with iPads or MacBooks, why with iPhones?
Kinda already answering your own question. Those products converted to USB C a while ago, and there hasn’t been a technical reason to not convert iPhone for at least as long. Why not iPhone? It’s probably because if I had to guess, the MFI business is like, a lot of money. Probably hundreds of millions.
If you follow apple and the rumors fairly closely, this is one that at this point will be a surprise if it doesn’t happen.
There is plenty of reason to think they will do something different. Apple is notorious for being petty with their interpretability. They have yet to build the RCA standard into their messages app because doing so would mean playing ball with their competitors. They intentionally make their Mac parts in such a way that you can’t get 3rd party replacements and instead need to rely on Apple for repair. They do shit like this all the time and I wouldn’t put it past them to limit interpretability here because they’ve made the calculation that their customers will think that it’s a problem with the competitor and switch to Apple more often than not.
Before Apple went ARM, they weren’t perfect, but they weren’t the worst. You could swap RAM on iMacs, change out storage on Mac Minis. But as they adopted ARM, RAM was incorporated into the SoC. And while poor for interoperability, there are notable performance improvements in this system-in-a-package design. More so, they do allow for some storage upgrades with the current Mac Mini and Mac Studio, even if it’s still somewhat user-hostile.
As for the charging question at hand, yeah…they probably WANTED something stupid like they did with MFi certification on lightning cables, but it seems as though the EU has already warned them about that. Hopefully we’ll end up with a pretty nice usb-c experience!
Personally I don’t see those as the same. NVMe and RCS didn’t exist when Apple started doing PCIE storage and iMessage. It is true that they are reluctant to move to a standard or incorporate it if they already have their own solution in place that works for them.
But they haven’t proprietarily extended or altered a standard in a long time. You may feel differently, which is fair. If I had to bet though, I suspect that we’ll just see a standard USB-C port that works with all their other standards complaint chargers and cables they’ve been making for the last decade.
I really don’t want to get into it so I’m just going to give you a good ol Louis Rossmann video for your viewing pleasure. The point is that Apple has literally built in mechanisms in their ssds to prevent interpretability even as their old tech worked with it and yet tons of people buy their products with their blatant anti competitive practices and people like you will do apologetics for them. They could build RCS into their app at any point but they don’t and blaming their competitors for why they can’t put it in. They do it with apps on their smart speakers as well. They only want their services to work with their devices and there is no excuse for the most profitable tech company to act that way except that it affects their bottom line and if there was anything they could do to pad their pockets with this switch to USB c, you could bet your bottom dollar that they would do it.
A soldiered SSD is not designed to be interoperable, shocking. Because they don’t want you futzing about inside the machine does not mean they will proprietarily extend or restrict external ports. I’m not making excuses for the first one, I’m saying they aren’t the same thing.
I’m just being realistic and using the information in front of me. Apple has been using USB-C for years, and hasn’t done anything nefarious with it. They will do the same with the iPhone 15. It’ll just be a standard USB port. Feel free to spread FUD if you wish, but it’s obvious for anyone following along that this is what will happen. I will happily eat my words if it turns out not to be true.
Genuinely curious, how did Nintendo change their specs for USB C? I still charge both my steam deck and switch off the charger my deck came with, but only the deck works with the usb-c to hdmi dongle I got. How does that work?
That I’m not exactly sure about. All I know is that every Apple device with USB-C I own works with all the USB-C docks I own with full port compatibility and video out, yet 3rd party docks have fried Switches and to get video out you need their dock.
If you search online I’m pretty sure people have gone indepth about what exactly Nintendo did differently.
Could easily be out of spec chargers. There are a number of prominent iPhone repair specialists (Louis Rossman, iPadRehab and such) that highly recommend against using 3rd party USB power supplies because there’s no guarantee of quality.
You can easily destroy your expensive device. They even recommend against using the built-in USB ports in planes and transit and instead using an AC power port with your OEM charging adapter to be safe.
But actually the free market would take care of this because capitalism is so great. Anyway, I have to get back to freebasing whatever’s under my sink now.
I mean the free market did, people decided they just didn’t care. You may have been sarcastic, but people have indeed decided it didn’t matter to them. That’s the “regulation” in this case
Need iPhone 16 or 17 with a waterproof replaceable battery so I can swap batteries while camping. Not needing to fuss with solar chargers would be awesome.
Ok. Now I just need to replace my expensive headphones when those come out, and I’ll be free of lightening. I’m guess it won’t be for a while, as ok don’t like replacing expensive things with minor updates.
Add comment