Apple products are largely inferior.

Post Reply New Topic

It needed to be said.

No, they really are. Apple's products lag on performance, intuitability, and flexibility (but they have always lagged in that realm). Apple is like an HOA. Your neighborhood looks nice and your lawn gets mowed but HOA bylaws supercede your land owner rights, you can't paint your house whatever color you want, and you must park your car in the garage. They provide a service that makes you more dependent on them rather than products which give the user a high degree of freedom.

Examples.

The iPhone 6 has a good camera but given the phone's price, users should be ceded complete manual control over the camera settings, and they are not. Compare this to various Android based phones where manual camera controls are standard.

The iPhone 6 does not have an SD card or removable memory storage. Most Android based phones do.

The battery on the iPhone 6 was not designed to be accessed and changed by the user. This is nothing new. Apple did the the same thing with the iPod. It was designed to last something like 50 charge cycles and then it had to be sent in so the battery could be changed, at a cost somewhere near the price of a new iPod. This is because Apple didn't want you to keep using the iPod. They wanted you to buy their new product, the iPhone, after you have purchased your iPod. Most Android based phones allow the user to access and change the battery easily.

iPhones were programmed to reduce CPU speed to extend battery life and Apple did not make users aware of this before purchase, or give users the option to disabled this feature.

There are compatibility problems between iPhones and PCs. iPhones are not treated as external storage devices by PCs and programs such as iTunes must be installed to access media stored in iPhones via PCs. Android based phones are treated as external storage devices by PCs and all files are readily accessible through file manager and other programs.

Apple offers phone locating services if one misplaces their phone, however these services cannot often be accessed from Android based devices. If a person loses their phone and the only people around have Android devices, the person is unable to access phone finding services by Apple. The person has to find someone else with an Apple device, or someone with a laptop or desktop.

Now I will be speaking of Apple computers running an Apple OS.

Apple computers become outdated significantly faster than Windows based PCs. This is by design. Apple does not offer free operating systems to be nice. They do it because the faster they can change the operating system, the faster they can get you to a point where you decide your computer is too slow and decide to buy a new one. And you get there quickly because Apple computers lag PCs in benchmark performance per dollar. At one point in time, Apple captured the media production market, but it's users were constantly having to upgrade. They could have gotten a significantly faster PC for the amount of money they spent on their first Apple computer, and paid a few hundred dollars for a good version of Windows, and ran that for 10 years.

PCs with Windows...at least before Microsoft made some bad decisions, came with just about everything the user needed to navigate the PC and file system. Not so with Apple computers. Example: I transfered some files from an iPhone to a Macbook Pro the other night (because I couldn't transfer them from the iPhone to a PC) and the Macbook Pro automatically imported them in to the "pictures" folder. The next half hour was spent attempting to locate this "pictures" folder, which was not on the desktop, and could not be located with the finder. Apparently this particular folder had to be accessed indirectly through a graphics oriented program of some sort. I am aware of file management apps for the Macbook Pro, but such things did not come standard on this one and they do come standard on Windows machines. My point here is, while Apple computers running an Apple OS might actually have a level of functionality similar to that of Windows machines, much of this is not made accessible by default and remains hidden to the user. This is probably the real reason Apple stores are so full. People who want to do some basic thing with their Apple device and can't figure out how because Apple has not made that apparent. It's like having to go to Home Depot because you have discovered some screws are loose in your kitchen and know you need to tighten them but are not sure which tool you need to use or where to find it.

Now that I have illustrated what has lead me to my conclusion, let me also point out the positive things about Apple products.

1. Newer versions of the iPhone have a quick emergency call feature, in which a call to your local emergency number can be placed by pressing the power button a certain number of times.

2. The phone tracking feature is useful despite the fact that the website associated with it can't be accessed from many Android based phones. (I should mention though, Google offers a similar service for Android based phones).

3. A lot of Apple users like the integrated services that Apple offers via their cloud. These services can be seen as a positive or negative depending on your personal tastes.

4. If for some reason you accidentally format your hard drive or erase all of your data, Apple will reinstall your operating system for free, and some or all of your data might be retrievable if you have backed it up to the cloud.

5. Apple laptops running an Apple OS generally boot up faster and get online faster than Windows based laptops.

6. Apple devices are less prone to viruses.

Preaching to the choir, iThink.

I envy the wealth of people who can engage in conspicuous spending, not the conspicuous spending itself. As an autistic weirdo who knows nothing of trying to impress people by means of behavior which otherwise only harms my interests, I'd have better things to spend on if I had that kind of money than deliberately crippled cool appliances, thank you very much.

I don't agree with this point. It used to be like this but now there's hardly any androids with removable batteries. Most modern androids are glued sandwiches of glass which means that is difficult to replace battery without cracking either the screen or the back. Iphones, on the other hand, still are mostly secured with screws. Although improved water resistance of iphones made replacing parts more difficult, but still not as bad as most androids are these days.

This is main reason why I still keep my old Samsung Note 4 with the old style removable battery. I think it's very irresponsible to treat expensive electronics as something disposable.

Another good thing about iphone:
1. Good mute hardware button

No, that is incorrect actually. They used to be treated as external storage devices, but they are not anymore. The only difference is that they use a more windows friendly protocol (MTP). You might remember that in the old android phones you had to turn on file sharing and it made that memory unavailable from the phone (i.e. computer had exclusive access to files) and back then sd card was formatted with FAT file system. Nowadays it is not fat and phone can access data while it is shared, but it means that this is not USB mass storage but rather MTP.

All of the HTC, LG and Nokia Android based phones I have crossed paths with have easily removable batteries that are not glued in and the cases are not glued together. Motorola does have at least one model that does use glue but at least in one model, this is part of the water resistance feature. In any case, one can find an current Android based phone that one can easily remove the battery from and one cannot find such an iPhone.




Technical details are irrelevant to user experience in this instance. I can plug an Android device into a PC and access the files directly as I would any other file and that cannot be done with the iPhone. The iPhone requires Windows based PC users to download iTunes and install an Apple USB driver and it's a known issue that sometimes this does not work. In that event, Apple recommends users transfer files using iCloud and other Apple products/services. There is no technical reason for this. It is not designed this way to make the user's life easier, as it does not. It's an attempt by Apple to control and force people to use Apple products and services. If a person with a PC buys an iPhone, to transfer their photos they have to use another Apple product or service.

Additionally, while some non-Apple input devices interface well with Apple computers, Apple computers as output devices often don't interface well with other non-Apple media devices. They often require adapters and the proxies are not always completely compatible.

From those manufacturers, all mid to high end phones are now without replaceable batteries. The last good phone from them with a replaceable battery was an LG v20, I think. I guess most regular users break phones before battery wears out so it is not important. GSM arena lists 442 androids made in 2017. Only 71 out of those had replaceable battery.


Well MTP almost as bad. On linux PC it sometimes works and sometimes it does not. And you need to install libmtp of course. I usually just avoid all this hassle and transfer everything through google drive or dropbox.


Examples:
1. AirPlay (SOME smart tvs support this while you can stream video to any smart tv with android)
2. Lack of standard ports because dongles generate extra sales

And how many Apple phones have easily replaceable batteries?



Linux is not quite a mainstream OS. It seems to be the most popular among CS majors though I don't actually know any professional programmers who run it as their primary OS. Windows still holds almost half of the OS market while iOS holds a little less than a quarter according to some sources. Linux/Ubuntu is less than 5% of the OS market.

[/quote]

I will have take yoru word on AirPlay. I've never used it. But I can think of a number of devices Apple does not like to cooperate with.

In any case, Apple has room for improvement. I wonder what would be going on now if Steve Jobs were still alive. They have been clinging to iPhones since he died and he was never much to cling to things. They are falling in to their old pre-Jobs days when the "user friendly" Macintosh was being outpaced by the superior technology of the PC. I think I know what Steve Jobs would do. He would first correct all of the bad things I've mentioned about Apple above and sell people an iPhone that people can change the battery to and easily interface with a PC, and then he would focus on bringing another technological concept mainstream.

I don't like Apple products as well.

Once you have one they force you to use only their products, while competitors like Microsoft, "Android", w/e are more user friendly and for the most part are compatible with more applications. In the end Apple is a closed system, so it's just a matter of taste.

I've seen friends who only use Apple products because they got used to them. Personally I couldn't get used to a Mac or an iPhone in like never.

I know there's lots of people in the media industry like music & movies who prefer Apple products because they are less buggy since everything is made by the same company. I rather modify my stuff thou & make changes to things like software & hardware so I prefer Microsoft & Android.

I've never own any Apple products, so I don't really have an opinion. Technology is in the hand of the beholder.

All apple phones have construction which makes replacing battery more difficult that it should be, but still it is easier than most new android phones of the same price range.


No, Steve Wozniak might've chosen such path, but not Jobs.