Show them what you did. I bought an iPhone 17 Pro Max.
Yeah, and the worst part is the reason. For what?
So Zoomer streamers wouldn't make fun of you when you go to exchange contact information?
That is not the only reason. It was the biggest one. And the worst part,
is he pulled the trigger on this thing just two weeks
before Google announced that Pixel phones will be supporting AirDrop,
making it more convenient than ever to socialize cross-platform.
Adding insult to entry, just weeks later, the Samsung trifold
that he waited four years for finally dropped.
Dude, the look on your face was, yeah, that one.
But as crazy as it sounds, I actually don't regret my decision.
I know many of you out there may not love Apple's business practices.
And to be fair, yeah, neither do I. But I find myself really appreciating
some of the quality of life features. And I wanted to give you guys my personal perspective
on why the social aspects of the iPhone go a lot deeper than bubble colors,
and why it's gonna be really hard for Android to win me back.
Again, even if I did buy this like one month before my dream Android device was announced.
Man, I really did buy this at the worst time, didn't I? Yeah.
But it's the best time to segue. Not quite.
Oh. You could have done it in August. Oh. That would have been slightly worse.
That's true. But it's the best time to segue.
To our sponsor. No story is complete
without the who, what, where, when, and why, though. Let's talk about all of that, just not in that order.
See you later. The TLDR is that I was looking for something fresher.
My OnePlus 11 was fine, but I really did miss being on something cutting edge,
whether it was because of a better camera or even some fun gimmick like my Fold 4 had.
But the biggest thing that actually pushed me to iPhone was the social experience.
Last October, I got to go down to TwitchCon for the first time. And as dumb as this is going to sound,
to many of you, my Android device actually held back my networking efforts multiple times.
Oh, hey, I'd spark up a conversation. We'd talk about a collaborative effort in the future.
We'd hold out our phones to AirDrop, and I had to be the awkward,
hey, can you just actually type your number into my phone? Thanks.
Well, no one refused to give me their number. I could immediately tell, though,
that I was kind of coming across as a bit of a burden.
Thanks. I did find some techie workarounds. I actually set my wallpaper to my Discord QR code.
But sometimes people had issues with that, too. QR codes are a little less ubiquitous in North America.
And let's face it, us Zoomers aren't exactly known right now for being super tech savvy.
Of course, that wasn't enough to convince me to join the herd.
It was all of the other boxes that Apple also ticked.
This generation of iPhone, even Linus admitted,
is an incredibly complete package, pretty much top to bottom.
So after that trip, I did it. I went out and bought this phone.
And I was actually so excited that I also picked up a base 17 as a birthday present for my wife
to replace her aging 12 mini. Then I got home, grabbed some dinner,
and some hard to swallow pills. Because it took me, I kid you not,
over 48 hours to finally get this device fully set up.
And this is where the what comes in. Because I was constantly asking,
what the fuck is Apple doing? Just like Linus, I struggled to get the move
to iOS app to do anything. And it wasn't for a lack of trying.
One time, my Android overheated and it shut down. Other times, it took so long that both phones died
mid-transfer. And then there was the time that it got stuck at the one minute remaining mark for several hours.
When I complained about this on Twitter, I had several people saying I was either fabricating
this story for clicks or this was a skill issue.
Well excuse fucking me. All I did was follow the app instructions
and at the time, I had no intention on this being a video.
So why would I fake this for my own personal device? I did get some helpful comments saying,
it's just broken on certain flavors of Android. And honestly, if that's the case, I get it.
The fragmentation of the Android ecosystem is one of the greatest weaknesses.
Which I'm gonna get into a little bit later. But Apple should be the one telling me.
If I open the app and it knows that it might not work,
Apple should pop up a little warning. Eventually I had to give up and set everything up manually,
which took about four hours. But it was kind of a blessing in disguise.
Because during that time, I started to understand where people are coming from when they speak
so highly about the iPhone. For starters, it's really easy on the eyes.
And whether you like it or not, the smooth transitions and the fun little animations
that come with liquid glass really do make the device feel luxurious, even if it can make things
take a little bit longer. The display is also incredible,
especially with how dim it can get for some bedtime doom scrolling.
And the battery has lasted me multiple days,
multiple times. But it charges so fast that I basically
don't really think about my battery during the work week when I can charge it in my car.
Also, despite what I have been told for years about Apple, the customization seems on par,
or even better than some Android devices that I've used.
Which doesn't mean it can do everything that Android can though.
A big one is it can't side load. I often hear people talk about how terrible it is
that you can't do this on Apple devices. But then I realized I have never side loaded on Android.
I just haven't needed to. And while there are tons of great reasons
to side load something, not being able to has never held me back.
And it probably won't hold me back in the future. And I found the same thing was true
for most of the techie people in my life. So I concede that it is a selling point for Android.
But I don't buy the narrative that not having it is a limitation of Apple.
The second big one is the keyboard. To put it simply, Apple has the worst default keyboard
I have ever used on a mobile phone. The amount of wasted space that could have been used
to have larger keys or more functions on the top layer
drives me nuts. And my Canadian homie Justin Bieber nailed this one.
The fact that they put the dictation key in the exact same spot as the send button
in a text message is downright unacceptable.
I know it's such a minor thing, but the amount of times that I have hit it by accident
tells me for certain that if anyone at Apple actually uses this keyboard,
they must know that this is a problem. And I know that I could probably download
a third party keyboard to get some of the functionality I'm missing.
But I never felt like I needed to replace Gboard. So I think this is a fair criticism.
Another thing that drives me nuts is having three separate actions for swiping down.
The middle pulls down apps and search, top left handles notifications,
and top right brings down the control center. Really, you couldn't have just like moved one of these
to a swipe up function. And even more annoyingly, if I swipe down the control center,
I either have to swipe back up in the top right,
which is not ergonomic, or tap. And I'm sure I'm gonna start a firestorm here,
but it's the one place in iOS where tap is the gesture to go back.
Instead of the other million back gestures that they have.
It's so confusing. On a brighter note though, the camera is incredible.
This right here is why these phones dominate
and will continue to dominate the social media-dicted teen demographic.
It's just easily the best camera I've ever used on a mobile device.
No question. There are things I don't like. The default camera app feels too bare and not customizable
and the camera button feels useless. And I press it on accident more times
than I'd like to admit. But the third-party camera apps unlock layers
of compatibility for this thing that is just hard to compete with.
A huge part as to why the camera can be so much better on an iPhone is simply down to how iOS interacts
with the hardware. And the very nature of Android
makes this kind of hard to replicate. Android is incredibly versatile
and works across thousands of devices. Maybe even tens of thousands of different devices.
But that means developers of each flavor need to work on bridging the gap between the various
physical camera integrations and Android. This can lead to extra overhead, poor image processing,
and maybe most importantly, an extremely inconsistent look
and feel across the ecosystem. You can say Apple phones have good cameras,
but you can't say with certainty that Android phones have good cameras.
And I think that's a big problem, especially when we go a layer deeper
and look at how third-party apps use the camera.
A perfect example is this one. Compare these two Twitch streams that I did
when I was down in San Diego. On the left, you can see Tubbo's POV
where he is using his front-facing camera on his iPhone.
It's pretty clean, right? And on the right, you can see my rear-facing camera,
which in theory is a much better sensor than any selfie cam.
It's okay, especially for a couple-year-old device.
But my footage is the full-quality file
that I downloaded off my phone. And Tubbo's is after Twitch compression
and uploading it to YouTube. Somehow, his still looks better,
even after passing through multiple dog-s**t encoding steps.
And this leads me to the biggest reason that I bought an iPhone.
It's the social experiences. You can say what you want about Apple's walled garden,
but when people have been fully converted to it, it truly feels like magic.
Whether it's the tapping to add people as context, seamless transition from AirPods to speakerphone,
sharing locations with friends in iMessage, going from phone call to FaceTime in one button press
without having to start a new call. And of course, AirDrop.
Stop, stop, stop right there. I know you are gonna fire up your fancy,
resizable, superior ducking keyboard and type, but Android has QuickShare.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. The difference is how Apple treats AirDrop
versus how Android handles QuickShare. QuickShare's an afterthought,
whereas Apple makes it a central part of their platform. And this kind of awareness matters.
Even decade-long Android users will often struggle
if I ask them to QuickShare a file with me. Almost all Apple people I know
can immediately find AirDrop. Another key element of Apple's superior social experience
is the apps. Brand new apps will often launch exclusively on iPhone.
And even for well-established apps, iPhone users will often get new updates
and features before the Android plebs. I found this to be especially true
for content creator-focused features. Linus famously spent years calling out YouTube
for supporting stories on iPhone, but not on many Android devices.
And Instagram has a feature called Trial Reels, which allows you to post Reels to non-followers
to get performance data before you share it with your followers.
That's been out for a year, but on my OnePlus and even some Samsung devices
still don't support that feature. I could go on and I could probably even go on
for a whole separate video with examples like that. But I think what I've covered so far
points to one big question. Who is this device for?
And in my view, it's for two people. The first is the person who just wants a phone.
They don't care about side loading. They don't care that Apple has them in a chokehold.
They might even like it. I won't judge. We're all into some weird stuff.
But when you look at it from that perspective, it makes sense why Apple's keynotes focus on things
like the camera, the body, the colors, or even liquid glass,
and leave only 30 seconds to talk about real tech shit that matters,
like how fast the USB-C port can transfer data.
The second is for people like me, a content creator.
And before you get mad, I'm not saying that content creators can't
get their work done on other devices. It's just that between the apps getting new features first,
sharing video files easily with Airdrop, tapping contacts at a quick meetup,
the iPhone prioritizes the features that people like me need it for.
So then, when am I going to be switching back
to an Android? To be honest, I don't think I ever will be.
If anything, I'm actually kind of upset that I put off on getting an iPhone for so long.
The only thing that might win me back is the Samsung tri-fold,
which I finally got hands on with recently. And if Linus doesn't end up keeping it,
maybe he'll let me do a 30-day review of it. And I'll tell you guys my thoughts.
That might win me back. But that's gonna have to wait until I'm at least done
telling you about our sponsor. If you guys enjoyed this video, go watch Linus's review of the iPhone 17
to see where we agree and where we disagree. All you need to know is that I'm right.
He's wrong. So like the video.