After recently doing a bit of research into a new smartphone, I begun to understand why people buy Iphones, even if they're really really expensive. Firstly, you can explain it away financially with monthly payments, like any phone through a provider, but the biggest pain point I had is proven reliability. Take any popular Android phone, and you'll see a history of unsolved hardware problems from the manufacturer, such as boot loops. I can't afford to have my phone just 'break' itself and have to deal with my provider or some such nonesense. It was a real problem looking through dozens and dozens of different phones and knowing that each one of them tried to re-invent the wheel in some way that will probably break.

In the end, I settled for a Moto Z Play, at the recommendation of a programming blog, and that it had excellent reviews on the outlets I could find it. But, even with that, I accidentally bought an international version from Amazon unknowingly until I tried to purchase accident protection from Motorola, and they had to direct me to Indian support, which their phoneline was offline for all the times I tried to call. After ordering the proper U.S. version through motorolas site, though, everything has been fine. But thats a lot of technical stuff and throwing direct money (no monthly payments) at a single item. I can understand why people would just go to their providers site, and order an Iphone after trying, or not trying, to do research into smartphones.

For reference, I was able to return the international version even though I had used it for a week or so, and once refunded bought the U.S. one. Motorola tries to provide a monthly payment mechanism through 'Affirm', but Affirm was... Firm in that I didn't have a checking account in my bank, because my bank gives it a different name (though still is a checking.). The main saving grace of motorola is that AFAIK, their accident protection can send me a new phone before I have to send a broken one back in the future if(when) it does break.

And after all of this, still no 4G on it, because AT&T doesn't do that unless you have an 'AT&T' phone IMEI supposedly.