The iPhone is Dead | Hacker News Reader

The iPhone is Dead

medium.com

15 pointsplease_choose25 comments

> iPhones don’t age well On my iPhone 6+, most apps crash on first open. Apps freeze for 5–10 seconds whenever launched or switched to. I lose 3–4%/min on my battery and Apple Support insists that my battery is perfectly healthy. I went through “apps using significant power” and uninstalled most of them.

Not to be too critical of this author, but this whole post is full of personal anecdotes extrapolated onto the half a billion iPhone users worldwide[1]. iPhones actually age quite well, as their resale value proves. And that doesn't even take into account their long-term security updates and patches.

1. https://www.quora.com/How-many-iPhone-users-are-in-the-world...

The battery draining fast seems to be a resolvable bug:

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/12/22/glenn-iphone-sl...

My iPhone 5 still works fine. Admittedly it’s not loaded with apps. Most of the things he does on his phone I do on my iPad instead.

So, what does your iPhone 5 work fine for?

I would make a bold assumption here: calling, texting? ;)

Maps and weather.

I imagine that one factor into resale value aging well is that the price is already high and Apple has a strong brand, versus the actual quality of the device. But it's hard to tell.

RE: personal anecdotes. Fair feedback, but the post was meant to be based entirely on my own experiences. Agree that a more comprehensive post could be done that includes real world data. Although that data would be challenging to gather.

The last company I’d have storing my personal data is Google. In fact, any of the arguments he presents are moot to me due to the alternative being an Ad agency’s product...

Does Google Drive+Photos monetize its data even though it's a subscription product?

Have a look at the EULA for Google Drive, they take the rights to use the data for promotions and improvements of the product.

There are a lot of useless personal anecdotes in this blog post, but one resonates with me strongly: Apple needs to better handle spam calls. In fact the entire mechanism dealing with how we make phone calls (authenticating callers) is ripe for disruption.

A big selling point of a phone to me is a built in blacklist feature. Problem is I only get that after the fact, or if I hunt for it while physically shopping. They don't usually bulletpoint it as a selling point, but it should be a standard feature.

I don't own an iPhone, but I assume you have the same trouble I do with spam texts/calls and no real decent blacklisting solution (most apps just don't work and I'm not going to throw money after money to find the one that does work in that pile of shovelware they call the play store.

Not sure if it works on IPhone but on android I've had very good luck / experience with "Truecaller: Caller ID, SMS spam blocking & Dialer". It doesn't catch them all, but it did decrease the amount of spam call / text I get within a month from 23 to 1. So that is nice.

iOS supports seamless call blocking via inexpensive 3rd party apps like Hiya. Hiya works great, calls that are suspect get labeled and calls that are verified fraud or marketing are never seen but available in call history. This been around since iOS 10 maybe longer.

This does not solve the fundamental issue, which is that it is trivial to spoof caller id. I get random numbers every day from scammers. We need a system where callers can certify who the callers are reliably.

Which anecdotes do you find useless?

The author's iPhone 6+ does not age well with apps consuming significant power. That anecdote is not useful, because that is a particular issue with the author's phone and not general enough to be useful. If you abuse your phone battery, it will not maintain capacity. My 6 plus's battery is at 89% capacity after 3+ years.

The author complains about Apple technical support, but brings up a anecdote about a laptop (I thought this was about a phone). Can you bring a Samsung phone to a Samsung store to get it repaired? I remember needing to mail my Samsung phone in for warranty repair and the screen coming back with a diagonal slice where they cut the packaging open. That sucked, but I am not going to blame all of Samsung for that (it was probably an unfortunate mistake) or blame the Android ecosystem.

Saw there was a survey that the iPhone loyalty has decreased a little but was at record lows even though still 80%

"Separately, Cowen conducted a survey of smartphone buyers and found that iPhone loyalty appears to be trending lower. In fact, repeat iPhone purchase intent is at a record low (within the context of Cowen's quarterly surveys). To be fair, iPhone loyalty is still incredibly high, with 80.5% of respondents planning on buying another iPhone when the time is right, but that's down sequentially from 87.6%. "

https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/01/18/is-iphone-x-demand...

I think anyone can write an article like this favoring their choice platform. Doing real complete comparison is hard. There are literally hundreds of features to compare. Include apps like this author and you’re writing forever. The hard part about choosing iPhone or Android is just the sheer magnitude of differences. Security, cost, aging, support, apps, os, hardware ... but maybe more than anything perspective matters.

Just pay for iCloud then half of your issues will be moot.

What issues in particular beyond device storage and background photo syncing? I don't think it cuts the issues in half. Using iCloud creates its own issues as well (like paying for yet another cloud storage)

> 2018

> people writing shitty blog posts and still using clickbait to get views

Why is my post marked as flagged?

Because the title is "The iPhone is Dead" instead of something like "Why I Switched to Android".

Ah, I see. Thanks for clarifying! Will be more careful with my titles going forward.

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