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Comment by therealmarv | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand why people think in 2023 that Android can not be a viable alternative to an iPhone. I would never use an iPhone for certain software and UX related issues (biggest is the missing back gesture/button). My Pixel does better photos than ANY iPhone on the market.

Macbook Air M1, just look at Dell XPS series.

Samsung S9 tablets have an OLED display. OLED... you don't get that on any iPad.

Apple Watch really has no competitor which matches 100%. On certain areas like fitness (Fitbit) or hiking (Garmin) there can be also some good and better alternatives but it does not match 100% of the features.

I think there is always a choice except when looking at the Apple Watch.

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I had a top of the line XPS. Battery life is less than half that of the Air. The speakers in the XPS sound like they are from the 90s. It gets painfully hot on the bottom case. The keyboard wrist rest area is cheap plastic. It was thicker and heavier than the MBA. Intel Iris GPU (ie slow af) versus M1/M2 GPU.

One point to the XPS: the pixel density of the 4k 13" was absolutely LOVELY. I have never seen a screen so nice.

There is really no comparison overall, though: the Apple laptops blow them (and everything else in that category) out of the water.

The top end iPhones are similarly 2-3 years ahead of the flagship Pixel devices in build quality, too. I tried, really I did.

Same here. The XPS’s hard drive died within two years and I had to replace it.

The keyboard and touchpad also don’t hold a candle to MacBooks.

I bought a MacBook Pro in 2013 and my mom bought a Dell XPS at around the same time. Her laptop died, she got a Lenovo Yoga. That one died within a year and was replaced for free. The new one died after two years. When the M1 Air came out I gave her the old MacBook Pro, which she still uses every day, going strong (aside from battery life, but it's mostly plugged in).

It has essentially outlived 4 Windows laptops. I expect the M1 Air to still be relevant in a decade, as well.

I bought a mid-range Acer laptop in December 2012. I used that thing as my daily driver until 2018 until I finally got a desktop. In 2020 I repurposed that laptop as a server and it's been running ever since. For tens of thousands of hours.

My point is that Apple doesn't have a monopoly on quality. Perhaps I'm pretty lucky in this sense, but I have had great longevity out of all of my hardware, and I have owned very few Apple devices.

The M1 won't, the SSD will wear out before that and with no way to swap, it will be landfill as well.

In 2013, TechReport did an SSD endurance test: for months, it ran non-stop write operations, a much more strenuous use case than what a regular laptop would experience, which will be primarily read operations. 4 months in, after writing 300TB, all the tested devices were still working without issue.

If the characteristics of the SSD in an M1 are sufficiently similar to the SSDs that were used back then (I have no clue if that's the case), wear out will be a non-issue.

Since 2013 there have been multiple iterations of SSD technology that increased storage density but sacrificed storage durability: https://www.howtogeek.com/444787/multi-layer-ssds-what-are-s...

This is why people are concerned about SSD endurance. An old SLC SSD's NAND would be good for many, many writes, tho the controller would often fail. Nowadays the NAND fails, but the controller is fine.

Do the M1s have especially short write lifetimes? I have a Toshiba from 2010 or so and the SSD is still fine even if the trackpad and speaker ports died years ago.

After 2 years of use, my M1 MBP has 5% write life used. Extrapolate that out and you get 40 years of lifespan.

I'd note that the 2013 MBP also has an SSD that hasn't experienced any problems so far.

Been running a XPS 9560 since 2017 and its rock solid. Windows 10 with WSLv2. Basically the key to any Windows machine is finding the combination of drivers that are stable. That is the trade off with Windows. They support a ton of hardware so naturally the driver quality varies. Apple's problem space is easy in comparison. One set of hardware, one set of drivers. A lot of the complaints about XPS hardware really boil down to the bad set of drivers Dell ships them with. As I get older it has become pretty clear the sweet spot is to be two generations behind the latest and greatest. You get the ideal spot between price, cheap replacement parts and stability.

So not turn key, but also not a rip off prison like Apple :)

Isn't a good high density screen typically a large power drain? Perhaps there's a trade-off that was made there…

It's not included because it's really hard to make a high quality screen, not because of the battery tradeoff.

> Macbook Air M1, just look at Dell XPS series.

If you want an unusable trackpad, a middling keyboard, a fan that spins up and down at random when the laptop is just sitting there, a space heater for your backpack when you close the laptop and stow it away, and a pathetic battery life, then, yes, a Dell laptop is just what you need.

I'll admit, I have a more expensive Dell Precision laptop, so maybe the XPS is actually usable, but I'm not going to hold my breath. The one that I have is the worst POS laptop I've ever had the pleasure of being forced to use.

I had a personal XPS 13 back in 2015 or 2016 that I loved. Right now for work I have a Precision 5560 from 2021 which has all the drawbacks you listed and that I hate. I don't know if it's a year thing or a model thing, but certainly there is no brand consistency when it comes to Dell.

> I still don't understand why people think in 2023 that Android can not be a viable alternative to an iPhone.

I don't think most people -- even iPhone users -- hold that opinion. In the US, at least, the iPhone is still a status symbol. People have iPhones because they don't want their iMessage bubbles on others' phones to be the wrong color. They're locked into that ecosystem with various purchases and don't want to throw that away. They use a Mac and like the integration.

On top of that, I (as an Android user) am constantly uncomfortable running a mobile OS built by a company that exists mainly to track people's behavior and invade their privacy, with the goal of selling ads (and I am more vehemently anti-advertising than most people). As much as I don't fully buy "Apple's commitment to privacy", they are in a much better place in that regard than Android is. I lock my phone down and give nearly every app (including Google's) zero permissions, and only enable (and then immediately disable[0]) as necessary, but I'm still convinced my privacy posture would probably be better with an iPhone. But I don't want to live in that walled-garden nanny-state, so that's that.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samruston....

> I still don't understand why people think in 2023 that Android can not be a viable alternative to an iPhone.

Because Google... I could live with not having iMessage or AirPlay, that's annoying but something I could live with. So it's either a de-googled Android phone or iPhone, and I do need a few apps which are only available in the App Store or Play Store, so I figure I'm limited to phones that can run something like CalyxOS, which basically limits me to Pixel or FairPhone.

The FairPhone isn't a terrible choice, but I'm not going to replace a functional iPhone with it... if it break maybe, or I can get a used iPhone.

It's not that I trust Apple all that much, I just trust them way more than Google at this point. I don't think Google is evil or bad, but their interest and mine doesn't really align.

>I could live with not having iMessage

So, literally any messaging app, something that non-Apple users have to do anyways, and have to deal with your bullshit about only going through iMessage when they have to send you SMS.

>AirPlay

Chromecast is infinitely more ubiquitous. Also, if Apple didn't patent AirPlay and refuse to share it with anyone, you wouldn't be in this situation.

I will absolutely agree with Google being an absolutely dreadful steward of Android, but make no mistake: you gave Apple full support in locking themselves down in their own little playground, and now you're complaining you can't get out.

> Chromecast is infinitely more ubiquitous.

Chromecast is a device.

> Also, if Apple didn't patent AirPlay and refuse to share it with anyone, you wouldn't be in this situation.

Google Cast is just as proprietary as AirPlay. Both require licensing to be included in devices. I have an LG TV that supports both, an ancient Roku device that does the same, as well as supporting Miracast. I suspect you're confusing Chromecast and the Google Cast protocol with Miracast, an open standard; one dropped by Google in favour of their proprietary stack.

> Chromecast is a device

It's branded as "Chromecast built-in" when supported by a TV, not "Google Cast".

e.g. https://www.sony.com/image/89821bf64399cd4c34680e0988903e4b?...

Is that a recent rebranding? The SDK is still called Google Cast.

https://developers.google.com/cast.

It's probably a difference between developer facing and consumer facing, or software vs hardware branding.

Or maybe they just couldn't get a trademark for "Cast"?

My son bought a Dell XPS for exactly that reason. After 1.5 years, the battery life was at 50%. He called Dell support and they said it was normal. He's now in the market for a MacBook Air M2.

I can’t believe my M1 Mac is almost 3 years old, performs just like the day I bought it (blazingly fast).

My work Thinkpad from the same period feels half way dead.

That's likely more a reflection of the software you run (and update over time) than of the hardware itself, no?

It helps that the Apple Silicon CPUs run so cool. In other laptops your CPU cooler and fans will fill up with dust causing the CPU to thermal throttle.

This is a limit of battery technology. Your Apple laptop will ha e shit battery life in a few years as well

I have an Apple laptop that is a few years old. It does not have shit battery life. Probably 90% of new.

Did you research this statement before making it?

I've owned several Apple laptops over the last 20 years for both personal and work use and they've all had reduced battery life over time. I've suffered one recall, another one which failed 1 month past the warranty and which the Apple Store said was quite normal(!), and several had degraded to the point I had to ensure they didn't drop down to below 20% (or some other magic number). After the first few I took into the Apple Store only for them to say "oh that's to be expected" I stopped going in. Not sure why people think Apple laptops are magically immune, they're not. They suffer battery issues just the same as other brands do.

Apple introduced battery charging limitation feature on MacBook in 2019 (or a few years ago?), while Windows laptops supported it in 2000s. That should be the reason for previous experience. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211094

Yep. Apple battery health in system preferences will show you how much the battery has degraded since the device was new. My ~2yo M1 MacBook Pro still has 92% capacity compared to when it was brand new.

I don't know if it's in System Preferences, but for me, System Information shows my mid-2015 MBP (running macOS 10.14.6 Mojave) still has a battery capacity of 8266mAh and a remaining charge of 8079mAh at 100%. Compared to the advertised capacity at launch of 8755mAh, that's a charge capacity of ~92% after ~five years (AppleCare replaced my battery during their recall). MacBooks are just built different.

Modern Macbooks are very strategic about when and how much they charge. You can override it if you know you need a full charge Right Now, but otherwise they will decide how much to charge based on your usage patterns, which keeps the battery alive much longer than on many other brands of laptop.

Apple's batteries are covered under warranty up to 1000 cycles. I had them replace my battery that hit 80% capacity at 3 years right before AppleCare ran out.

Device manufacturers can engineer for longer useful lifespan by oversizing the battery, can't they? Do they all do that to the same extent?

To an extent, there's a limit for air travel, generally speaking as they can be dangerous. The m1/m2 are just killer in terms of lifetime and usage for general reading/browsing/email.. and still very long for even content viewing. Most people aren't rapidly draining their batteries, so the longevity gets to be a bit better overall.

AMD is getting pretty close and the perf:watt on the coming generation(s) for laptops (including integrated gpu) look to be really impressive to say the least...

They can also implement better battery management technology (cooling, charge rate curves, keeping the charge between 10%-90% instead of 0-100%, but reporting 0-100% to the user via scaling), etc, etc.

For a good counter-example, look at the early Nissan Leafs. They burned out their batteries in a matter of a few years, but battery replacements for other brands from that time are basically unheard of. (The inherent information asymmetry for new car purchasers is one reason Biden's IRA dictated minimum car battery warranties.)

Funny, I heard the total opposite about Nissan Leafs. The industry was guesstimating that batteries would last 8-10 years. The first Nissan Leafs (which was about the first commercially mass-available EV) had battery lives where something like 90% were still going strong and still 80% of original capacity left after 13 years.

Rather than the Leaf being problematic, it was the car that showed the market that worrying about the lifespan of EV batteries wasn't really necessary.

I had one of those early Leafs, the battery degradation was real. Newer vehicles seem to have much better curves.

The key to battery life/health on the XPS is to use the BIOS functions to limit charging. My XPS-13 9370 has been plugged in most of its life (about 4 years now) and battery health has dropped from 96% to 93%.

I can't speak to the rest of the comparison to the Macs - they're probably better overall - but the battery life is a solved problem if you know to limit charging.

That's clever, but probably too clever for the 99% of people who don't even know what a BIOS is. You've got to wonder why Dell wouldn't do that kind of front end work themselves.

When most people you know use iMessage then Android is a bad experience.

Also, as someone who switched from Pixels and other Android devices to the Apple ecosystem . It’s nice that everything “just works.”

It’s kind of like running BSD or Debian stable after having been on Fedora/Arch/etc.

> When most people you know use iMessage then Android is a bad experience.

Isn't this because Android uses open standards for its SMS and iOS refuses to do so?

RCS as a baseline standard is proprietary, but google then slapped a bunch of proprietary extensions onto it that it refuses to license, so no, it's not.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...

> Google's version of RCS—the one promoted on the website with Google-exclusive features like optional encryption—is definitely proprietary, by the way. If this is supposed to be a standard, there's no way for a third-party to use Google's RCS APIs right now. Some messaging apps, like Beeper, have asked Google about integrating RCS and were told there's no public RCS API and no plans to build one. Google has an RCS API already, but only Samsung is allowed to use it because Samsung signed some kind of partnership deal.

> If you want to implement RCS, you'll need to run the messages through some kind of service, and who provides that server? It will probably be Google. Google bought Jibe, the leading RCS server provider, in 2015. Today it has a whole sales pitch about how Google Jibe can "help carriers quickly scale RCS services, iterate in short cycles, and benefit from improvements immediately." So the pitch for Apple to adopt RCS isn't just this public-good nonsense about making texts with Android users better; it's also about running Apple's messages through Google servers. Google profits in both server fees and data acquisition.

Like c'mon google doesn't care about open-standards except insofar as that allows them to embrace-extend-extinguish. google's end goal is imessage but with google servers in the middle instead of apple ones.

> there's no way for a third-party to use Google's RCS APIs right now

To be fair, this criticism is fundamentally true of iMessage, too. Implementing all of iMessage's features in an open, trustless manner is impossible.

Thanks, glad I asked - I genuinely was not sure.

Sorry, it sounded snarky/pointed, that was more adversarial than was ideal. It really is hard to ask a question these days, if it's political...

This is correct. Google put a lot of effort into making carriers adopt RCS (which has most of the functionality of iMessage), but Apple will not adopt it to keep their "competitive advantage."

https://www.android.com/get-the-message/

I use an iPhone now but these kinds of business tactics and the others mentioned here really make me wish there were more competitive products on the other end.

RCS is pretty garbage without Google’s extensions. Of course this ends up being very similar to iMessage.

Does it matter for me as a user?

No, and I wouldn't want to imply otherwise. I was genuinely asking because my recollection is that the answer is "yes" but I don't recall.

I loved Android back when I had the time to hack around with ROMs and crazy customization. It's fun. But these days in my busy working life, I don't have time for that kind of stuff, I just want something that works well and gets regular security updates. My Android phones weren't really cutting it.

> I would never use an iPhone for certain software and UX related issues (biggest is the missing back gesture/button).

During my time as an Android user, that back button struck me as the single biggest anti-feature in the Android UX. Every application implemented it differently, sometimes I'd find it bumped me right out of an app if I tapped it once too often, others didn't do that. I hated the thing; it required learning a different set of mysterious tendencies for every app and situation. So happy that it's not stinking up the screen of my first-ever iPhone.

Stuff like the 911 calling bug is a great example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32713375

> I still don't understand why people think in 2023 that Android can not be a viable alternative to an iPhone.

Because some people, like yours truly, enjoy having a patched up-to-date mobile os, but also don't need to change their phone every other year. My Iphone 7 which I bought refurbished in February 2017, still works perfectly after a battery change. It has the previous iOS version, but it keeps receiving security updates. All the apps I need work on it (games may be too much for it, but luckily, I have a PC with a big-ass GPU for that). My dad's Galaxy S7 hasn't had an update in a while. He tried to install 1password, a freaking password manager which is basically a glorified notepad, says it doesn't support the phone and / or the android version. His GS7 is working fine otherwise, though.

> Macbook Air M1, just look at Dell XPS series.

This has to be a joke. I can wholly understand people not valuing build quality and preferring to save money over that or invest it someplace else. But that doesn't make it "comparable".

Have they finally fixed the touchpad moving by itself or ignoring your finger? The fan spinning like a jet engine for no reason? I hear nowadays everybody's on the "modern standby" bandwagon. How do you like your battery draining 50% while on your commute home while the PC supposedly sleeps? Or waiting around for it to wake up from hibernation? That's if you're lucky enough it doesn't burn down your bag because it figured it's as good a time as any to wake up and do who knows what, which absolutely couldn't wait.

I won't comment on the ipad nor the watch, since I've never owned any of those.

FWIW, Apple does release _some_ patches for previous iOS versions, but there absolutely are mitigations that are not back ported to older versions.

If you care deeply about security, I’d recommend having a phone that actually is using up-to-date OS.

I do care, that's why I'm thinking of getting a new one. But still, ios 16, the first which didn't support the iphone 7, came out in September 2022. The iphone 7 came out in September 2016. I'm not aware of any Android phone with such a long support cycle.

There is not even one that would have half that.

My android phone is from 2011. All the apps I want to run on it run on it. I know of some that won't, but I don't want to use them.

So what does this prove? Anything? Probably not.

I'd argue that games are a specific kind of app which require performance. It's likely that a brand new low-end phone supports the latest android os but not the latest power-hungy games. Though you can probably install them on it, just like I can install power-hungry games on my old iphone. It's just that it won't be an enjoyable experience playing them.

A password manager doesn't have any such requirements.

Agreed Android is a suitable iOS replacement. Maybe a bit wonky at times but I’ve used both and they’re the same for my needs.

XPS is not comparable to M1. Not even close.

> I would never use an iPhone for certain software and UX related issues (biggest is the missing back gesture/button)

Um, swiping from the left edge takes you back on iPhone and iPad. Not sure how long ago did you last test the "missing back gesture" theory. Been using an iPhone for 3 years and has always been this way.

Not in several google apps — they deliberately break the convention.

just google ruining the experience as usual. same with youtube on iOS, they get away with it so why not try breaking the rules everywhere.

Android phones come loaded with ad tech, malware, depending on a matrix of carrier _and_ manufacturer. Even if they don't start with it, if they actually get updates, any update could bring it along later. It's a metaphoric minefield, where you have to do significant research before finding the current mine-free path. Samsung in particular has a reputation for lacking scruples.

It has nothing to do with hardware.

”…missing back gesture/button”

Swipe from the left of the screen goes back a page in the current app. Swiping right on the bar at the bottom goes back to the previous app used. Two different locations but the same gesture. What else is missing for a back gesture/button?

Back gesture on iOS only works within an app. Back button on Android works system-wide (cross-app).

Swiping along the bottom of the screen goes to the last used app.

It works but I prefer Android's intent based transition system.

What does intent based transition system mean? The advantage of Apple’s system is that it is unambiguous. I’ve heard from plenty of people that the “back” button or gesture surprises them from time to time.

Macbook Air M1 > Dell XPS or whatever alternative

can't speak to other tablets but iPads get the job done. I have one of the oldest generation ipad Air that still gets updates. Got it secondhand. It does the basics well enough. I'm not sure an android tablet would even be getting that support.

If you care about privacy, then the only choice within the Android-sphere is GrapheneOS, which limits you to pixels, which arguably are not on the same level in hardware than iphones.

>I would never use an iPhone... missing back gesture/button

One finger swipe right.

I have a Pixel 3a and longevity of phone is important. But Android is cutting down their supported cycles to 3 years. Unless something changes, in fall next year I will get an iPhone 14/15 (possibly refurbished) and keep it for 6/7 years. ios16 is still possible on the iPhone8 - a solid 6+ years of official updates!

Walled garden or not, their products are solid and supported. That is what most consumers look at. No hassle ownership for most.

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