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Comment by daseiner1 | Hacker News Reader

i've been hearing this critique of new apple products for about two decades now and inevitably: - apple's product "does the same thing" as [device sold at 25% of the cost] AND - apple's product "does the thing" at a level of polish that's in an entirely different league from every competitor.

siri is the great exception here. jesus christ what a piece of shit

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Thats not the point. There is a difference between someone spending a lot of money on compute and never use it vs. doing the same thing.

Its like buying a porsch and driving it always at 100km only.

a better analogy would be a toyota hybrid, which is basically the same as any other hybrid car, except for the one issue of reliability.

So yes, a toyota hybrid and a chevrolet hybrid should be exactly the same, but they are not, the price difference reflects it, as does the number of twenty year old toyota hybrids still on the road.

My wife has gone through a large number of iPhones in the past 14 years, where as I've had a total of 2 android phones. Way easier to repair, and add software well past the end of life date.

Why has she gone through so many iPhones? I’m typing this on my iPhone 12 from 2020. Before that I had an iPhone 6s from 2015. I’m considering upgrading this year, but I could hold off for another few years if I wanted to. My phone still runs like it did when it was new. I get through most days with 60%+ battery remaining.

The biggest problem with my phone is modern software bloat. I only have the 64gb model. Modern software - especially iOS itself - has gotten ginormous. Every time a patch comes out I’ve gotta delete a bunch of stuff in order to update. And running unpatched software seems pretty dangerous right about now.

They were slowing down to the point of unusable.

I had a Galaxy S3 from 2012 to 2024, then got a hand me down Galaxy S9 for free.

I don't like that I can't remove the battery, but it's got a SD card so I don't have to worry about storage ever and a headphone jack, so I don't have to worry about my headphones running out of batteries.

Perhaps a bit pedantic, but ironically I don't think Chevrolet makes any normal price range hybrids atm

The $500 tablet could be an Apple iPad

In fact iPads start at $429

The iPad Mini starts at $599, with a more comparable screen size.

And there isn't really any competitive tablet with Android in that size. I've only seen cheaper tablets with lower specs.

Hell before the recent price hikes $2000 would get you a Macbook Neo, an iPad Mini, and an iPhone 17e.

The classic slashdot comment!

There used to be a pretty big gap between iPhone and android in terms of polish. that gap keeps narrowing, but it is still there for sure.

Is there, though? The last few iOS releases have been pretty classless and inconsistent, imho.

That gap isn’t closing when it comes to the total package software plus hardware, and fit and finish there is a huge gap between Apple being a vertical computer company and whatever PC, Linux, Android product you look at, someone else brought up Toyota or Honda when you look at those two companies and you compare what they make to what GM and Ford make there is still a gap and you can also still see a gap when you talk about some of the other German companies when it comes to fit and finish too.

I have an iPhone and an Android phone and I don't see the gap at all when it comes to software. Quite the opposite, I think iOS regressed a lot with iOS 26 to the point where I see quite a lot of render stutters on an iPhone Air and 17 Pro. Besides that, Android is much more configurable (especially OneUI).

Apple is still the indisputable leader when it comes to hardware though. Great SoC, great cameras, great build quality.

Too bad it doesn't have GrapheneOS :).

This year it's the most ___ ever.

(I hope so, would be embarrassing to say last years iphone was faster but used more power, so ....)

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