Why I switched to Apple and iPhone 12 Review

So, I’ve been using this iPhone 12 for a few weeks now and I’ve gotta say it’s….

But before that, let me give a glimpse about me. I got my first smart phone in 2012. It was a black Samsung Galaxy y Duos. It was a whole new experience. The mobile is so feature rich compared to all the buttoned Nokia phones we had before. I didn’t worry about screen refresh rate, camera quality or the audio/video quality back then. I was excited just knowing that a smartphone can do all those things. The smart phones became more and more powerful along the years. The smart phone industry have exploded since.

The next smartphone I used is a Sony Xperia (I forgot the model name it was a mid range one, Sony does a terrible job at naming their smartphones). It was good. The next ones are Redmi Note 3 and Redmi Note 5 pro. The only reason I went with Xiaomi is they provided good specs at an affordable price and I didn’t care much about the smartphones back then. Since I didn’t have other good mobiles to compare and I wasn’t much into smartphones the redmi series felt fine for me. I felt that something about this mobile is wrong and a smartphone could provide a great experience than the ones I had. Then I started exploring smartphones watching and reading a lot of stuff about them.

Here are some reasons that made me switch to Apple.

Bloatware

When I first bought the Redmi Note 3, there were a ton of Google apps pre-installed in it. Yeah, Android is developed and maintained by Google and maybe there’s a clause that says that. But you don’t have the permission to uninstall them. You don’t have a choice to choose between Microsoft One Drive or other cloud services as your default storage and so on. So you’ll end up having a shit ton of apps irrespective of you needing it or not. To make things worse, these smartphone manufacturers pushed their own copies of those bloatwares along with the existing Google bloatwares. Now we have two stores for downloading apps, two browsers, two cloud storage apps and what not. Now we ended up with twice the of shit ton of these bloatwares. The same is true for Samsung. Not sure about one plus. But eventually all companies will end up doing the same. It worsens the experience. Think about the storage space it takes. Not good! And worse Redmi pushed me to use their service every time I try to do some action.

“Yeah nice, But Apple has bloatwares too, right? So how can you unfairly criticize other smartphones?” I can hear that. Yeah, Apple has a ton of bloatwares too. But the thing is You can remove any of them. Including the default camera app and all of their subscription services. Shocking right? Even I was shocked. It gives us the complete control to choose most of the services. Name one Android smartphone that does that.

Privacy

Google tracks us. Like a lot. It knows us better than our close friends or family. Most people doesn’t care about this saying “What is Google going to do with the information of a common man/woman like me?”. Privacy is a human right. I’m completely for it. Apple’s privacy policies are So strict compared to Android. This is also a primary reason for moving to iOS. I could be wrong. But Apple lists privacy as their selling point. So if they mess this one they’re going lose their trust. Name one Android smartphone which has privacy as their selling point. With iOS 14 you get detailed explanation on how the apps track you, which Facebook took it so personally and became a full blown SJW, and ran campaigns saying Apple is “destroying small businesses”. But Apple CEO Tim Cook just destroyed them with this single tweet.

Hardware

The quality of the iPhones are great. They have a strong body, strong glasses, great durability. The design and build quality is so good. I loved iPhone 12’s design. Yeah there are good Android phones but like Apple advertised, iPhone12’s design was pushed to the limits. iPhone12 is the best good looking smartphone I’ve ever seen. When I saw the drop tests, durability tests, hardness tests and water resistant tests of iPhone 12, I couldn’t help but imagine the amount of effort Apple made to perfect their phones both in design and build quality.

UI

No offense to Mi users, I totally hated the MIUI. No matter what theme I change, I hated the icons, the fonts and everything about it. ( Not because it is Chinese, I totally love competition and letting the users decide). Yeah there are Android smartphones with good UI. But I badly wanted to try iOS. iOS is so smooth and fluid. I love it. It is simple, minimalistic and so smooth to use. There are some issues too, which I’ll cover in a separate article. But the positives outweigh the negatives.

Experiencing the Other side

I completely hated Apple once. I always thought of Apple as that evil capitalist company. I’m against their anti-repair policies and having complete control over the entire supply chain. I’m completely for Right to Repair. I’m a huge fan of Louis Rossman who continuously exposes Apple and it’s bad practices. There are millions of iPhone users around the world. I wanted to know why people religiously use Apple devices despite the criticisms. I always love exploring and experiencing new things. I just wanted to peek into the dark side for a change and experience it. This is also a main reason why I’ve made my mind to try an iPhone. Here is one of my favorite video from Louis Rossman.

Ads

Ads Ads everywhere. I totally hate ads. Not sure about other smartphones but I saw a lot of ads in the Redmi phones I used. (No it’s not from the installed applications).

Fragmentation in Android and App Experience

For starters, Android is not exclusively made for one smartphone/device. It is a generic OS and smartphone companies customize it according to their needs and use them. Android devices comes in various shapes and sizes with different specifications. So a “One for all” OS can’t extract the most out of the hardware for every device. There’s always this trade-off. You either create an exclusive OS for your devices and get the most out of your hardware and create an efficient product (You guessed it right, the Apple way) or use an existing popular platform and use it with some compromises. Most companies choose the latter because if they create a new OS they need the app developers to develop another app for the new OS along with iOS and Android, which is very expensive. That is the exact reason why windows phone failed.

That’s the reason why Apple smartphones with inferior specs outperform android smartphones with superior specs.

When I used one of my friend’s iPhone5s, I felt that. It’s performance, camera quality is so great compared to the Redmi Note 5 pro I used. It just felt so different and good. And apps are so fluid and smooth in iOS because there are only few iOS devices, so developers make apps exclusively for those, making the best out the hardware.

Camera

I travel a lot. I love clicking photos. I like to grab a pic of the locations I visit and store them in memory. DSLR camera is an option, but I preferred a compact smartphone with a powerful camera I can carry around. And the pics I took from redmi are not so good. Yeah, this is not the main reason for moving to Apple because there are some Android smartphones with great camera too. (Pixel is ❤) But iPhone 12 camera is so good and I was able to take some high quality photos and videos.

After going through my reasons, I fixed my mind to buy an iPhone. After some waiting I finally bought the iPhone 12. I bought the 64 GB variant, which costs INR 80000 (Almost $1100) in India. Yeah I had to buy the adapter separately because Apple is “protecting the environment” by not including adapters and selling them separately.

I first thing I noticed is it’s speed and fluidity. Apps open so fast. Apple boasted about A14 chip in it’s website like 11 trillion operations per second, 50% faster than any other smartphone, smart neural engine etc., I haven’t test the full extent of it. I tested out playing popular games like Asphalt 9, CoD, etc., And I’m impressed. There hasn’t been a lag. The display is bright, vibrant and colorful and provided a great experience. I picked some slo-mo videos, tested out the night mode and it’s awesome. The other thing that impressed me the most is the stability while picking up videos. The stabilization is so good and I’m able to take some high quality 4K videos. The apps are smooth. The same app in Android runs sloppier compared to the ones in iOS. The battery is good. It’s sufficient to last a day. With regular use, you’ll end up with 10–15% battery at the end of the day. It takes almost an hour to get the battery to full. But the initial 50% is fast, it takes around 20–25 mins. Love the FaceId feature. But these days with corona and masks around, I often have to remove my mask or enter passcode for unlocking the device. Other than that it’s a great experience overall.

It took me some time to get used to it. But the experience is so great. There’s a saying that once you start using Apple you’ll never move out of it. It’s only been a month since I started using it, and I already feel it. The Apple experience has been so good. And switching to Apple is a decision I don’t regret.

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