Future proofing, mostly. Google and Samsung have been promising seven years of updates, but they’re doing it because Apple has done it always, only Apple never promised longevity.

The issue here is that Apple designs its own silicon, so Apple decides when to stop supporting a device. With Android phones, Qualcomm and others make the silicon, and they are hard coded to specific Android versions. They release patches that allow new versions of Android to be used (this is in layman’s terms, it’s much more complicated than all that) and after a year or two, they stop releasing these patches. No new version of Android can run on that hardware and you have to buy a new phone or keep using unpatchable code. Well, at some point the Android side got this shit figured out and now they can logistically do seven years of updates. But the processors are still not as fast. Android guys are going nuts over the fact that the Pixel 10 benchmarks similar to the iPhone 11 in performance (Tensor 5 by Google in the Pixel 10, vs A13 Bionic by Apple in the iPhone 11). And while the iPhone 11 is still supported today (it’s getting iOS 26 on Monday), no one’s imagining an iPhone 11 is competitive with the current generation. So if you think a Tensor 5-powered Pixel 10 will be usable in 7 years, while it may be still getting updates… I got oceanfront property in Colorado to sell you.

The A19 Pro is also going to be awesome for gaming, but nobody buys Apple tech for gaming. It’s more creative stuff. Like making video/audio. Artists have always flocked to Apple, but I don’t think the power of the A19 Pro is necessarily catering to them. Or the platform it’s on. Artists want the iPad Pro, which currently runs on the M3 or M4 (Mac silicon).

And yet, you posted two comments to me, on two different communities, on two different instances, completely hostile in both of them.

You should get help. I can only imagine what you’re like in real life. Either you’re very meek when you’re not behind a keyboard, people walk all over you so you bully people online, or you’re exactly the same in real life and you hurt people around you. Maybe that’s not the kind of person you want to be, either way. If I’m wrong and it is, nothing I say will convince you otherwise. But on the off chance there’s any decency in you, take your own advice and talk to somebody.

Can’t you get a terminal on Android? I did once upon a time. It’s a rather clunky way of doing things, but it’s essentially Linux so this shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

I’m a Mac/iPhone guy, but it’s the same shit. I use jdownloader2 (a Java downloader that uses yt-dl and others, it’s basically the Swiss Army knife of downloaders) to pull the video down on the computer, then send it over the air to my phone. It would work exactly the same way if the computer was running Windows, and/or if the phone was running Android. I can also get files wirelessly between Android and iOS going both ways. Both the top video players (Outplayer on iOS and VLC on Android) can be turned into web servers, so I just put both phones on the same network, open a web server on one and connect to it with the other, send stuff right across. Android is, of course, a bit better with its file picker, but iOS is better at the server stuff, being basically UNIX, I guess. Either way, it’s not a challenge to move stuff between them. But the actual downloading? I do that on a computer. And as you might guess from the name, Jdownloader2 uses Java, so it’s the same app on both Mac and Windows and presumably Linux as well.

I’ll just refer you to what I said to the other guy. So if you see this, you should be able to click through to the thread, see what I said to the other guy, and read my reasoning there. No need to split the argument/debate into two threads.

That’s a good point. But the issue is, it’s always going to be a moving target. Every year I could reassess the streaming services and quit the one I’m on and go with the one that best meets my needs each year. And each year it could be a different one. Ethically, that would be the superior option. But, I’m not perfect, I’m barely ideal, and I use a family plan to help justify my cost. Sure, I pay more, but I also get my wife and a couple other family members the gift of perpetual music as well.

So if every year, or every, however often, I were to reassess, and drop one service, and start another one and ask them to dump the app and get a new app and let me add them on that, all of us are losing our entire library every time we switch across. It’s a lot of work. Sure, there are tools to convert your stuff over, but it’s still a bit of work.

At this point it’s not about who’s the actual absolute best at the things that matter the most, at this point it’s just which one’s good enough for our needs. Also Apple is one of the few streaming services that doesn’t give a hoot if your family all lives with you. We had Spotify before and at that point — this was years ago — you had to retype the address every month, and if, say, my niece mistyped it, she’d lose access to her premium benefits for a month. At one point I just sent her an email with the exact text to copy and it was fine, but like if she accidentally left a space at the end or something, if the text didn’t match 100%, it was this whole thing — and of course I wasn’t compensated for a family member being denied their benefit for the month. Apple does not care. You add the person and they get the benefit without ever having to physically be at that address. I just hope that doesn’t change.

(Also, I think Napster pays artists the most now, ironically?)

Okay, so aside from the fact that you’re stalking me across communities for whatever reason — if I write a loophole in your employer’s code, like a patch, that keeps them from having to pay you, and they like not having to pay you, I haven’t done anything egregious or unethical? Or it’s only egregious or unethical because it’s happening to a company you don’t like?

If the law doesn’t apply without prejudice blindly and equally for all, what good is it? And who decides who is deserving? Some pathetic Internet stalker? So given your lack of ethics, would you then agree it would be fair to take your wages as well? Or do you draw the line between companies and people, or how much someone makes? Because we might find some common ground there. But on the surface, it appears you are the one throwing dog shit from that which is covering you.

Yeah, they write smaller checks than Spotify. Spotify has more subscribers. But Apple pays more per stream.

Spotify sponsors Joe Rogan, and Apple’s CEO sucks up to Trump. There are no winners here with regards to politics.

Some say you can’t separate music from politicians, and I suppose that’s fair. I still pay for music, and if my same ten bucks a month or whatever it is now is gonna go in some small part to some bad fuckers, if more goes to the artists with one than the other, I can consider that the lesser of two evils.

Though you’re not gonna hurt Apple and their Trump boot licking by not paying for their music streaming. Nah, you do that by only buying the phone you need, when you need it, not a new one every year like some people like to do. You can only hurt Spotify by not buying Spotify Premium. I like my iPhone okay, but it wasn’t as big of an upgrade as the last one, and my next smartphone probably won’t be an iPhone at all. Though I won’t need to make that decision for another five or six years.

The funny thing is, if her family is wealthy, they’ll just take care of it. It’s poor and brown/Black girls they want to keep barefoot and pregnant. It’s not about oppressing girls — that’s just a side effect they’re glad for. It’s about maintaining the class divide.

I had a fourth generation Xeon. Good chip. Ran the latest games for almost 10 years. Yes, I ran Cyberpunk on it. Barely. But it got me through two plays through, and that isn’t a short game.

I wouldn’t expect Spotify to just let people use premium services for free. Fuck Spotify, right there with y’all on that, but this isn’t egregious or unethical behavior for them.

Use Spotify since it has a free tier, for music discovery if you like, but get FLACs and self host. I like Plex for that and it works with what I use.

Music is actually one thing I will always pay for. I use Apple Music because they pay artists more and they offer better quality. And they don’t care, if you’re on a family plan, if not all your family lives with you. I also self host because backups are nice and I can’t access Apple Music at work. I can, however, access Plex. (It’s not that Apple is blocked. It’s that Apple requires 2FA and I can’t bring my iPhone into work.) But, point is either way, self host and stream everywhere. Sucks that Plex went up; I got Lifetime for $80 years ago. (Now it’s $250.)

So my question is, do we want ISPs to be liable? If they are, they will be more likely to cut alleged pirates off. If they aren’t, then a legal door is open for the rights holders to go after individuals directly.

Nope, my wife uses Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Discord.

Can’t get her to adopt Fediverse equivalents.

I’d say I choose quality over quantity, but she mostly is in artist communities that don’t want to move off the old platforms. They say they were there before the crazies, they aren’t the problem, so they’re not gonna move, even if the people who own those platforms are straight up fascists. I couldn’t do it.

“Agrees” and “forced under duress” are not the same thing. An agreement before both, I think.

They were sued. Nintendo won. The people don’t have a chance against corporations.

I’m not a nurse. Nurses are a different breed.

But as for me and my answer, I don’t let other people decide my happiness. That’s really all it is. Someone wants to be a jerk to me, I let them, I smile, and I go about my day. Because they do the things they do because of who they are and I do what I do because of who I am. Sounds cliche AF but it works for me.

That doesn’t sound accurate. Plenty of places use ballasts and those are legal. A ballast is a barrier, typically concrete but some are plastic and filled with sand, and they are commonly used to keep cars out of pedestrian spaces. You might not even notice them sometimes, but if you think about what keeps cars off the sidewalk or out of parks, you might notice them.

That’s my point, for most people the performance gains of one 2024 or 2025 flagship over another don’t mean much.

I can transfer stuff over WiFi to my iPhone in seconds. Like 2-3GB movies, 100MB-1GB video clips, etc. Seconds.

microSD sucks and I think anyone familiar with the tech knows it. The issue is speed. microSD is fine for like 16GB, maybe 32GB. Once you get bigger, you wanna put bigger files up there, more files, but they move. so. slow. It’s painful to watch. Then you get a bigger one and it’s such a headache to transfer stuff between them. I think a couple companies tried to make faster microSD cards/readers but they never took off. So I talked about NVMe and UFS. Slower than UFS, on garbage Android phones that aren’t good enough for UFS, is EMMC, and EMMC is faster than microSD. microSD is good for Jack and shit, and Jack left town. Apple may have blessed the industry by never including it. It’s trash and Jobs knew it, and he didn’t put trash in his products. Lots of people know microSD is trash and that, not Apple, is why most Android phones don’t include them now either. One, because yeah, they wanna sell you the faster internal storage and/or cloud storage. But two, because it’s just so slow.

But yeah, I’d say get a big-ish phone (storage wise, like 256GB or more) and keep stuff on the internal UFS or NVMe. Optionally get a Samsung T7 or T9 portable SSD, 2TB for around $100, on Black Friday (I mean, that’s about what I paid for my T7, like $110 tops) and keep stuff on that. Yes, iPhones can read/write from/to flash drives and portable drives. Same as Android, you open the file manager, browse to the drive, copy stuff over. Apple’s built in Files does it. On Android I’m old school, I’d only mess with either Solid Explorer (my personal choice) or FX File Explorer (2nd choice). I know Android has a file manager now (Samsung had one longer) but I trust those.

A lot of names can be converted. My favorite uncle gave his oldest daughter a pretty name, but he wanted a son to name after himself. They quit after having two girls, and he named his youngest girl after himself, with the name converted to the feminine variety.

I’d say the good guys are the ones supporting, or trying to support human rights. And gay rights, trans rights, the rights of immigrants and such… are human rights. A civilisation is judged not by how it treats its nobility, but how it treats its working poor. And we need to do better.

Well, I have the best one. I have the 16 Pro Max, 512GB. I like the big screen, and I like a lot of things about it. And how well it works with my watch, my AirPods, and my Macs — for example, being able to copy something on one and paste it on the other. “The Ecosystem” isn’t as great as some say, but it does have its advantages.

Some apps cost money. I refuse to do subscriptions. I’ll pay for an app if I like it but I won’t pay monthly unless it’s a service (like say Apple Music). There are free apps on both platforms. There are paid/subscription apps on both platforms. Both platforms take 30% so they’re both incentivised to promote subscriptions and paid apps over free ones. The free ones still exist. Only on Android, you also have F-Droid which is all free/open source apps.

Nothing is more powerful than an iPhone in all conditions. Okay so the Galaxy S25 is faster right now, but when it gets hot, its thermal protections reduce power by like 50-60% to cool it faster. iPhone only loses 20-30%, so under no load, the S25 is gonna be faster, and the iPhone is gonna be faster under load. Talking about playing the top games. So most of the time you’re under no load. Also, on paper nothing has faster storage than an iPhone because iPhones use more expensive NVMe SSDs. Your top Android phones use UFS 4.0, or even 3.x, which is slower… on paper. The benchmarks speak for themselves. But power on an iPhone 16 Pro and a Galaxy S25 Ultra and open and close apps, you’re not going to see a big enough difference to say “I’m selling the phone in my left hand to buy the phone in my right,” whichever way you wanna go. Android has more RAM. Android has better AI. iPhone has never had a good keyboard — Gboard sucks on iOS but it’s amazing on Android. Android has Firefox with uBlock Origin. iPhone has better video cameras. Still cameras? iPhone over-sharpens, Samsung over-softens, and Pixel uses AI hallucinations to fill in what it can’t see. They can all show you lab-created conditions where their phone comes out on top. MKBHD has shown people time and time again that in blind image contests, most of his viewers/subscribers prefer pictures taken by cheap Android phones, not flagships from anyone.

So the truth is, there really is no best smartphone platform. For a Mac guy, iPhones have a slight advantage, but their disadvantages are notable, too. And honestly I’d love to have a better Android phone than my 2019 Galaxy S10, but the fact that I like my S10 better than my 16PM for a few things speaks volumes.

I think what I’m gonna do is, in a few years, buy a Galaxy phone that’s a couple generations out that is better than my S10 (it should be — by a lot) and then after a few more years, replace the iPhone… probably with a base model, because honestly I don’t play top end games and even the top iPhone can’t get something as basic as typing.

Just trying to keep my head above water for the most part.

Trying to pass along kindness hoping it continues to be passed along.

And voting for the good guys in every election.

And avoiding the worst privacy offenders in tech where I can because I care about that too.