The new iPhone 14 and Pro are so disappointed that it pushed me away from Apple ecosystem further away (from the inside mind). The biggest upgrades of this year’s iPhone are obviously the dynamic island and the 48MP camera. The former one, is yet another syntactic sugar for the fact that Apple pokes a pill shape hole in the screen. No matter how fancy its animation looks like, its existance is questionable without the front camera and lasers. That being said, if one day Apple is able to resolve the under-screen camera issue, or use some other techniques to make the screen a real full screen, I don’t see any points of the dynamic island. It’s a pitty that UX and engineers spent so much time and effort on this transition feature. Yes, it would go away. As for the 48MP, undoubtly it is an improvement. But, given the fact that the photos taken on iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro are almost identical, this new camera is pretty much useless add-on. Those who want the quality of the photo won’t even consider iPhone 14 Pro as there are much more advanced devices out there. Its target user should be those who just don’t want to carry the heavy bulk DSLRs and want to take some quick and nice shots. 48MP is an improvement, but is not as desired.
I had a chance to hold a brand new Pixel 6 Pro. Any iOS users will be shocked by how good the phone feels in their hands if they ever hold a Pixel. The hold exposed a different side of the digital world that I have been neglected for years: Android. I switched to iOS more than ten years ago directly from Symbian. At that time, Android phones were not premium, looked ugly, and was full of weird round corners. That didn’t seem to be the case long ago. Playing with the Pixel phone, a dangers idea came to my mind: switching to Android.
I took one step back and thought carefully. Unfortunately, my digitial life was built upon Apple ecosystem. I made a list about the things I use everyday on iOS, tagged with priority.
| Priority | Need | iOS | Android | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| P0 | Podcast | Overcast | Google Podcast | Should be painless transition |
| P0 | Personal finance | Debit & Credit app | N/A | Either use iPad or switch to a different app completely |
| P0 | Smart home | Homebridge | Google Home | There is no a central hub like Homebridge for Android, end up having too may apps |
| P0 | Todo | Things3 | Task | Not close to Things3 but might work |
| P0 | Earphone | Airpods Pro | Pixel buds or Bose earpods | Airpods UX is very good but maybe 3P is as competitive |
| P1 | TV | Apple TV | Android TV | Well I don’t really have to change other than losing the phone remote, which wasn’t actually good |
| P1 | Carplay | Carplay | Android Auto | Tesla has neither anyway |
| P2 | Hand-off | Native | N/A | There might be some alternatives on Android but none of them is native for sure |
The table is good at sorting my heads and it turns out all items I care about will have a solution (good or bad). Will put more time considering this.