I hate the tribalism regarding Apple products. There are loyal fanboys who won’t hear a bad word about Apple, and then there are Apple haters who criticise everything about them.

I wish we had some more nuance in this debate. The reality is that there are advantages and disadvantages to Apple products. I’ll outline a few:

Advantages

Long iOS support. Typically you can expect an iPhone to be supported for 5-7 years, which is well above the average in the industry.
No bloatware or adverts on the iPhone
Better privacy than Google Android/Microsoft Windows
High-end hardware, e.g. M1 chip in MacBooks.
User friendly design. Nice user experience.

Disadvantages

Overpriced. Seriously all Apple products are more expensive than the competition.
Anti-consumer business practices that influence the industry. They normalised removing the headphone jack and using non-removable batteries, which other manufacturers followed. Another anti-consumer practice is using their proprietary Lighting port, rather than USB (luckily the EU should be forcing them to adopt USB-C and removable batteries soon). Also, no SD card slot because they want you to use iCloud
Walled garden. No support for side-loading apps
Required to use iTunes to add/remove music to the iPhone, which is a problem if you use Linux (you’d have to use Wine to install the Windows version as a workaround)

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No bloatware or adverts on the iPhone

Cherry-picked. There are phones without ads or bloat. And, given the incompatibility between facetime/iMessage and apps standardized across all other platforms, I consider these to be bloat.

User friendly design. Nice user experience.

Subjective. I support a number of family members whose grandkids suggested iPhones. Whether it's swooshing, skootching, swiping, tapping or banging it against a guardrail, I haven't learned and they can't remember how to bring up the main app screen now that the functional button was removed -- like, none of them. I'm just here to fix their email passwords, and I leave the UX issues to said grandkids.

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