Bye Bye Apple
In November 2014 I bought my 3rd iPhone (and probably my 8th or 9th iPod) – the iPhone 6 Plus. Literally 1 year after I bought it, the ca,era stopped focusing. Two months later the screen became unresponsive. I didn’t drop the phone, kept it in a protective case: externally it looks perfect. Functionally it is dead. I went back to the shop – “sorry 1 year warranty – 2 year contract – pity you didn’t buy insurance.” I phoned Apple – same story. From the Internet it appears that this is a common problem with that particular phone – associated with “bend gate” – Apple refuses to admit the clear fault with the phone leaving many of us with €900 bricks. Apple used to be a company that sold premium products for premium prices – now they seem to be selling shoddy products at ludicrous prices. It is unacceptable that a phone should die from an internal fault within the contract period and not be replaced. I choose to insure a phone in case I do something stupid like dropping it down the toilet – not to idemnify Apple for a poorly designed product.
So, I decided to abandon them and go with Android. I preordered the Galaxy Note 7 – and then battery gate happened. On Friday, I couldn’t take any more of my 4 year old iPhone 4S (bad signal, bad connection and about a 6 hour battery life) – so I went into my local phone shop (due an upgrade). Guess what – iPhone 7 release date. On the rack was the 7 side by side with the Galaxy S7 edge. What a contrast – the Edge is a 5.5″ beauty – a real object of desire – or for €50 more I could buy a really boring looking iPhone – that looks like last years’ phone without the headphone jack. Why in God’s name would anybody buy a portable entertainment system into which you cannot plug headphones? There is a reason why headphones have been around so long – they work dummy. High end headphones are just about the only high fidelity products making money these days – and the iPod/pad/phone are largely responsible. Didn’t Apple spend a few billion dollars buying shitty headphone brand (they didn’t even design them) Beats? Obviously nobody at Apple knows what decent headphones are otherwise they would have bought Sennheiser, AKG, Grado, B&W or some other hi fi company. I have had dozens of wireless headphones over the years and use none of them now – the sound is lousy, you have to charge them and they are fiddly. “You can use the dongle” and attach it to your $1000 Grados – I’m sure that there is an amazing DAC built into that wire – not! A lot of people forgave Apple for making their iPod/phone docks redundant (I have a fairly expensive Wadia one) a few years ago – but killing off the analogue headphone market is sheer hubris.
So iPhone 7 or S7 Edge:
Advantages of iPhone – I can use my old apps (most of them are free). I know how it works. That’s all: nothing special.
Advantages of S7Edge – it is bigger, and looks really good, great camera, high res music – that doesn’t require annoying iTunes sync nonsense, SD card slot to increase memory, and A HEADPHONE connector. The latter did it for me. Hello Android. Strange, though, I am typing this blog on my iPad Air 2!
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