As an Apple user for more then 4 years, I have seen Apple's exceptionally good products suddenly burn and die once a new device comes out. Sure they could optimize and fix bugs on new updates, but every update that you apply to your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad lags it. I have a second generation iPod touch like many other early adopters of the touch-screen technology (and touch screen apple devices) and it was revolutionary and could run silky smooth, doing what I wanted it to do without any lag. Then the updates kept rolling month after month, until the iPhone 4 was announced, and iOS 4 was released.. Since then, it takes around half a minute to open the music app, longer to read emails and minutes to browser the web on Safari. Turning off spotlight helped with the lag dramatically, but until this day, iOS
4.2.1 is what my iPod touch has been stuck at, and performance isn't perfect (at all).. What Apple did to the device was to cripple the hardware through the software updates, and as an iPhone user, I feel burned and disappointed by Apple for not providing a product that can last.
Tl;dr: I'm disappointed at Apple, they killed a perfectly good iPod touch off
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| The phone I now love to hate |
Tl;dr: I was once happy with my iPhone
A year later, after the "amazing" ios 6 update, the ability to jailbreak was removed (even though I didn't jailbreak) and the iPhone 5 was released... The update crippled the iPhone 4S and even more so the iPhone 4. Safari was laggy like no tomorrow (the iPhone's Google Chrome browser didn't fare any better, only Opera Mini does a good job at browsing the web), and I've found some serious limitation with the device. Having 20mB/s internet, I found that the iPhone 4S can only utilize around 1/20th of it, meaning on top of the slow Safari browsing, downloading critical documents like pdfs (some can get as large as 50mbs fyi) and word documents took minutes instead of the seconds which I was used to... So what, you're thinking, slow internet speeds on an iPhone. Well it wasn't just that, file sharing wirelessly with other computers in my wireless network was slow as well. To make it worse, the iPhone 4S (let alone the iPhone 4) doesn't have proper capabilities of the "n" range wifi network (that is extremely fast), so though Apple advertises the iPhone 4S as having "n" wifi support, it doesn't, and can only use slower bands of wifi.
Tl;dr: I found issues with my phone after using it as a smartphone out of the box
iOS 6 nerfed the music application and the itunes/app store applications on the iPhone 4S; a second or so worth of loading now takes around 30 seconds or more...
Even worse, the camera of the iPhone 4S takes a minute to capture from when it first loads up. There's an irritating freeze from when you see the app all loaded and when you've pressed the button to capture the photo, to when it actually captures. The shit device locks up on "focus" mode and crashes from time to time, let alone the crashes that the iPhone 4S got when the shutter starts loading. With this, when you actually try to take a photo, it doesn't work from time to time and those precious, or critical moments of your lives will be lost forever.
Even worse, the camera of the iPhone 4S takes a minute to capture from when it first loads up. There's an irritating freeze from when you see the app all loaded and when you've pressed the button to capture the photo, to when it actually captures. The shit device locks up on "focus" mode and crashes from time to time, let alone the crashes that the iPhone 4S got when the shutter starts loading. With this, when you actually try to take a photo, it doesn't work from time to time and those precious, or critical moments of your lives will be lost forever.
Tl;dr: Apple caused my iPhone to lag
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When opening the settings app in iOS 6, on an iPhone 4 or 4S, the app will sometimes crash or lag for minutes. This issue did not happen during the time when my iPhone 4S was still on iOS 5, iOS 6 is starting to cripple the phone just like what iOS 4.2.1 did with my iPod touch. iOS 6 did not provide any significant updates or changes to iOS 5, but was advertised to do so to draw users to update to buy an iPhone 5, iOS 6 was not a feature - It's an advertisement.
Tl;dr: Apple lags iPhones to get people to buy new ones.
Not just that, iPhones have destroyed my user experience, even when it was still new, the 64 gigs that I have on it is now gone and there's no easy way for me to erase the phone without plugging it into my computer with a cable. So basically, the phone has been full, there was no non-tedious way to remedy that. Even worse, with "0" bytes remaining, as a power user, there is no knowing what the iPhone is deleting when you take screenshots at 0 bytes, making the entire process tedious and painful. There was a few other horrible bugs that I experienced a few times, taking a photo with the iPhone using the power buttons (how apple intends it now to work) actually makes your middle fingers cover the camera when you grip the iPhone which makes the feature seam almost as pointless as the other features on the phone. The alarm is tied to the phone ringer, which is annoying because as a user, what if I do want the iPhone to wake me up, but at the same time not get embarrassed when someone calls me? There's a really stupid cheap rattling sound that the iPhone makes (iPhone 4, 4S and 5 even iPad 4's are affected by this) that irritates me when I use it. The phone cannot control my tv without some stupid $50 accessory that I bought.
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| All of these "vouchers" are pretty much worthless |
The apps are all using the stupid freemium model that causes me to pay for every coin that I want in-game, making that the app store economy is filled with shit apps that seem like they were made in a few days (as opposed to the number of high quality titles that the app store once had. The iPhone cannot rotate 180 degrees. Developing websites may seem like heaven, but you need a cable attached to the iPhone when Safari is loaded to even think about doing something like that, meaning that you'll have some fun testing accelerometer based iPhone websites. The iPhone actually pauses all scripts on the iPhone when you put your finger on it, making web development even worse. You cannot get rid of the passbook app, because as an Australian, it's absolutely worthless (unless I wanted ticketek tickets. Siri absolutely fails at speech recognition and cannot do some tasks (open up an app, e.t.c.). Notification centre (when you slide your finger down from the top), is worthless since you cannot control the brightness from there e.t.c. and have to open up the settings app for it. An update for an iOS app means updating the entire app usually, meaning that the slower then expected wifi speeds does not help with updating iPhone apps, the "Video" app is unbearably useless (think: YouTube). Apple maps has gotten a direction wrong once and locked up at the "Re-calculating route" message (trying to go through a road that has been blocked off for years? really, Apple?), being absolutely worthless for the rest of the trip (though the 3D feature is pretty cool, at their defence), voice memos autoplay when you select the menu when you don't want them to and there's no way to stop it afterwards (unless you press the home-button , Game centre are filled with people who don't want to do anything asides from challenging you, the inbuilt "Speak Selection" feature is notoriously hard to stop once it's started, YouTube automatically streams at HD (sucks when the iPhone cannot utilize the most of fast internet), iCloud is useless for everything asides from email and music, you have to actually cut your sim card in order for it to be used in an iPhone. Some apps decide to suck battery life even when they're in the background/multi-task bar (and should be "forgotten" according to Apple). App folders have a limit of 12 Apps, which is far-far too small (20 apps should be good though...), covering the iPhone's microphone when you're not using a case could muffle sound when you record a video, and so on and so forth....
Tl;dr: Apple devices were limited in the first place and iOS sucks
With that, I'm not getting an iPhone unless Apple steps up their game and makes a 2.4GHZ dual core smartphone device and FIXES THEIR OS! besides - The iPhone 4S still functions well as a phone (but nowhere near as a "perfect" smartphone) and of course, android devices have the advantage of speed, freedom and the fact that it isn't crippled once it becomes out of date (preforming the same as an iPhone that's released years later). An iPhone 5 will become just as crippled as an iPhone 4S when the "next" iPhone does get released, as Apple does not care about existing users of 1 year old technology, and will do anything to persuade users to update to newer hardware, as opposed to android, where you can update as soon as it is slower then the newest iPhone, at a cheaper cost and lower price.