Android Guy becomes iPhone Guy

The deal, as they say, is done.

After having no end of frustrations big and small with my Pixel 5, a couple of weeks back I finally jumped ship completely over to Apple. I sold the (very quickly devaluing) Pixel 5, paired that with less cash than I’d expected, and got a used iPhone 11 that had its glass replaced, a brand new battery, and (importantly) a full year of warranty.

It’s sexy and red and sexy.

As soon as I got it up and running, it immediately connected to the other Apple devices in the house. Having used Androids since they came to Canada, and mostly working on Windows computers in the house, I’d forgotten how easy Apple makes connecting to things. In 2022 I shouldn’t need to be banging my head against a wall in frustration about X, Y and Z not connecting smoothly, when it can evidently be made literally effortless.

Thus far, the UI differences between Android and iPhone have of course been a learning curve, and there are definitely seemingly basic things I wish I could do with it–what do you mean I can’t just put app icons where I want them? What do you mean I can’t set the camera to default to 16:9? What do you mean I can’t make the alarm volume go any lower than what’s still a startling volume to wake me up?–but I’m still certainly happier with it than I was with the Pixel 5, so I call it a clear win.

I was going to leave Google totally behind, to the point of taking my gigs and gigs of old pics stored on Google Photos and get them to Apple’s iCloud instead–why continue to pay Google for storage when I wasn’t using Google as a primary backup?–but then I remembered my own advice in that one shouldn’t put all of one’s digital eggs into one digital basket. So I’ll trim down what I can on Google Photos to at least get it to a free tier and leave what I can there so long as they’re willing to house them.

Now that I’ve gotten that Pixel 5 irritation out of the way and can enjoy casually learning how to optimize my use of this new phone without stressing over fundamentals, I can better focus on bigger things.

Onward!