Apple, Android, or Microsoft?

Do you prefer Apple, Android, or Microsoft tech?

  • Happy with Apple.

    Votes: 28 56.0%
  • Happy with Android.

    Votes: 16 32.0%
  • Happy with Microsoft.

    Votes: 6 12.0%
  • Dislike them all!

    Votes: 3 6.0%

  • Total voters
    50

bnizzle87

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I will be picking up my first Android phone sometimes next week, the Sony Xperia Z3...

http://store.sony.com/xperia-z3-lte-zid27-M/XZ3D6603/cat-27-catid-collections-xperia-z3?vva_ColorCode=FFFFFF&_t=pfm=category

It will not replace my iPhone 6 but replace another line and I want to try it out. Honestly my iPhone 6 has been rather problematic and that is the last thing I need since I conduct so much business on the phone.\

You'll enjoy it. My Z2 has held up considerably well. Being able to pair it to my PS4 and record 4k video (albeit for short clips) made it quite appealing.
 

mmcartalk

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I've got a year-old Mac Air, and I've found it overall a lot more reliable than Windows, though some functions were easier on Windows, like transferring images and opening/closing and shifting back and forth between multiple windows. Still, I'd take the Mac in a heartbeat.
 

nabbun

Premium Member
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I love my Android phones. The from do what I want and how I want is very liberating. There is a steeper learning curve because you have so many options but, that's ok.

I can't knock Apple for it's quality however, I build water cooled gaming rigs and Macs aren't built for that.
 

DoingDamage

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I hate MACs!

Here's why: the company builds products the way they want it to work. For 75% of the average consumer, this is great! They minimized user input into their OS, so with Apple - It Just Works! But, if you want to hold your phone this way, no. You need to hold it the Apple way. Want to load music on your iPod/iPhone, you can't just copy and paste stuff. No, do it the Apple Way by running iTunes, which crashes and acts up from time to time, and sync. Oh, you want to load 1 song on your phone - time to tell you about the iTunes upgrade processes that will take hours, then since it has a bug, you'll have to wait for the next release of iTunes to come out. And in order to have iTunes working correctly, you need QuickTime. Don't like QuickTime - TOUGH! It will be there and be a thorn in your side anytime you want to look at a video. Do you want U2's new CD? No? Tough! Apple wants you to have U2's new CD.

Being a Tech, Geek, nerd, I want things to run the way I want them to run. I love open source because you can customize it exactly how you want stuff. And, I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate iTunes and QuickTime. Is it possible to have the same experience with Apple products when you hate those two products? No.

My wife has iPhones and she's tired of me laughing every time she runs into an issue. When she performed a factory reset and lost all her data, when iTunes doesn't sync properly and she loses music, etc... I have my 32gig stick that I replaced for a 64gig stick without buying a new phone. I like to listen to my music in a different program than the default app. I like to look at videos in a different program/app than the default. In Droid, its easy to change. On IOS - how can I do it? Can I back up stuff my my own cloud provider or do I have to use Apple's Cloud? I'm still trying to figure out how to load music via wifi on my wife's iPhone so she won't have to find her laptop, plug the phone in, then wait for iTunes to load, then her to figure out how to load her music now since iTunes did an update, then sync, etc.... On my droid, open up a ES File Explorer, search for my 3TB drive on my wifi, copy the folder I want, paste it on my 64gig microSD card, open up my audio player and play.

Doing stuff the Apple Way sometimes is more complicated than the way you want to do it.
 

Onelog

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I hate MACs!

Here's why: the company builds products the way they want it to work. For 75% of the average consumer, this is great! They minimized user input into their OS, so with Apple - It Just Works! But, if you want to hold your phone this way, no. You need to hold it the Apple way. Want to load music on your iPod/iPhone, you can't just copy and paste stuff. No, do it the Apple Way by running iTunes, which crashes and acts up from time to time, and sync. Oh, you want to load 1 song on your phone - time to tell you about the iTunes upgrade processes that will take hours, then since it has a bug, you'll have to wait for the next release of iTunes to come out. And in order to have iTunes working correctly, you need QuickTime. Don't like QuickTime - TOUGH! It will be there and be a thorn in your side anytime you want to look at a video. Do you want U2's new CD? No? Tough! Apple wants you to have U2's new CD.

Being a Tech, Geek, nerd, I want things to run the way I want them to run. I love open source because you can customize it exactly how you want stuff. And, I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate iTunes and QuickTime. Is it possible to have the same experience with Apple products when you hate those two products? No.

My wife has iPhones and she's tired of me laughing every time she runs into an issue. When she performed a factory reset and lost all her data, when iTunes doesn't sync properly and she loses music, etc... I have my 32gig stick that I replaced for a 64gig stick without buying a new phone. I like to listen to my music in a different program than the default app. I like to look at videos in a different program/app than the default. In Droid, its easy to change. On IOS - how can I do it? Can I back up stuff my my own cloud provider or do I have to use Apple's Cloud? I'm still trying to figure out how to load music via wifi on my wife's iPhone so she won't have to find her laptop, plug the phone in, then wait for iTunes to load, then her to figure out how to load her music now since iTunes did an update, then sync, etc.... On my droid, open up a ES File Explorer, search for my 3TB drive on my wifi, copy the folder I want, paste it on my 64gig microSD card, open up my audio player and play.

Doing stuff the Apple Way sometimes is more complicated than the way you want to do it.

I totally understand your side, and have many friends that have been rooting and jailbreaking their devices since they got their first Palm back in the day. Personally though, I may be a "technology specialist" at Lexus, but I'm not really into coding, and I like stuff that "just works", hah. Quicktime isn't the best program in the world for videos, but you know what most people download on their PCs? Rhapsody! If you want a way to pull your hair out, try to watch anything in a slightly strange filetype with that mess of a program. iTunes has some trouble once in a while for me, but when I buy a song on my computer iTunes and then open up my phone, hey look the song is there too! And yeah, that would be tougher to update songs to the iPhone from iTunes if all your music is on a laptop in your bag, but my iTunes is on my Wifi, which means every night when I plug in my phone, it re-syncs, and I can access it on my Apple TV as well through my Remote App from the back yard and change the music, because everything just plays nice. One of my favorite things though is I can be sitting in my living room with my laptop, my desktop in my office, and my phone charging in the bedroom, and if I get a text message, I don't miss it, because since my devices are all connected, I can see and respond to that cat video from my old roommate right away from my computer. Or I'm searching the web for that perfect recipe for dinner, find it, but don't want to drag the laptop or desktop into the kitchen and risk spilling on it. I can "handoff" any webpage, text message, email, etc. from there to my phone to take it with me.

tl;dr, I like it when things just work, it makes my life easy enough :) But I do appreciate the customization options you can get when working with other OSs.
 
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I have been through all the type of phones and the iPhone was really disappointing me. I found it boring, static and just sad... After three months I picked up my 2,5 year old Windows phone (Lumia 920) and stayed happy with it for one more year. Now I have got a new Lumia 950. Its user friendly and a pleasure to use.

:cool:
 

Gecko

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I've moved from PC to Mac...I used to really dislike Apple products....I got a shuffle as a gift and let it rot, until I decided to use it one day and thought "wow this is pretty cool and easy"....eventually going to an iPhone 3-6 and dropping my Sony PC for a MAC and now Mac Air and of course iPads and the Air....and then my family all moved to Apple....

I just find them durable, lightweight and good for traveling, easy to use and they boot up so quickly....

Though I have to say this latest iPhone6 of mine has been the most problematic product of theirs and I would dump it.

I've used Android products and have no issues with them, they are just currently not really for me but I could use them.

As for Microsoft, my wife has an ACER laptop she got as a gift and I feel bad cause the software is just maddening. She complains all the time about it and when I've used it it makes me want to throw it into Biscayne Bay lol..

This sums up my experience exactly. I was anti-Apple for a long time, but at this point, their products and ecosystem just make everything so simple and seamless that it's hard to go somewhere else.

I've been sucked in.
 

krew

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Been meaning to write this rant for a while, but yesterday's iPhone 7 announcement has sealed the deal -- I love Apple products, but I hate Apple as a company. And now it's starting to make me question my 15 years of loyalty.

There's something very off-putting about how the company presents itself now, it's all so flashy and superficial. There used to be this clean aesthetic that really appealed to me, but now it's all Beats1 and weird business strategies like gold watches and removing the headphone jack.

I'm locked into Mac as my computer platform, and could never go back to Windows now. But I was sooooo close to buying a Galaxy Note until they started exploding. The iPhone 7 Plus looks like an interesting product, but it's obviously been neutered so there's a new iPhone 8 to release next year.

I don't know. It's likely me just getting older and less willing to self-identify with a company, but Apple as a lifestyle is completely dead to me.

(Starts saving for an Apple Watch, iPhone 7 Plus, Airpods, eventual Macbook Pro.)
 

Ian Schmidt

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I'm not sure what's putting you off, to be honest. The clean aesthetic is still very much visible in the actual Apple products (I mean, c'mon, look at those piano black iPhone 7s!) Beats is a separate brand *because* they have a different aesthetic, and the gold watch is there for the 0.1% who want it. It's like Maybach, to use a comparison I know people here will get. And I really don't understand what's "neutered" about the 7 Plus; it's about 18 months ahead of Android top of the line devices on real-world CPU and GPU performance (cite: I'm a developer), it's finally water-resistant, and the new camera is crazy good.

The headphone jack thing seems weird now, but I've had the wires yank accidentally out of enough pairs of headphones that I'm convinced wireless is the future. And at that point who needs the jack?
 

meth.ix

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For Phones and tablets I prefer Android over anything BY FAR because first of all, Android/Google's Material Design is definitely the best out there unlike the boring and outdated iOS UI. Also, since Android phones are made by hundreds of different manufacturers, ou can always have variety instead of being forced to buy one type of phone if you want to run iOS. This also means you can buy very inexpensive Android phones if you're on a low budget. Also Android is far better than iOS when it comes to features. Yes, they have a few good, original features like 3D touch and people think that this means that Android isn't as good because Apple marketing is much better. But actually, Android is much better because it is more customizable, (like the home screen is much more efficient) and Google Now INCREDIBLY enhance the user experience. Widgets are awesome, notifications are far more productive, Google Maps works better than the iOS version and the iOS Maps app. I'm not gonna go into any details, but just search up any of the things I mentioned and you'll see. One reason I know people prefer Apple is because the first Android phone they use is a Samsung or HTC. Now, Samsung and HTC are pretty good. But, they heavily mod Android to be unique to their phones by adding useless features and apps. This makes it so confusing for someone using a smartphone for the first time. Plus their mods make the UI look SOO BAD. And since Samsung is the most common Android device, people think that only Samsung makes Android.

SAMSUNG IS NOT ANDROID

There are so many other manufacturers that have PURE ANDROID as made by Google. Companies like this are Motorola, Nexus, etc.
Trust me, Android is so much more productive and fun to use. With widgets

And Android Auto is also far better than CarPlay. Google Maps is far better than Apple Maps, everyone knows that. Design is so much nicer on Auto. And Android Auto supports more third-party apps to work so there are more apps like Pandora, Spotify, etc. that you can use.

And I think Windows Phone 10 would be second place over iOS if their Windows Store had more apps like the large Android Library. Windows design language is also great, too.
 

Ian Schmidt

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Mattias Duarte, the current Android designer, is doing great work when the OEMs don't paint over his work (hello Samsung!). I was a fan back when he made webOS for the Palm Pre. That said, I don't think there's a significant difference in the modern "flat" UIs between Android, Windows 10, iOS 10, Mac OS, and even recent versions of KDE and GNOME on Linux. If you haven't played with the iOS 10 betas yet, buttons are back to looking like buttons rather than browser links, which I greatly appreciate.

Also, Apple Maps isn't the funny joke it was 3 or 4 years ago - they have over 1,000 people working on it now. All the errors are fixed, there's 3D models of pretty much all cities, transit and walking directions are in, and the tiles often download faster than Google's. About all Google has over it is Street View at this point.
 

mikeavelli

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I rarely use the headphone jack as I was using bluetooth headphones anyway....I've rarely used it in the car. If you want the best sound, you don't use an iPhone anyway.

My 7 plus 256 in Jet Black was ordered without much of a second thought. I have a 6 and 6 plus now and they are fantastic. The additional camera hardware is top rate as the new features.

As for KREW's point on how they are presenting themselves, I guess the crazy thing is Apple used to be a niche brand and today its the dominant brand. Its not rare, everyone has it and that might turn people off. When Apple was smaller you REALLY had to be a techie to use it.

And my iPhone 6 has been working pretty flawlessly lately. I'm also VERY happy moving to T-mobile.
 

krew

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As for KREW's point on how they are presenting themselves, I guess the crazy thing is Apple used to be a niche brand and today its the dominant brand. Its not rare, everyone has it and that might turn people off. When Apple was smaller you REALLY had to be a techie to use it.

Yeah, my post does sound a bit like "I liked it before it was cool!". :D

I guess my real point is that there used to be this super-clean minimalist design approach that extended to the way the company presented itself, and now it feels like Apple is run by people that want to be middle-age rock stars.
 

meth.ix

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The new Google Pixel which replaces the Nexus line of phones has the highest rated smartphone rear camera, and it doesn't even have a dual camera!!!
 

FearTheYu

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Been using Apple since the beginning for smartphones. Was always a PC desktop enthusiast, but I've learned to enjoy ease of use when it comes to the smartphone OS of Apple and accept the quirks and nuances of it. Very happy with Apple still!