I have used almost every iPhone in the last 10 years. I have also used quite a few Android phones during that time. The reason for this is that I get excited about technology but I get bored of it just as fast.

I had an iPhone 6S and Apple Watch, got bored of the iPhone and went through various Android devices before landing on a 7 Plus for a while. Got bored of iOS and tried various Android phones again, ended up with an OS iPhone SE, it was faulty so used a rather shitty iPhone 7 til I traded it in for a XR, sold that for a XS. I had an Nokia for a bit after that. I don’t remember what I had after that but I landed on the iPhone SE 2, and then the 12 and stayed there for a while. I did trade between models because I wanted the 12 Pro Max after that, it was too big, so sold that and went back to the regular 12, and stayed with it til the 14 Pro.

In comes the Samsung S23 Ultra. The phone is genuinely wonderful. The screen is a great size, the cameras are unbelievably good. I was taking what I felt were DSLR quality photos at a wedding and on holiday in France. So much better than iPhone in terms of image processing, integration with Google is so good, it all just works, and Google Assistant vastly better than Siri. Siri just needs to, um, die. I will still keep the Samsung and have a secondary SIM to put in it, so I won’t be selling it.

iOS and the majority of the Apple ecosystem is great. I’ve got the iPhone, watch, MacBook, a couple of sets of AirPods and some AirTags. It all just works. The Apple Watch is genuinly the best fitness smartwatch I’ve ever come across. The iPhone is the easiest phone to use for me. The MacBook is an absolute titan. The Airpods are expensive for what they are but they work well. AirTags allow me to know where my things are. Leaving that ecosystem means I lose out on the seamlessness of everything. It’s a complete pain in the arse.

The thing that doesn’t bother me much when I’ve switched out between ecosystems is iMessage. iMessage is great, but here in the UK it’s not used as much as it is in the USA. We can use WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Discord, Telegram etc. etc. But when you’re the odd one out in a group of people who use iMessage, it can just get annoying. Apple just keep adding features to it which are kinda nice, like stickers. Android doesn’t really have this, or if it does I’ve not seen it.

The Apple Watch includes all the premium features that are often paywalled on other fitness watches and it does it well. The watch bands are expensive, but they last forever. Integration with other services like Strava are nice, and it’s really simple to integrate.

I guess one of my main influences is the vast plethora of YouTube videos telling you that “OMG IOS IS SO AMAZING LOOK AT ALL THE STUFF YOU CAN DO” and “IOS IS TERRIBLE ANDROID IS WAAAY BETTER DITCH ANDROID PLEASE LOOK AT WHAT THIS PHONE CAN DO!”. A lot of these videos are often from the same content creators, so they influence a load of subscribers to switch and then a month or so later they do another video about how wrong they were and have switched back.

If these YouTube influencers stopped making these kind of videos influcencing people to dump a perfectly working ecosystem for another, and then switching back again a short time later in a video that’s supposed to seem sincere. Given that, Apple need to keep up with the likes of Samsung and Google in terms of image processing and types of cameras. Apparently Siri and autocorrect will be improved in iOS 17. We’ll wait and see.