Product elitism is dumb.
It was fun before… like 20 years ago. Now it’s just… eh. Apple users don’t care about any of that. They want a device that “just works” and has their ecosystem. They’re trapped in it, but eh, what’s the point. They aren’t going to convert, and after converting some people you learn you just become tech support for them.
Seriously, does anyone think Apple users care about unlocked bootloaders and LDAC codecs? They want whatever the new iOS features are and their AirPods to work seamlessly.
I have an Android phone and an iPhone, and they both do pretty much the same thing. I can do some things with Android that iOS can’t, but it’s nothing an average user couldn’t do without, or even know they’re missing.
They’re also all made by heartless megacorps anyway. None of the companies are really ‘good’ just different forms of terrible.
To be fair i do care quite a bit about that. Phones just make bad computers to me. Small screen and half is used by a keyboard.
They seem designed to frustrate me so “it just works (most times)” is the only way i can stomach owning one.
I have a dream where apple is forced to make ios fully open source and where screen/input devices can freely stream any system/OS from a dedicated server.
Iphones are so “cleverly” dumb it makes them usable.
I think even the average users are becomming aware because of how inferior iOS is. For example, all these things I’m going to mention below are doable on any Android (no root or bootloader required) since 2015 or even older versions while iPhone cant do shit:
iPhone cant temporarily disable apps, can’t prevent apps from using networks, cant disable system apps, cant open multi apps in mutli windows, cant location spoof, cant disable any system app or feature, cant customize themes or control anything in comparison.
Except when the shitty ecosystem fucks with everyone else. Eg. when trying to get files from an iOS device to another phone. You need to use 3rd party software, which is almost exclusively shit on iOS and (at least in my school) no iPad kiddie managed to use local file sharing websites. The real kicker? Sharing stuff from the teachers iPad to the students does not work reliably either. Never. 20 students, and Apple can’t manage to transport shit. We resorted to uploading it to Teams - so much for Apple’s nice ecosystem for easily sharing files, which ends up taking 15+ Minutes.
I‘ve used Android and iPhones for multiple years. Now I am using an iPhone and I am very happy. Main reasons are build quality and software. It just works. And the main advantage is primarily if you use multiple Apple devices. And since Android phones are expensive as fuck, too, I don’t care about the price anymore
They want a device that “just works” and has their ecosystem.
i have friends that struggle to pay rent and they’re forced to pay apple’s extortion-esque prices when something goes wrong or when purchasing their phones and equipment.
witnessing them suffer like this hits close to home for me because i grew up poor enough to ration out the government cheese & powdered milk along with asking extended family and begging neighbors for food so that we could stay alive until next payday and also because i’m tech savvy enough to understand how unscrupulously apple has behaved at creating this well designed trap of an ecosystem that’s actively easy to fall into and passively difficult to leave; locking my friends into a seeming perpetually repeating cycle of new iphones and government cheese.
i think that the icing on this shit-cake is that they’re all atleast vaguely aware that apple is screwing them over; but they still accept it because it either “just works” or it’s “all they know” and that blows my mind because 5-year-old-me HATED government powdered milk in my cereal enough to switch to oatmeal for breakfast if it were an option.
Weirdly, a lot of them seem to care a whole lot about the color of their speech bubbles in their sms app
This isnt elitism, this is trying to show apple users they are being scammed. Sure, most of them are happy that way, but maybe some of us should have higher standards for ourselves
mAh is a stupid way to measure batteries. Wh is more relevant.
It also tells nothing about the efficiency of the device. You can add a 50kWh battery to a device but it doesn’t matter if it uses 2kWh at idle
I’d argue Wh is a complete waste. Just use J, which is the much more established unit.
I disagree. Joules are really hard to understand to laypeople. Watt-hours directly relate to the power of a device without conversion, and can even be really translated in terms of power bill.
3.6 megajoules? Eh, I guess that’s maybe a lot? Or not?
1000 watt-hours? Oh, like running a microwave for a whole hour? Dang that’s a LOT!
I believe it actually has to do more with historical conventions in electronics or math. (This is just what I remember from heresay when I was in university as an electronics engineer), but there is also a mathematical reason.
history hearsay theory
The easiest way to measure power draw is by measuring current draw (voltage across a sense resistor) way back before there were affordable, quality ICs to measure voltage and current and pretty much joule count.
To add to this, current sensors are much easier and cheaper than test machines that do the calculations for you.
When lithium batteries and NiCAD batteries became standard compared to the earlier lead-acid (which are measured in Wh), they had an extremely flat voltage curve compared to lead acid. They could be considered to be at a constant voltage.
Now cheaper electronics were being made and if a designer wanted to know how long a battery would last, they could take the nominal battery voltage that the battery would be at a vast majority of the time, and they could just measure the current draw over a short time of the circuit, 10s of calculations, and you have your approximate battery life. There is a joke that engineers approximate π to 3.
Even designing electronics today, everything is specced to current draw, not power draw. ICs take X current in mA during Y operations. Your DCDC converters have Z quiescent currents and from there you can calculate efficiency. It is much easier to work in current for energy running through the circuit.
Math units
Ah is a measure of electrical charge.
Wh is a measure of energy
Batteries and capacitors hold charge so are measured in Ah, generators that power the grid generate energy and use of that energy is measured in Wh (it also isn’t a “constant” voltage source like batteries as it is AC)
The thing is, it does not matter how much charge the battery holds, it does matter how much energy it holds. Without knowing the Voltage the Ah is useless.
Sorry, but you are simply wrong. Simple math says that you are wrong.
You can buck or boost convert nearly any voltage to any other voltage.
Then measure the current output of the battery, boom you have battery life.
Also electrical charge can be used in many, many very valuable calculations without involving voltage at all.
Let’s take an arbitrary example with an arbitrary battery powered device. Let’s say the battery is somewhere between 1V and 10000000V. You can’t measure it because you might blow up your multimeter.
You know that the battery is 5000mAh. You can safely measure that all of the circuitry is draining 1000mA because sense resistors or contactless magnetic current measurements don’t have anywhere near dangerous voltages. You know that the battery will last about 5 hours. What is the voltage? Doesn’t matter.
Yes, charge and the flow of charge is not the entire story, but to say it is useless or does not matter is just a straight lie. It is fine if you don’t understand electronics, but then don’t spit out misinformation.
Yes Watt-hours would give a more complete picture to slightly tech-inclined consumers (makes 0 difference for 99% of consumers), but then it returns to not mattering because you can do the 5s calculation yourself because single cell lithium batteries are overwhelmingly 1 nominal voltage.
Literally 90% of calculations related to efficiency are JUST as valid using mA as W.
Your device uses 12mA at idle with a 5000mAh battery has the same relevance as your 18.5Wh battery using 45mW at idle.
I guess it comes down to whether we want to primarily communicate battery size in terms of charge (Coulombs = Amps * Time) or energy (Joules = Watts * Time).
The first metric you multiply by your operating voltage to get the second metric, whereas the second metric you have to divide by your voltage to get the first. Depends on what comes easier to most people.
you can optimize your android device battery in ways iphones cant. For example you cant disable or remove any system app consuming your battery in iPhones, but that is instantly doable in Androids
Settings, apps, Google play services, disable. Very easy. Nobody is saying “you can disable any app you want on android and your phone will magically just keep running perfectly as though it’s not dependent on it” just that it is possible to do so. Yes, I understand disabling Google play services will cripple many features. It is however possible, and you’ll still have a functional phone afterwards. The same cannot be said about iPhones.
iphones cannot temporarily disable apps, cannot prevent specific apps from accessing network, cant spoof live location sharing, cannot even multi-window several apps at once. those are 4 simple examples which I personally find very helpful which all androids can do for more than 10 years already while iphone cant.
A 4Ah battery at 5V would be a 20Wh battery, drop the kilo. Electronics draw power at idle, not energy. 2kWh is meaningless without an idle duration. What are you saying?
Wh may be better for determining total energy storage across differing cell chemistry. mAh is standard for electronics and makes more sense at the design level as the battery voltage is chemistry dependent and known to the designer.
i don’t think any manufacturer publishes the voltage their devices run at, could be anywhere from 3.3 to 5V. so i don’t know how an end-user is supposed to compare battery sizes between devices.
They would also have to give current draw which isn’t really possible since each end user has different apps and behavior. So you more often get standby time or video playback time which are based on an “ideal” (probably non-bloated) clean OS. That’s more useful to an end user but also subject to marketing fudging the figures.
You can often look up the battery chemistry or use an app to access sensors btw.
At the end of the day battery capacity is only one factor of many in battery/charge life and is generally just marketing in the context of phones.
What? They draw power, not energy?
Energy is just the product of power and time. And just like amperage, the power draw of a device varies.
And this should be obvious, but what makes more sense to an electronics engineer doesn’t matter one bit to the end user. And the end user doesn’t know anything about milli-amperes or volts (except maybe their wall outlet voltage).
Yes power is a rate. As you said energy is the time integral of power. So it’s meaningless to state an “energy draw” without a duration implied or explicit. E.g. what does drawing 2kWh at idle even mean?
I agree about end user sentiment. I was trying to suggest as well. The only way to know which battery/phone is going to have a better battery life is to identify reviews with similar usage to your own or cross-compare metrics across devices you’re familiar with. In general, phone A with a 4000mAh battery won’t necessarily outlast phone B with a 4500mAh batt.
Not even what it was once close to being unfortunately on the android side either.
Android users have also been losing features every year.
Flagships have seen the removal of:
-SD card expansion - what we could once count on to use phones like mirrorless cameras is now gone so they can rip you off for higher non expandable storage (128GB SD? $10. 128 -> 256 GB base? $200)
-
3.5mm - why buy cheap wired headphones when you can force people to spend 10x as much on wireless! Coming up with a solution to a problem they invented.
-
IR blaster - yes I used it since it worked on TV, receiver, DVD player, air conditioner, etc. Also super convenient if you have used stuff you bought without the remote
-
FM radio - yes I used it again since no data needed! Can also be fun to listen to campus radio or when travelling
-
notification led - The RGB led was pretty good when you had binds foe each app to know who texted you and why. Always on OLED draws substantially more power than the LED did
-
Always unlocked bootloaders - the custom ROM scene was pretty big at one point, but has shrunk as more manufacturs have begun locking bootloaders ‘for safety’
-
removable battery - phone no longer holding a good charge? $15 fix. Was also super convenient since I bought a spare that I kept charged and in my bag, meaning I could go 0% to 100% in 2 mins… better than fast charge!
List could go on for longer. Maybe it’s just nostalgia but I do miss some of those days.
This is what Android users get for pining after Samsung despite them being first in line after Apple to remove most of these. JFC they made a phone that exploded and they STILL lead the market.
(yes, I use android too)
- Losing SD Expansion sucks; they should bring this back. Only reason they stopped this is greed.
- Yet another Nice-To-Have that is gone; but I’ve never seen any phones that weren’t Samsung with this. This one doesn’t really even affect waterproofing; or phone size so they have no excuse.
- I certainly miss this one; but the FM Radio was present back on my 2020 Moto G6 Power. It was present on my 2020 Moto Edge. This one got stolen from us because we lost the 3.5mm Jack too…they used the wire from your wired headphones as an FM Antenna lead.
- This is nice; but I ended up having to root my Nexus 6 to make this work properly and use all the colors the LED could perform. I don’t really miss it with Bezel-less phones.
- I hate that bootloaders are frequently locked; but it’s been less necessary to root Android as it’s improved over the years. There are still a few pain points; but not quite as many that require root.
- This is another case of greed. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have removable batteries for phones that aren’t IP67 or higher. If it ain’t waterproof; there’s no reason to seal the battery in…and replaceable batteries is a benefit when they accidentally ship units that become “spicy pillows” when the batteries swell due to bad batteries. It also simplifies disposal of phones; which don’t need disassembly if they’ve got a removable battery.
IR blasters are very common on Chinese brand phones even today. It’s easily the feature I miss most from my Huawei.
Ah; I don’t use Chinese branded phones at all. Never have.
Phones in the US market do not usually have them, unless they’re Samsung branded, and since I don’t include Chinese made phones in that “group”, what I’m saying is true for the US.
- Losing SD Expansion sucks; they should bring this back. Only reason they stopped this is greed.
Fuck that noise. SD expansion was a terrible idea and I’m glad it’s gone. There are so many problems introduced by removable storage, it was a terrible PITA to deal with as a developer. One of Google’s dumbest ideas in early Android. Good. Fucking. Riddance.
I have honestly never heard this take but it makes sense. If you feel like elaborating more on why it’s a pain for developers I would be interested. But like, I also have google if you don’t feel like typing it all out lol.
Uh, No. Hell to the fucking no. Bring back SD expansion. Treat it like the data storage device it was.
Your beefs with Google are misplaced; because they were trying to mess with what folders were used; and with trying to protect user privacy because applications were misusing storage to violate their user’s privacy.
Yeah @PM_ME_SNEKS_IN_HATS@lemmy.world - this is a first! Also curious to hear more.
That Sony retailed for $1300 when it launched
The iPhone goes for $800
The 13 Pro which released around the same time also had USB 3.2g2 and 120hz display. The Pros are clearly a better comparison.
That’s not to say Apple’s done good or anything, just a super expensive Android device vs the entry iPhone doesn’t seem like the best comparison
op’s post was making the point that a lot of specs of the 2024 iphone 16 were already found on the 2021 sony xperia 1 III. I don’t really care about either, and you could use a lot of different 2021 android phones as a comparison. I don’t even think the comparison is entirely fair, but to ignore the fact that apple is clearly lagging behind android on certain aspects while hiding behind marketing is just misguided. Also, their phones are just overpriced because of price, and the innovation argument is getting old.
