Ever tried using one of those dirt-cheap Android phones?

The difference is the a dirt cheap Android phone will cost less than $100 for new unlocked, whereas a dirt cheap iPhone start at about $300.

For $300, you could get a competitevly specced Android phone with great support for AOSP custom roms. Get one of these, flash AOSP without play services and you've got a reasonably privacy-focused phone.

For US$300 you'll get an iPhone SE that'll outrun a Samsung Galaxy S7 in most benchmarks. What's not competitive about that? Can't expect current flagship performance from a US$300 device.

A cheap Android phone runs circles around the most expensive iPhone in day-to-day tasks. https://youtu.be/qcfqhszn7Bk

This has been the case for many years now. https://youtu.be/hPhkPXVxISY

So a "cheap" Android phone costing US$500 that came out like yesterday is really good at opening and closing applications. The new benchmark of What Makes A Really Great Phone after It Must Have Slim Bezels wasn't an argument anymore.

> So a "cheap" Android phone costing US$500 that came out like yesterday

See the second video, which shows a $300 phone of the previous generation beating an iPhone of the latest generation at the time that cost twice as much. I couldn't find a head to head comparison of the iPhone X against a cheap Android of the previous generation, but I expect the outcome to be the same.

> is really good at opening and closing applications.

The video doesn't show speed of closing applications. Opening communication applications is 90% of what users wait for when using a phone, and Android users wait less.

Your artificial benchmarks that measure gaming performance aren't much use to the 99% of users who use their phones more for productivity than for AAA games.

We're measuring performance of computing devices with benchmarks for at least 20 years now. Most of the scenes still do it that way, for example comparing PC performance to Xbox or Playstation. AMD vs Nvidia. Nobody questions that a significant difference in benchmark results means a difference in real life performance.

Except for some people living in the Android world. Why is that?

I think it's a bit like people that are denying climate science. They keep looking for new kinds of benchmarks until they find something that fits their predetermined outcome. Some glacier got longer instead of shorter? and boom see no global warming. Some YouTube dude has a video that makes your phone looks fast? and boom look no further. Benchmarks suck!

Those benchmarks work ceteris paribus. All else being equal, a faster CPU, faster memory, and faster disk will translate to faster app launch times.

In this case, they don't, as you can see with your own eyes. That's because the platforms are different.

> Some YouTube dude has a video that makes your phone looks fast?

Every single video that shows app launching has the same result. Don't believe them? Try it yourself. If you get a different result and post it to YouTube, all of your fanboy friends will love it, and you'll get some revenue. The rest of us are happy to use the more productive and less expensive phones.

You're like a person who says climate change is due to solar flares but doesn't actually measure the effect of solar flares on climate to realize that there is a huge amount of warming that is not accounted for by that simple analysis.

Yes, MotoG3 2015. Best phone I've had so far, all around. $200 is not exactly dirt cheap, but it comes out to $100 a year so far. There is no way an iPhone is going to last me 10 years to match that cost per unit time.

The pisser about it, is Motorola, like so many other companies, abandoned it for major updates. It does ostensibly still get major security updates, but...

My daughter's on a 4S. Still trucking on.

I'm on iPhone 5 right now. No problems.