However, I found myself in a similar situation as yourself with my Nexus 6P. Newlywed on a beautiful island all by ourselves ready to record some memories. 6P took phenomenal pictures and we were all ready with tripod and remote clicker. 6P just died. Luckily still had the wife's old iphone which managed to capture the moments, but not in all its glory.

Went through one more iteration of Android with a Motorola, that they stopped supporting about 3 months after buying.

As I've said in other posts, the amount of ewaste I generated while in the Android/Google ecosystem is criminal.

Switched to an iphone and haven't looked back. I'm still on the same iphone years later, still getting updates, still chugging along.

In all honesty, I preferred the Android OS, but it's too expensive to tolerate in so many ways; money, time (learning the new UX every time there's an update), environment/ewaste, privacy (google and affiliates vacuuming up all my personal information), convenience (it doesn't breakdown when i need it the most).

This is an unspoken downside of that ecosystem. I have also generated many phones worth of ewaste when I give up on them in less than a year. Its one of the reasons I stopped playing games with all these manufacturers and just bought an "official" Google phone and not touch it software wise. It obviously still wasn't enough.

I was recently cleaning through my attic and I found a lot of these old Android phones. Its amazing how many of them didn't get anywhere near the support that iPhones phones do. I told myself that I would eventually find a custom rom for them and then reuse them for something else but lets be real, that is just another time sink that probably won't happen. Now I am left staring at these phones wishing there was an easy way to deconstruct all the components into their base materials. I know that it is possible to break down the plastics via pyrolysis but no one is really doing this. Secondly there are the circuit board. FR-4 is ground up and used as filler from what I understand. What that means is that even if this phone is recycled, it will never really fully go away. Put in that context, the Android ecosystem just seems even sillier.

Much cheaper than pixel and iPhone and Samsung has a design language that many prefer to stock android and ios.

Moreover, when it comes eventually replacing the iphone, I'm going to get a better trade in value than the android even if it's 3-4x older. Thus lowering the cost of my next phone. (less ewaste bc i know the iphone will end up in someone else's pocket, not in a landfill)

Maybe Samsung is different, but when I went to trade in my $7-800 Motorola after 8-12 months of use, I was offered $28 trade-in value.

My time is also worth money. I don't have time (money) to waste on dealing with android.

Samsungs provides 3-5 years of updates for current mid and high end phones. Does your iPhone last 5x4=20 years? Will it be worth much even in 5 years? But if you trade it only after one year, how does that in any way reduce ewaste?

When I got my current phone it was 1/3 of an iphone and 1/5 of the most expensive Samsung (the fold thingy). It works well and is guaranteed at least 3 years of updates. But I plan to use it as my daily driver for 2 years, maybe 2.5. After which I will probably keep it and use it for something else around the house.

I have zero interest in a f!cking OS pushing ads into my face.

Apple fined for slowing down old iPhones - BBC News – https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724

What they should have done is include the toggle from day one, clearly explained why the feature was built, and then presented users with a prompt to enable it if the phone detected it may be necessary. Shoving it down peoples throats just made for terrible optics and "planned obsolescence" was a very well fitting and easy explanation in the absence of the real one that few understood.

Like, people still talk about it like it was a bad thing, see this thread for evidence, and this is one of the places where I would expect to find one of the largest concentrations of people that do understand what that patch did and why it was necessary.

Personally I think it's pretty great to know that I can use my iPhone even with a degraded battery and not have it shut down unexpectedly.

I've had both iPhones and Androids do that in the past, often in cold weather and during bursts of high load (like on a chairlift at a ski resort, which my example here is based on).

The idea was good, but it was implemented in a way that created issues for some users (eg: my iPhone 5 being sluggish all the time) and benefited Apple as most users would simply buy a new iPhone because no one knew what was going on.

Apple messed up the explanations and messaging on that incident big-time, but I'm convinced that they made the correct engineering tradeoff, and I feel like not enough people (even techies) really understood and appreciated that.

As this thread illustrates, a phone is a life-saving device. The priority must be to function when you absolutely need it. You will literally die if you can't call for help when you're stuck in a blizzard and need to call for a rescue.

Apple slowing down phones with weak batteries so that the CPU always has enough juice and doesn't crash is 100% the right engineering tradeoff for a life-saving device.

The last thing you need when you're bleeding out on the kitchen floor and dialing 911 is for your battery to not supply enough power and then force a phone restart or worse when seconds are counting down.

That's 8 years of support if it's the last. It was the first 64-bit ARM phone, and the first to have a Secure Enclave, so it might be a bit of a favourite child.

Not sure what you mean with life changing, but from experience: if you ever find yourself in a situation where you go on a trip and your health might depend on the ability to call or navigate, don't ever use a smartphone for that ability :)

Also got to do a lot of deep thinking while traveling across Europe. Wish they were more united. There are so many unbelievably talented people in Europe. It would be interesting if they could compete head on with the US and help to keep us more on our toes sort of like a second super power. I think that would be good for the world. Alas I saw how things like this are just not possible because people do not believe in it. The same problem I had before I came to Europe! Its unfortunate because Europe has all the components to be just as competitive as the US (in my opinion). :)

I actually enjoyed nexus 5, nice form factor, awesome weight.

It was eventually fixed in subsequent firmware releases(while other things broke). After getting the iPhone as my daily driver, I opened up and started using the Nexus 5 as a tinkering testbed for custom roms. The smoothest firmware I have seen was a Cyanogen Mod release in late 2015 although it still had rough edges compared to my iPhone from what I recall.

Original iPhone (2007), iPhone 3GS (2009), iPhone 4S (2011), HTC One X (2011, not because the iPhone broke, a friend convinced me I should try Android, and on paper it seemed like I would love that so why not?), Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE (2012), Sony Xperia Z (2013), Sony Xperia Z1 Compact (also 2013), (LG) Google Nexus 5X (2015), iPhone SE (2016), iPhone X (2018), iPhone 12 mini (2020).

I actually knew I was done with Android by the time my Z1 Compact broke in the same way it had already been repaired for once (small crack in the display glass which the digitiser was glued to meaning touch stopped working on one side of the crack, unfortunately about 90% of the screen), but I figured maybe I've just been buying the wrong brands and figured I should give Google, the premium brand, a chance before I went back to iPhones for good.

Alas, the Nexus 5X was so bad (laggy, terrible battery life) I actually went back to my iPhone 4S (which I had also been using between the Z1 Compact and the 5X) within the first year, and then bought the iPhone SE when it came out and never looked back. That iPhone SE actually went to my little brother when I bought the iPhone X, and he stopped using it in 2020 after the screen finally cracked (still usable because Apple doesn't glue the digitiser to the display glass like many Android manufacturers do, a practice I personally think is to force repairs since it becomes impossible to use them without a repair).

I always prepare the possibility of fresh install / factory reset when upgrading.

Which is why google play's auto update when I'm outside made me angry.