My iPhone story. Enticed into iOS for the 2020s...
I do get it in the neck from other geeks occasionally for using an Apple iPhone rather than, as many geeks do, an Android-powered smartphone. Now, in truth, I also own several Android phones too, but they're more playthings these days and keeping up with what Google is doing in the phone world, that being (or used to be, seeing as I'm now semi-retired!) my primary trade.
Now, between 2007 and 2015, I was a bit scornful of Apple's iPhones. They were either too small, too limited, too locked down (in terms of apps and files), had too poor a camera (certainly relative to my Nokia Series smartphones), or all of the above. And I maintain that I was right, compared to the competition, and despite the ambition of iOS in aiming for desktop-class performance.
But 2016 saw the ultra-cheap original iPhone SE and I bought one second hand to play around with and was rather impressed by how fast it was and by how well things just... worked. I set it up with my main accounts and had it as a secondary phone for a few years, alongside my beloved Nokia Lumias, running Windows Phone (and then Windows 10 Mobile), and the odd Samsung, running Android.
It took a generous donation from a follower (hint: you too can donate to the cause!) to encourage me to buy more seriously into the iOS way in 2019, with a brand new, pocketable, stainless-steel-framed iPhone 11 Pro. You see, the cameras in iPhones had been taking leaps and bounds, thanks to the arrival at Apple of several of the key ex-Nokia imaging engineers (Microsoft having made them redundant in 2015). The result was phone photography that was easily up with the best of the rest at long last, along with screen, speakers, and performance that were also flagship in quality. With the 11 Pro, my main SIM card finally got switched and I. Was. An. iPhone. User. Gulp.
Yet, despite the iPhone 11 Pro's main camera being good, it still sharpened images to make them 'pop', just like every other phone of the era. With the 12 Pro series, Apple introduced ProRAW, essentially taking all the multi-frame noise reduction, HDR, and texture enhancement that they did so well in the 11 Pro but allowing the end image to skip sharpening and edge enhancement if you toggled on ProRAW. Yes, the final photo size was much larger, but for any shot worth its salt it was a worthy tradeoff. Results were as 'pure' as on my (5 megapixel) Lumia 1020 but with dramatically better dynamic range and output resolution.
So, to get ProRAW, I bought an iPhone 12 Pro Max from MeWe Classifieds late in 2020 and I took many photos that I'm still very proud of. It wasn't just the cameras, mind you - I was also impressed by Apple's patented bass-octave-shifted speaker enhancements (meaning that it could 'play' 50-100Hz bass notes), by the quality of the iOS applications and how well they now hooked into many other online ecosystems, including Google's and (at the time, for me) Dropbox. Yes, the 12 Pro Max was large and heavy, but I could see more, and do more, on its display. And my eyes appreciated the difference.
A word about MagSafe is needed here... One luxury I'd enjoyed for a decade at this point was Qi wireless charging. A pad beside my office desk and a pad beside my bed and I, quite literally, never needed to plug a wire into a phone. My Lumias had Qi, so did my Samsungs, and so did the 11 Pro and 12 Pro Max in the iPhone world. But the 12 Pro Max added a significant twist to the concept.
MagSafe, introduced with the 12 series, added a high-tech dual magnet ring that auto-aligned the phone to the exact centre of the charging pad's coil, ensuring best efficiency. It's a wonderful idea and does its best to alleviate the biggest criticism of Qi charging - that it's not efficient and energy is wasted. Usually by the phone and pad coils not being optimally lined up - which is where MagSafe steps in. OK, so there's still 20% or so energy lost in using electromagnetic induction in the first place, but at least it stops there if the coils are perfect.
Given that Apple will support the iPhone 12 Pro Max with OS updates until 2027, so two years still, beyond me writing this in 2025, why am I not still using the 12 Pro Max? Good question. I could well have been. But, although improvements are incremental across the board these days, I got tempted. Very tempted. My 12 Pro Max was almost out of storage and up on the aforementioned MeWe Classified forum popped up a 2022 iPhone 14 Pro Max 1TB, and at a decent price. A TERAbyte. Guaranteed to last me the life of the device, I reckoned. Never worry about storage space on a phone ever again, etc.
So I snapped it up. There were other tempting factors, of course. The 14 Pro Max had significantly bigger and better speakers, plus a bigger and better set of cameras yet again, plus faster RAM and an even faster chipset. As I write this, I'll have owned the 14 Pro Max for two and a half years and am so confident in its ability to keep up with everything I need it for that I recently had its battery replaced at the Apple Store (£90 including VAT) to take it back to 'as new' performance.
As we head into 'new iPhone season' in 2025, the question becomes whether Apple will find anything to entice me to buy the iPhone 17 Pro Max. The prospect of a (leaked) 48MP 3.5x zoom camera with 7x lossless smart-cropped zoom is a possible attraction, but I think Apple will have to work a bit harder than that if they want me to trade in my beloved 14 Pro Max. Watch this space!
PS. I'd intended this blog post to cover some of the software aspects in which I think iOS is strongest, but time is pressing and I'll leave that for the next article. Do please use the XML feed in my header above if you want to be notified in your browser or feedreader.
PPS. If you like my work then think about buying me a beer at paypal.me/stevelitchfield - thanks!
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