Hi Tilderinos!

As the title says, I have used Android almost my entire life. Many parts of the internet (especially reddit) really look down on Apple for many reasons (may of them valid). Starting about 3 weeks ago, I started to wonder if the grass really was greener on the other side. I would like to share my experience.

My first smart device was an iPod tough 4th generation. Back then, iOS was really bad. Notifications took over the screen. If you didn't want to deal with a notification right then, you had to dismiss it permanently. Multitasking did not exist (until a few updates later) Android was miles better then. Switching was the obvious choice. Flash forward to now, through many different android devices. I had a Samsung Galaxy S10e, Galaxy Watch LTE, and Galaxy Buds. I had the best ecosystem of devices that Android has to offer (Tizen vs WearOS is arguable, but I have not used WearOS).

I wanted to get back into mountain biking, and I wanted to bring only my buds and watch. This should be an obvious use case for an LTE watch and bluetooth earbuds. Unfortunately, transferring music to the watch is a difficult prospect. You must have the files downloaded onto your phone, but I use Spotify or Google Play Music. Spotify does have a Tizen app, but it is pretty terrible. Also, I wanted to have audiobooks and podcasts downloaded to listen to. I could not find any apps for audiobooks or podcasts for my Galaxy Watch. All my google-fu got me to the answer: Just transfer the files and play them in the watch music app. This was a pretty bad solution for a few reasons. First, listening times did not sync with the phone. Second, I don't think that the watch music app would save the timestamp when you closed it. Finally, the Galaxy Watch has 4gb storage, and only leaves around 2gb usable. Game of Thrones book 5 weighs in at about 1.3gb. If I wanted my book and even a single episode from most of my podcasts, that would not be enough storage.

Because of this experience, I started looking into the Apple Watch. My grandfather gave me his old iPhone 6s+ and I got an Apple Watch series 3 LTE for a great deal on craigslist. I thought the phone would be a downgrade from an s10e. In a few ways it is, such as the screen, battery life, and camera. But for everything else about this phone, it is just as good as my s10e, which is 4 years newer. I still have my s10e, and I keep it charged. There are very few times where I want to use my s10e over my 6s+. This was not what I was expecting when I switched. I expected to use the 6s+ to see if I could handle a new iPhone, just so I could use an Apple Watch. Since then, I borrowed my dad's old MacBook Pro mid 2012 non-retina, to see if I liked OS X. I am currently typing this in that MacBook. I also bought the AirPods Pro.

Almost every single interaction between these devices is quick, intuitive, and seamless. OS X is way better than windows. Parallels makes running windows software a dream. When I bought parallels, I was able to pay with my watch through Apple Pay. I have not heard of any software doing anything like that with google/samsung pay and windows. Overcast is able to automatically sync podcasts and playback times to the watch, and easily switch which device is playing. Audible is a bit more clunky (and I am still looking for an alternative for books), but it is possible to get books on the watch, and the playback time syncs without issue. The AirPods Pro seamlessly switch between the phone and watch. They are already paired with the MBP through iCloud, although they do not seamlessly switch. I think this is because the bluetooth chip in the computer is too old. CarPlay is miles better than android auto. Siri is just as good for most thing as google assistant, and is more consistent.

This is a pretty long post already, but the bottom line is every single apple device I am trying out is better than the corresponding android/windows device that is 2-4 years newer. After many years of shunning apple, I am back on the apple bandwagon. I am currently planning on replacing all of my devices with something from apple (except my gaming desktop, unfortunately). I would like to hear about your experiences with switching to or from either ecosystem.

(Mods: I wasn't sure if this should be in ~talk or ~tech. Please move it if necessary)

I figured one thread for all of Apple's new product announcements would be enough.

The new MacBook Air with the same redesigned keyboard as the 16-inch model and newer processors. I'm glad to see that they're bringing the keyboard to the rest of the lineup so quickly (I'm writing this on a 2017 MacBook Pro and this keyboard is not pleasant even after two and a half years of adjustment).

The new iPad Pro is where things get interesting. Same design as the previous iPad Pros, but now with an ultra wide camera and a LIDAR sensor.

The iPad Pro also has a new keyboard and trackpad accessory that looks interesting. It has an adjustable hinge that can hold the iPad at any angle, which is one of my biggest complaints with the current keyboard case. I'm interested to see how well it works in a lap when hands on videos start coming out.

I'm excited that Apple is bringing official pointing support to iOS (beyond the basic accessibility feature in iOS 13). This could be a game changer. I'm also excited that it's coming to iOS 13.4 (and all iPads that can run it) and they aren't waiting until iOS 14 to roll out the feature. I've wanted Apple to start rolling out features on an ongoing basis (like Google is doing with the Pixel Feature Drops) rather than as one big drop every fall.

I've been jailbreaking for years now, and one of the things that have always puzzled me was how the jailbreak community determines whether or not a tweak has malicious code since they aren't always open-sourced. With the latest releases of checkra1n, and unc0ver, I've gotten back into jailbreaking since I wanted to jailbreak my 12.9" iPad Pro. From my understanding, the jailbreak itself (usually) is open-sourced, so it can generally be "vetted" that way. I typically stay away from using too many tweaks and try to stick with those from the "more well-known" developers, but I'm curious how others decide which developers/tweaks to trust and use? Do you strictly base it on "bug-reports" and a developer's reputation? What other factors come into play? There are tweaks like "Compatimark" that helps with compatibility information (but that's not really what I'm talking about).

Edit: First time posting a topic here, so hopefully it isn't breaking any rules.