Useless article. I was hoping they would reveal their own biases, not state that the industry has biases.
Head for the hills!
Head for the hills!
The bias is almost everywhere and spreading fast
What a useless editorial. Basically is justifying the iPhone bias because Apple's influence in the tech industry. Talk about building a strawman.
<snip>
iPhones are great products and people have a lot of reason to give them the benefit of the doubt. But bad tech journalism gives the impression to normals that EVERY iDevice is as safe of a bet as any other iDevice and we all know that isn't the case.
You'd be asking a bit much of a review to start speculating on how a device might fare years down the line. It's definitely wise to critique limitations that could have an immediate or near-term impact (like 16GB of base storage), but it's up in the air as to whether or not a 6 Plus will be laggy, say, in 2016. Point out the extra RAM and how it could futureproof a device, but don't declare a crisis before you know it's going to happen.
And I'd actually argue that a good review tries not to get bogged down in technical details.
They influence things to a degree, but what really matters is whether or not a device will make you happy.
Well, in a lot of ways, Vlad isn't wrong. The world has embraced Apple iPhone as the be all and the only phone that matters for the majority of the market. It's pretty unprecedented to see something hit the market like this and it's surely interesting to see how it is front and center in the eyes of consumers. There's nothing really like it.
To be honest, I still don't understand the hate, do you-all expect people to understand how a television works? The iPhone is primarily for "normals" and it's very popular.
It's not like Apple buys Android phones and destroys them to take them off the market or reduce your personal choices.
Sigh...
I get not being a chicken little, but mobile tech websites seems to go out of their way to avoid facing the facts about the iPhone.
For example, I have only seen ONE technology website (this one) point out that the 1GB of RAM in the iPhone 6 (and 6+ and 5s) is actually less EFFECTIVE RAM than the 2012 32bit iPhone 5 had because of the extra memory utilization of 64 bit apps. ONE WEBSITE! And heck I haven't even seen anyone even repost Anand's results on that, it was mostly ignored by the community and then Apple hired him (partially to shut him up IMHO).
Technology websites don't need to jump to my speculation that future iOS updates will be slow, just explain to users that 1GB of RAM means background apps are going to die more often than on competing devices and that Safari is going to reload pages more often on a 2014 phone than the 2012 model. People will draw their own conclusions, or at the very least be given a chance to.
Experience is important I agree. I am one of the first people to get upset when people want to judge a TV completely by its stated resolution for example. Not everything can be broken down into bullets points on a page.
With that said, I think part of the job description for being a mobile technology journalist is to get people to understand that some iDevices are simply better purchases long-term than other iDevices, and that if people make the choice to get the phablet with 16GB of storage and 1GB of RAM it isn't the OS updates's fault that the new update runs slower, it is THEIR fault for buying a device with such obvious limitations. But these journalists don't exist to educate consumers, they exist to get clicks and make money.
That is where the buck stops unfortunately, and why these "technology" websites put out iPhone reviews with as much technical critique as you would expect out of a Good Morning America review.
There is a huge group of people that plan to buy the new iPhone no matter what, bad reviews or obvious technical limitations aren't stopping them. So for these people if they encounter a review that is actually critical of a new iPhone it will give them cognitive dissonance to the point where they might avoid the WEBSITE (rather than the less emotional choice of reconsidering their purchase). There is nothing to gain from trying to educate these consumers only to be punished by them for doing so.
So the best thing these websites can do is to pile praises on any new iPhone or iPad or Apple Watch no matter the limitations, so that way people who were already going to buy those product feel better about their purchase and those good feelings might be transferred to the website in the form of them coming back for non-iPhone reviews. Even if I don't like it I get why things are the way they are.
In the Wintel days this would NEVER EVER happen. Purchases were made based on specs or value, and if you couldn't deliver that (like back when Dell wouldn't sell AMD when it had better CPUs due to Intel's backroom deals) the technology community would call you out on it. Apple has always lived outside of that world (the "Apple Tax" predated any iPhone), but it still existed in a space where the actual functional limitations and capabilities of their platform mattered.
The iPhone is such a massive success because it got people who barely tolerated computers before ("because computers HATE me") to suddenly be heavy utilizers of technology. People who do not and never will understand what an OS is, or what RAM is, or what pixels are can drain their iPhone batteries daily on freemium games or Tinder because iOS is the most easy to use major OS ever created. For us nerds this is a net benefit if these people can add to the economies of scale to give us cheaper products, but the cost of having to dumb down the entire technology sector to accommodate the feelings of these users will be a net negative to EVERYONE if it allows an Apple to slip by substandard products simply because the new color it comes in makes nontechnical people feel special inside.
There is a balance, and now that Anand is gone there is NO ONE who is walking that tightrope correctly. This editorial is just more proof that they don't get it, and never will.
It's not like I'm going to take anything from the Verge seriously, even less to influence my buying decisions.
I'd never let any site influence your decisions; make your own.
No. Never let a site MAKE your decisions for you, or tell you what to buy. But you cannot make an informed decision without research, and unless you're incredibly wealthy in both money AND time, you can't do the research yourself. 5 minutes with the phone at the store is insufficient.
So, use the sites you think you can trust, and use that data to INFLUENCE your decision.
I guess it depends which country you like in. In the UK we have very strong consumer protection laws which means I can buy, try out and return phones as I please as long as I've bought them online.
I don't like the way Android bombards with me choices that it should be making on my behalf (why the heck is it asking me whether I want to open a YouTube video in YouTube or Chrome? The answer is obvious and I shouldn't be prompted to choose) and I don't like the way that the operation of the device and the way things look on the screen is not properly controlled or managed.
I was wondering if this was sarcasm......You know you can change this and just choose a default app for most things. I can't fathom any reason why someone would NOT want to be able to choose.
Because it's a smartphone, it should be able to work these things out for itself. It's just a hassle being prompted what you want to open something with. It's like Windows for goodness sake!
Because it's a smartphone, it should be able to work these things out for itself. It's just a hassle being prompted what you want to open something with. It's like Windows for goodness sake!
By that I take it you mean "awesome". Therefore I find myself in agreement with you.
So you'd rather have the device dictate how to use it. Gotcha.
Epitome of laziness if you calling selecting your default program working
using a default program which in some cases is inferior is not smart, so your expectations of smartphone being smart is not happening all the time