This might seem like a weird thing to blog about, but it was so traumatic for me that it needs to be done. This entire blog will be to tell you about my horrible experience switching to a Galaxy S9+ recently. The funny thing is, it’s a great phone, and it has a great camera (which is big reason why I switched) but man, I didn’t know how terrible it would be to go back to Android after being with Apple. Let me tell you why.
Warning: This next paragraph might be offensive to Mac users.
Photo Credit Adam Andres Pawlikiewicz
Let me start with a little backstory and some interesting facts you might not know. For starters, I work on PC, almost exclusively, in fact I am writing this on a PC (I know, I know, just take a deep breath and keep reading). My laptop is a PC. I have a MacBook Pro, but I don’t use it and it’s old. I actually bought a Mac out of peer pressure, because that’s what “creatives” use, but I realized quickly that it didn’t matter, and I could build a PC for way cheaper than a Mac. That being said I might have just lost a ton of readers, but oh well, that’s the long and short of it. I think Mac is great, but I’ve never had a problem with my PC, and with all the stuff I have in this PC it would cost me over $4k with Mac, I haven’t even hit $2k with all the upgrades.
OK, let’s get to the meat of this blog. A few years ago my wife and I decided to try iPhones, everyone said they were awesome, and so we decided to give it the ol’ college try. They were great, I have nothing against iPhone…they had been really reliable as far as things go. Recently though, I became a little tired of the lack of compatibility and flexability that iPhones have. In a brash moment of stupidity, I researched phones and bought a Samsung Galaxy S9+. Really cool, and as I said earlier the camera system was getting great reviews, which is what I use it for most. It seemed like a win win, but there was no winning involved, it was very much lose lose.
Frankly, getting the phone going was rough. I bought an unlocked phone, and the SIM card from my iPhone didn’t work (shocker). I ordered another SIM card, which actually took a while to get. Once I got the new SIM card I switched everything over and had the horrific realization that if someone had an iPhone and I texted them I would not get the return text. It was going to my iPhone, on iMessage. The solution? After calling the phone company and researching online, I was told to text everyone who had an iPhone and switch my phone to text message only. That’s where it started, sending out a shameful little green bubble to hundreds of people publicly proclaiming that I don’t have an iPhone anymore.
Photo Credit Adam Andres Pawlikiewicz
Great, text message problem solved. I was good to go! Wrong. After that came some really bad realizations. First of all, I send images to people all the time, and I have people send me images and videos regularly, especially BTS from my assistants. I also send my wife a lot of photos and get a lot of photos/videos from her. I couldn’t do any of that any more, I didn’t get most of the photos, I couldn’t send photos or videos to iPhones because they were to big, and videos from other people came through as tiny pixelated movies that you could barely see, if they came through at all. On a positive note, there is something called Samsung Share (which is like iMessage for Samsung) so you can share stuff with all your Samsung pals! Oh wait, I only know three people who have Android phones and only two of them are Samsung.
That was the beginning of the end for me, I completely took for granted how many people have iPhones and what that means. There is an actual end though. It happened when we realized my wife couldn’t have the kids send me voice messages, and as I was walking her through downloading something in place of FaceTime while I was trying to say good night to the kids on set. I was getting ready for two big trips and this was definitely the straw that broke the camels back.
This might sound dramatic, and frankly this whole blog post is just a giant 1st world problem rant about how a big baby had to buy another phone, but it was genuinely isolating. It was as if I couldn’t communicate with people, especially my family and other people in my industry. It was terrible, and never once in all of my research did I see it mentioned that switching to Android would make it so you really can’t communicate the same way.
You could think of this blog as a review for people thinking about switching from iPhone to Android, I mean, A LOT of people said they were thinking about it when I switched. I can tell you now with great certainty that you shouldn’t switch, not if you’ve been on iPhone for any length of time. I was literally discovering things almost every day that either wouldn’t work or need a new app to work so I could do seemingly normal things.
How does this story end? With me shamefully walking into the Apple store and buying another iPhone. Let me tell you, if you think new cars don’t hold their value (which they don’t) new phones are even worse. I sold my Samsung for $340, after using it for 2 months, I lost almost $400. On top of that, I had to spend almost $900 on the new iPhone…I’m not great at math, but it wasn’t good. My advice, just be happy with what you have: I have an iPhone and I’m happy with that.