Need a Decent Phone

[Mercutio]

I am still on a Sprint employee plan. It has carried over to Tmo but if I need anything from the carrier, I can't go to a store for help. I have to call one specific person who can authorize sending me a new SIM or whatever. I think she's literally the only person I can talk to, because I've had to speak to her three different times in the last couple years. I'd probably move to Mint (which is also Tmo, technically) if I wasn't on a $30/month plan already.

 

[LunarMist]

Why not get a better plan? I thought that Sprint was out of business.

I don't think they use a SIM anymore; at least the A54 doesn't need it in the states. I'm curious if there will be an A55. I might do a double swap moving the A53 to A54 role and then the A54 to A55 role.

 

[Mercutio]

$30/month unlimited everything? There is no better plan, at least not inclusive of data.
On the other hand, my phones at least DO need a SIM. It might be because of the unusual nature of my phone plan, but I've been told I don't get to have an eSIM. I actually had a SIM physically fail last year. I didn't even know that was possible. It was a total hassle to get it replaced.

 

[sedrosken]

Sprint got bought by T-Mobile -- T-Mobile is bound to support their old contracts, at their old rates. So Merc is paying $30/mo on, I'm guessing, a grandfathered-in unlimited everything plan. You literally cannot get any better than that.

Slowly but surely phones are moving to eSIMs -- essentially, no physical SIM tray, the phone company sends configuration data, so on and so forth.

Merc, what will you do when phones stop shipping with physical SIM slots? I realize realistically that's such a far-away prospect but are they planning to just make people ride out the phones they have and then shunt them onto worse plans for more money? They'd probably love to do that but that seems like such a lame excuse.

 

[LunarMist]

So a lower price equates to a better plan - somehow?
One of my staff had a defective SIM on travel in 2023. They must be making SIMs from cheap junk lately.

 

[Mercutio]

Merc, what will you do when phones stop shipping with physical SIM slots? I realize realistically that's such a far-away prospect but are they planning to just make people ride out the phones they have and then shunt them onto worse plans for more money? They'd probably love to do that but that seems like such a lame excuse.

I think they'll exist for a while yet, if only because everybody else in the world is used to dealing with the idea that the physical SIM is the only thing they need to change their phone's identity. I'm sure every security agency and mobile carrier in the world wants them gone though. Presumably, some day Tmo will move X thousand remaining customers on my particular contracts on to the same setup as regular phones but that day is not any time soon.

Rough guess as to the date they kill them is probably after some drop-dead date when the "average" mobile is something like a 2021 or 2022 model. WAY too many people are still using six year old+ phones.

So a lower price equates to a better plan - somehow?

I almost never travel internationally. I have unmetered voice and data service in the USA and I am seldom outside an area of LTE service for more than 10 minutes unless I'm in underground or in a national park. What would make a plan better than that given the price?

 

[sedrosken]

So a lower price equates to a better plan - somehow?
One of my staff had a defective SIM on travel in 2023. They must be making SIMs from cheap junk lately.

He's connecting to the same network as other T-Mobile customers. He has the same coverage as if he were a normal customer paying their full rate (full unlimited, like I have, is typically around 85 dollars per month). His plan is, if anything, likely better -- T-Mobile by default tracks and limits tethering/hotspot data, his plan likely doesn't as it predates the concept. If he's connecting at the same places I do, the same rates I do, and pays a little over a third what I do, for the same service, how exactly is that not better?

If he was travelling internationally constantly like you seem to, yeah, the lack of anything outside the US would be a limit for sure. That said, he's said he only rarely does, and you can just as easily pop the SIM out and use a local one if the bands match up in the event he is out-of-country. It's a little bit of inconvenience for a metric shitload of cost-savings. Why pay more than you need to?

He may be able to get better coverage with Verizon, but their prices are even worse, and last I knew the Chicagoland area is a T-Mobile stronghold anyway so Verizon might well have worse service. My mom certainly had/has no complaints, and she's lived in the surrounding suburbs literally all her life and has been a T-Mobile customer almost as long as I've been alive.

 

[LunarMist]

It's pretty obvious that is a CHEAP plan. Having to talk to one specific person or use a specific SIM is not a GOOD plan IMO.

I have 3 phones on the T..Mobiles. They are not so good internationally, and worse than they were in some regions. The problem is that they partner with some of the crappier local telcos. There may be 3 bars of the 4G LTE yet data is often crapping out. In the larger towns I use Wi-Fi anyways with the DVN and that is also for work.

 

[sedrosken]

To be fair, him having to talk to one specific person is likely because that one person is in charge of handling all the legacy plans carried forward from their Sprint acquisition. 30/mo was probably pretty much the going rate at that time, it's just considered a good rate now that phones are so much more essential and the telcos have figured out people will gladly pay more.

 

[Mercutio]

IIRC, getting a phone with a data plan in 2003 was probably still $60ish for most people. The Sprint employee plan gave me unlimited 3G service and a massive discount on a Windows Mobile phone at a time when both of those things were exotic. The only caveat in the time since is that I've always had to buy my phones outright rather than buy them with a discount from the carrier; doing that is an opportunity for them to change the contract. In the time since, providers have dropped the phone discounts anyway, so it's not much of an issue any longer.

re: Verizon. As I understand it, Verizon has more overall coverage but less specifically 5G coverage. Verizon phones work in a lot of places other phones don't (e.g. the Red line in Chicago), but if I have coverage it's almost always 5G. Since I'm seldom away from a city, Tmo has a better network IMO.

 

[LunarMist]

I didn't realize you worked for Sprint in the past. My job in 2003 provided a cellphone when it was required for travel. There was a pool of phones for most countries - different for Europe than Asia for some reason. Later we all got those crude Blackberries. I don't recall that we had to pay until about 2010 and then get a subsidy. At that time I had a few choices and selected T..Mobiles because it was on sale (supposedly they were trying to attract customers for the defeated ATT merger) and the signal at work and home was good. Verizon was weak in the main offices.

I'm not finding 5G to be particularly worth anything more than 4G. My understading is that the UC needs to activate for it to be much better than 4G LET. Even then the number of bars is seemingly not correlating to speed.

 

[Handruin]

I ended up buying the unlocked S22+ back in April of 22 with the anticipation of trying an mnvo but never changed over. I also never paid my carrier to get 5G enabled because of the price jump, so it's be stuck with 4G. I rarely use cellular anyway so it was never a priority.

 

[sedrosken]

5G is, mostly, at current, a marketing move. 5G UC or UW is what you want to see, yes -- that means it's using one of the higher bandwidth frequencies, usually one of the mmWave bands. "Regular" 5G, what you'll see most of the time, just means it's LTE under a different name, I believe, or the difference isn't striking enough to make it worth noting.

 

[Handruin]

Mine uses the fake 5Ge or whatever marketing have att came up with to rebrand the LTE that my phone uses. It has the radios to use the newer 5G mmWave but I can't access it unless I upgrade my plan and get a new SIM card (I think).

 

[LunarMist]

I'm pretty sure it's all included with the T..Mobiles. Both phones have the UC sometimes.
I was in about 8 cities in late November/December and the speeds are not consistent. Most countries did not have the 5G at all at least not for T..Mobiles.

 

[Handruin]

I'm seeing that Samsung is offering decent credits and deals for the new S24+ with a trade and I'm kinda interested. I can get $550 back from my 2 year old S22+

 

[Mercutio]

Yeah. I have an S8 tablet I can swap in that gets $600 in credit, plus another $50 for reservation. The total to get an S24+ is $350 and the S24U is $500. The lack of SD card and overall reduced storage would be a pain but I have an S20 Ultra now and I think it's too goddamned big, and the S24+ doesn't even offer a 1TB option.

Either way, I'm in the ballpark of what the A54, which has the storage but not the screen, costs.

 

[Handruin]

I've been managing fairly well with 256GB storage and having this potential new phone jump to 512 would be great. I may way a few days before committing to it. My company is going through layoffs so I may wait it out before pulling the trigger.

 

[LunarMist]

Yeah. I have an S8 tablet I can swap in that gets $600 in credit, plus another $50 for reservation. The total to get an S24+ is $350 and the S24U is $500. The lack of SD card and overall reduced storage would be a pain but I have an S20 Ultra now and I think it's too goddamned big, and the S24+ doesn't even offer a 1TB option.

Either way, I'm in the ballpark of what the A54, which has the storage but not the screen, costs.

You could get two of the S24+ and keep half of the data on each one.

 

[Mercutio]

OK, new phone showed up.

First thing is that the screen is definitely brighter than my S20. Not by some crazy amount, but definitely enough that I notice.
Second thing is that the under-screen fingerprint scanner is so much better that it's upsetting. It takes just a tick longer than my old LG phones did, but it's something that doesn't actively piss me off. HUGE improvement.

Samsung's old-to-new transfer is a little weird. It transferred over some device settings and preferences but not others. Notification noises are a particular pain point for me. I understand that most people just shut all of them off but I actually rely on my phone making noise. I have scripts to set some but not all of the custom sounds I want. I also notice that RCP Ringtones, my go-to for neutral but identifiable noises, is no longer able to update system sounds on Android 14. My favorite circa 2012 Bubble Shooter game is marked specifically incompatible with the S24. Which is weird, because it works on the three month old Tab S9 and my partner's S22+.

During the setup process, I had to re-set my default launcher three times. The transfer process kept changing it back to OneUI. I use Nova Launcher on everything with the same icon layout and settings. I kept thinking the transfer was done, then finding out it wasn't. Hopefully, this isn't an ongoing confusion. I was signed in to Amazon-Everything and Philips Hue from the moment those things were installed, but not Spotify or Firefox. It also didn't bother to copy over my Gboard dictionary.

Samsung also really seems to push Microsoft software, with Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn front and center on the device. It also copied over and restored my progress in Microsoft Mahjong. I only play that on tablets and I didn't sync from a tablet, so I'm curious how and why that showed up. Facebook was also preinstalled. My adb pimp hand has been exercised much this day.

Interestingly, apps I've gotten from F-droid were copied over. I never noticed that in dealing with other Samsung devices. All the simple open source tools I have were copied right over.

I can't see a subjective performance difference yet but I did watch the battery on the new phone drop by about 40% during the ~90 minutes it took for the phone to copy over data and install all my apps. I find that somewhat alarming. Is the battery life bad or is the process of doing a data transfer just a ton of work? I also haven't done carrier activation yet. I'm interested to see how much better the 5G service is on a much newer device; I live very close to a T-mobile tower and my old S20 sometimes gets test speeds of 150Mbit down.

I can barely tell the difference from the old phone to the new one. It's just a high quality Android device. I mess with budget-ish tablets fairly regularly, and on those I can see differences almost immediately, particularly if the SoC or RAM aren't up to snuff. My old guy was fast and fine. My new guy is fast and fine. The only big difference is that the new one is going to get seven years of updates and the old one is done as of now.

The S24 is supposed to do AI nonsense. I'm kind of annoyed, because they changed my Google Assistant shortcut and moved it to "swipe from a corner." I see how circle to search is supposed to work and I can't even begin to care. I can already highlight text and send it off to Google and as far as I can tell, everything else it does is a normal function of Google Lens. Circle someone's shoe in a photo and it'll tell you what kind they are and where to buy them. Just like Google Lens. Hopefully, I'll be able to put the old gesture back the way I'm used to. The photo editing and other BS seems to be locked to Samsung apps and it turns out that I just don't use any of them.

So what I really have is a newer version of the same thing I had but with a better fingerprint reader. That's not nothing.
I'm sure I'll have more thoughts later.

 

[LunarMist]

Whose fingerprints are you reading? Is that a new IT thing?

 

[Handruin]

Whose fingerprints are you reading? Is that a new IT thing?

The finger print reader is only for the user of the phone to unlock it. These aren't generally new features except that more modern phones switched from using a capacitive sensor on the exterior of the phone to an ultrasonic version now located under the front glass.

They have been improving over the years which is what I believe Merc is confirming.

 

[LunarMist]

No, I'm not familiar. The phone I use for work is not high security, but the software for some reason requires an alpha/numeric password rather than the biodemetrics. Evidently my phone has a fingerprinting function of the KNOX. Obviously my prints are in various databases, but I'm not sure they need to be sent by the KNOX to unknown regions. I don't store anything on the personal phone, not even a single contact exists on it.

I'm not sure if that S24+ phone is worth $1000 for my limited use, but maybe I'd get the next generation in 2025. I am pretty sure that it won't be very useful in 7 years, maybe 5 years at the outside.

 

[Handruin]

From my understanding of Android and finger print management for unlocking devices, the requirements appear to be quite detailed and strict from Google with respect to user privacy. You're finger prints should never be leaving your phone.

Finger prints are moved into the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) for higher security. There's a lot more detailed information here if you're curious.

Android Fingerprint Security

Security has always been a crucial part of mobile development, and getting it right is no small feat.

infinum.com

 

[LunarMist]

Holy moly, that actually works on the A54 (2023). It takes about a half second press on the glass, but only in a specified area. On the newer phones does the finger function all over the display area?

 

[Mercutio]

For what it's worth, one of the reasons to NOT configure biometrics is that law enforcement can compel device owners to authenticate. I have a routine set up to remove my stored biometrics via Google Assistant to prevent a cop from going through my phone without my permission. I have had this happen. It's not a hypothetical.

The fingerprint scanner is one particular area on more or less every Samsung phone, LM.

 

[Handruin]

To a degree this biometric issue with law enforcement is minimized with a reboot or timeout. My phone requires a pin after a certain amount of time regardless if the fingerprint is enabled or if I'm in a situation where law enforcement would be a concern, just reboot the phone.

 

[LunarMist]

For what it's worth, one of the reasons to NOT configure biometrics is that law enforcement can compel device owners to authenticate. I have a routine set up to remove my stored biometrics via Google Assistant to prevent a cop from going through my phone without my permission. I have had this happen. It's not a hypothetical.

The fingerprint scanner is one particular area on more or less every Samsung phone, LM.

I naturally cooperate with LEOs, but that is also in at least one SOP that I follow.
The reason I use the password in my personal use phone is to prevent thieves from getting anything off of it.

Well, I was trying to find some advantages to the new phone.

 

[sedrosken]

Sidegraded to a Z Fold 4 for work. It's neat. The bigger screen would be useful for ultra-mobile remote desktop work, you know, if our RMM had that for an integration. I'll want to figure something out for that someday -- it would be very useful if I could just launch into a remote session to click a couple buttons from my phone instead of needing to break out my laptop, waiting for it to boot up, waiting for it to get with the program, signing into the remote solution, waiting for the connection to negotiate... to be fair, some of that's true no matter the platform, but I honestly think my phone might be faster than my work laptop right now. We're looking at replacing it with our next bulk deployment, but that won't be for a while.

Edit: I approved Splashtop for RMM for install through InTune. It does, in fact, do the remote thing, but the mobile Syncro app is annoying and won't work with it on its own, you have to launch it from Syncro for Web. At this point I legitimately think I should uninstall the app and just use the web app everywhere.

Personally, I moved to an iPhone 13 as my carrier had it on special and I did some line juggling to make it work. My cousin went on my plan with me so she could get a new phone after she broke the one she had without having to shell out $lol for it outright, and the third line was "free." I'm much more satisfied with my battery life now -- I went from needing to charge halfway through my day to ending my day with over half my battery left. Most of my family is on iPhone and I can now reliably message with them again. Since I stream most of my entertainment now, I don't really need local media, so I get along fine with a 128GB model now, but I do have a copy of my music library saved in VLC as 320-MP3s. I get around weird issues with syncing over USB in iTunes by just doing it over WiFi now.

 

[Mercutio]

I finally conceded to Signal for communication with subhuman iOS users.

I don't like SMS even a tiny bit. I have to tell people regularly that they are not entitled to my private phone number, so SMS is off the table and in any case Apple's malicious compliance with the barest minimum of MMS standards means that it will never be acceptable. I used Snapchat as a medium for sharing photos and short videos, but Snap has a 59 second limit on video and can only share 10 photos in one message. When I finally showed a few friends how disgustingly easy it is to save Snapchat messages without letting other users know you've done so, a lot of them have moved away from it as well.

Signal sets the limit for video attachments at 300MB, which covers about 95% of anything I'd share from a phone. It's also not controlled by any other media company, supports end to end encryption, read receipts and has a native desktop version. The biggest down side for me is that backing up and restoring messages is mildly inconvenient due to the usual question of how to save your decryption key. Best of all, it doesn't have to be tied to your actual phone number. I used my work VOIP line to set it up.

The S24 continues to be fine. Battery life is much better than I would've guessed, but that's coming from a phone with a four year old battery. The fast charge is fast; using a 65W charger, I can go from 50% to around 90% in the time it takes me to do my morning ablutions.

 

[Handruin]

I've had good luck using Signal the few times I've tried in the past but there is a barrier to entry for most because it's basically a foreign idea compared to SMS. Not that it's complicated, I think most just fear the unknown. Glad you were able to get people to use it for your needs.

I decided to switch away from AT&T and try Google Fi. The price is about 1/3rd of what I've been paying in the past and now I get some amount of 5G coverage. AT&T wanted more money for that but I didn't care enough to upgrade. In my area my service is now basically MVNO of T-Mobile and the coverage seems about the same or better so far. The changeover was pretty easy and it's the first time I've used an eSIM.

 

[LunarMist]

People that are using iOS are some of the nicest, most successful, upstanding people. Mostly they are not sending secret videos.
Frankly if anyone I did not know personally asked me to communicate via an unauthorized app, I'd be suspicous of their motives.
I avoided the Apple products because I used "PCs" at work in the 80s and then at home. When I started with wireless the iPhones were too small and expensive and they did not have replaceable batteries.

I typically charge the Samsung batteries to 85% using the standard speed charging. The ultra fast charging will reduce battery life as will repeated cycles at >4.2V that the phones use now to eke out more capacity without bursting into flames. It is something to think about if you are trying to get more than 4 years with high capacity. Use of the protective phone case also does not help things because it can reduce the heat flow out of the phone. I assume that the new S24+ phones have the same settings.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm one of the monsters who doesn't use a phone case, although I have more misgivings about that since newer phones are often glass on all sides.

I've had good luck using Signal the few times I've tried in the past but there is a barrier to entry for most because it's basically a foreign idea compared to SMS. Not that it's complicated, I think most just fear the unknown. Glad you were able to get people to use it for your needs.

A couple of my good friends are nerdy enough to follow the argument for Signal. It also helps that sharing quality photos is a major use case for messaging and it's something Apple won't do if there's even a whiff of non-Apple hardware.

People that are using iOS are some of the nicest, most successful, upstanding people.

Nope. They're degenerates who actively support making technology worse because they like a logo better than non-crippled software.

 

[LunarMist]

Of course there is nothing wrong with not using a phone case. I need a grippy surface and don't like caseless phone use since I would be even more likely to drop them. I wish that phones were slightly larger, but with built-in protection that would be smaller than using a phone with a case.

I'm not at all convinced that the iPhone cannot do whatever practical things are done by most other phones. You act like hacking a phone is normal or necessary. I'm not familiar with the image quality issue. Doesn't the iPhone support the HEIF and in fact developed it? Many apps and most of the internet use that crappy jpeg format, which was never about quality but about speed and low cost.

 

[Handruin]

I'm also another person who doesn't use a phone case. I haven't used one in probably the past 6-8 years now. My compromise has been to use a dbrand skin to give it a little more traction to grip and also a bit of scratch protection.

I can appreciate the technical and functional objections to owning and using an iPhone but the personal hate seems like too much misplaced energy and degrades from a conversation. People like what they like and I know plenty of people in hi-tech that have them and they're far from degenerates. I used to care more about arguing which platform was better but it feels so 2010 at this point.

 

[sedrosken]

I can switch pretty seamlessly between either-or at this point, the iPhone is just what happened to be on promotion this time and it's more convenient for actually getting messages through to my folks. Most of my people don't have the qualifications to download Facebook messenger, much less Signal, and I have neither the time nor the energy to create more work for myself as the designated IT guy of the family. Especially when a large proportion of them are approximately half a country away and negotiating screen sharing would be yet another excruciating discussion and wasted afternoon.

As for the photos issue, I'm no photographer, and I rarely send photos at all. When I do, it certainly isn't over iMessage. It's also usually not over MMS even on an Android device. I've had it fail far too many times to really trust it much anymore. I typically throw them to cloud storage and send links by email for what few uses I have for that.

There's also the matter of Android devolving into three major manufacturers in the US landscape -- Samsung, who have made OneUI consistently worse and worse to the point where I've called it TouchWiz unironically in my head several times already; Motorola, who can't seem to actually support their devices very long past manufacture to save their lives which isn't surprising post-Lenovo buyout; and Google themselves. I already don't like giving Google my data as it is. I switched to Edge of all things on my work stuff, and Firefox on my personal stuff just to get away from them as much as is convenient. I almost posted a section here cursing Google out for making Apple seem almost reasonable by comparison on some issues.

I wouldn't mind a Poco or Oppo device, but they don't tend to come with US bands from my research. We don't get cool shit here anymore.

I've flipped around over the years on the issue of cases -- these days I'll use them, but I'll compromise with a TPU case from Spigen or some other such that doesn't make my phone a bulky brick hard to pull out of my pocket.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm not familiar with the image quality issue. Doesn't the iPhone support the HEIF and in fact developed it?

Apple actively degrades messages sent using SMS to the minimum spec. It does not offer the option of internet delivery for SMS messages while delivering full quality media to Apple users over its iMessage software. It even goes so far as to display messages sent by non-Apple users in a deliberately unreadable white-on-green palette that end users cannot change. So even if you share a 40kb JPG, it's likely that Apple will apply lossy compression before that message is passed on, to or from an iOS user. I don't like SMS for other reasons but since I take photos that get shared at all, this is something that fills me with actual murderous rage. It's worse for younger people; GenZs consider not having blue bubbles as an indicator of poverty.

Apple made a big deal out of offering a file browsing experience about three years ago. This file browsing is still minimally functional and still does not represent the full extent of user files stored on the device. This has been one of my biggest complaints about iOS all along. This is particularly exacerbated from my experience trying to extract photos from an iOS device without involving an Apple Service. I found that I literally could not, even when the phone was connected by an OEM Lightning cable to a Mac. I just wasn't shown all the photos, nor photos in anything like their logical order, until the phone and Mac were signed into the same Apple account and backups to iCloud were turned on. Then, magically, photos were actually shown in date order.

The iOS keyboard is simply the worst one I've ever seen. All the punctuation is on a different screen. This is an insult to the concept of literacy. The earliest iteration of the iOS keyboard didn't even change the case of characters on screen when the shift key was pressed; they changed the color of the letters. IIRC it toggled between red and blue. Sit for a minute and think about why those two colors in particular might be a problem.

iOS propagates that web sites should be treated as "apps" but many iOS apps are functionally just single-purpose Safari sessions that are limited to a particular domain. iOS only allows one browser engine. Any third party browser on iOS is just Safari with different branding. You can't opt out of that.

The number of times I've been told some variation of "Well, I had to get an iphone because it's the only way my kids will let me see the grandbaby" speaks to the degree of cult mentality and Apple goes out of its way to differentiate cult members from people. Human beings whom I know full well understand to have used other services like Skype or Zoom to do the same things lose their minds and trip over themselves to have the Apple experience.

I am not joking. The people responsible for these decisions need to know what napalm tastes like.

 

[LunarMist]

You are way overreacting. Most all of the pro photographers I know use iPhones. They post quality images and video to online places and also to private storage that requires a password. There is still email, or the maybe youth doesn't use it? You can also AirDrop from one phone to another. Or just don't use the iPhone, but don't denigrate the rest of the world that doesn't have yoiur particular needs.

More concerning is that you are displacing or projecting excessive anger onto phones, which is rooted in some unrelated issue. In IT you must be constantly facing changes and challenges far more difficult than a message file size. It's not healthy for your body to be stressed.

 

[Mercutio]

The problem is too many people are willing to go live in Apple's world, such that Apple's version of reality becomes the default for other people. If Apple's phone can't do that, or Apple's phone won't interoperate properly with any other, that is a problem for everyone, and this is technology that is too important to allow that.

I'll also note that I deal with entire communities of people for whom iOS is the assumed default in all cases. They don't have any problems sharing with each other, only with those outside their bubble. There's no effort at all made to understand the differences between platforms, only that everything outside the cult is worse.

When Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy, it was the absolute model of interoperability. Funny how that changed for their mobile devices.

 

[Handruin]

Perhaps it's just the scope of perspective in the community of people you interact with compared others? I am not disagreeing with the technical roadblocks that are in the way when it comes to how these two major device ecosystems exchange media or interop with each other. I can appreciate that those in the apple world live in that cohesive bubble where everything works but yet once they step outside that, problems occur.

You mentioned there is a perception of anything outside the apple ecosystem is worse, and perhaps from their perspective it's true. These tech devices are often nothing more than a utility like a spoon or knife to most, but to you and I we are more invested in their inner workings. I don't fault others for them not caring about these nuances, this isn't their world or life.

Having spent decades in tech, hardware, software, etc, I just don't care what that person's opinion is anymore when the two ecosystems don't function together. If they wanted to have a technical discussion about it, I'll entertain it but I have no desire to try and convert them from their technological religion.

None the less, I have not seen these incompatibilities impact my daily life in any meaningful way over the years while interacting with friends/family/coworkers who are in the apple ecosystem. It's more that I just don't let these issues impact me. I have better things to spend my time on these days.