I switched to IPhone 13 pro 3.5 years ago and I have the completely opposite experience.
It doesn’t “just work”.
- Swipe typing is so horrible I had to disable it.
- Notifications are extremely large and you have less control over what type of notifications you want to receive.
- You can’t transfer files by simply connecting your phone to a PC.
- Videos played in Safari don’t automatically rotate to landscape mode (nor there is a button to quickly do this) unless you disable portrait lock from control center. If you lock this again hoping it will stay in landscape it will switch back to portrait mode.
- You can’t set alarm on a certain date.
- You can only snooze the alarm for 9 minutes (I think you can configure this in iOS26, but this was unacceptable even 5 years ago)
- Apps get killed or stopped in background extremely frequently which means that if you have some long running task you need to keep the app open.
- Hotspot automatically disconnects even with a Macbook (Windows/Linux is much worse). I used to live without home internet relying on hotspot feature. IPhone hotspot proved to be extremely unreliable.
This is not even mentioning more technical things like sideloading, torrent client etc.
I have some alarms for specific dates, do you mean a single use alarm?
> - You can only snooze the alarm for 9 minutes (I think you can configure this in iOS26, but this was unacceptable even 5 years ago)
To this day I miss one alarm that LG phones had where it would make me do more work to even dismiss it, on purpose, because I am known to just turn it off and keep sleeping.
> - Hotspot automatically disconnects even with a Macbook (Windows/Linux is much worse). I used to live without home internet relying on hotspot feature. IPhone hotspot proved to be extremely unreliable.
I have not had this issue, though I did have the issue of not realizing that since I had bought my phone through Apple instead of through T-Mobile my data / hotspot plan was not the right one, I realized this after I left T-Mobile for Mint, but I rarely if ever use hotspot.
> - Swipe typing is so horrible I had to disable it.
I had the 12 Pro and now the 17 Pro, I rarely do swipe typing, voice to text is slightly more annoying, I would hope that in this world of AI that Apple would improve their voice to text, it just doesn't hear me at all half of the time.
> - You can’t transfer files by simply connecting your phone to a PC.
Apple has always been all about being on Apple, so yeah, though I have gotten my Linux to mount files from the iPhone before, doesn't look pretty at all mind you, but I can take a rough but full snapshot of all my images on my phone..
> I have some alarms for specific dates, do you mean a single use alarm?
Are you using a third party app, or the built in Clock/Alarm?
The built in clock alarm lets you set alarms for specific days ("Repeat -> Never / Every {Monday..Sunday}"), but doesn't let you set alarms for specific dates (Set my alarm for 6am on Wednesday 10th and Monday 29th)
> > - Hotspot automatically disconnects even with a Macbook (Windows/Linux is much worse). I used to live without home internet relying on hotspot feature. IPhone hotspot proved to be extremely unreliable.
This happens to me frequently when I switched to using my phone hotspot as my primary internet connection for a week. My solution ended up being getting a dedicated AP, and having that connect to my phone instead. A random Netgear running OpenWRT was able to more reliably stay tethered to my Apple iPhone than my Apple Macbook or Apple iPad. It's ironic when inter-vendor works better than intra-vendor.
> > - You can’t transfer files by simply connecting your phone to a PC.
> Apple has always been all about being on Apple, so yeah, though I have gotten my Linux to mount files from the iPhone before, doesn't look pretty at all mind you, but I can take a rough but full snapshot of all my images on my phone..
That's about all I can do with Windows PC, Linux PC, or Mac too. Transfer photos. If I want to transfer arbitrary files by connecting to USB and browsing a filesystem (e.g. everything that Files.app displays in "On my iPhone" view), I can't on any platform.
And what happened after? Did you stop using YouTube altogether or you can now moderate your usage?
I did a similar experiment quitting YouTube and reddit for a month last year. By the end of the month I didn't feel like I missed it much and thought that it wasn't a problem for me anymore. Unfortunately, with time my usage started to ramp up again.
YouTube is still useful, so I didn't cut it out completely. I have an RSS feed for channels I'm interested in, and sometimes the only good search result is a video. The feed is for noise control only. I find that I now negatively associate impulsive YouTube consumption, and I'm conscious of when it happens, so I catch myself almost immediately.
If your usage ramps up, and you catch yourself scrolling for the sake of distraction, then don't beat yourself up, just repeat the process. I'm sure I'll need a reminder too.
I’m in the process of loading up my instance of FreshRSS with my MVP YouTube subscriptions, with plugins to allow videos to be viewed inline, sans anything relevant to politics or news. It will be the final algorithmically determined feed that I am routinely exposed to. I left most social media for good over 12-years ago (I am an early adopter, even in cynicism about the societally damaging potential of social networks).
The benefit of having a chronological feed that consists entirely of plain text headlines cannot be overstated. I can feel a tangible difference in how I engage with news and information that’s presented without the usual “tricks of the trade”. I am going to setup accounts on my system for friends and family, but I wish there were a more straightforward mechanism for doing this, and I fear that Cloudflare, Discord, and actions from the big players in this game will take actions to prevent this kind of separation of content from its platform, but for now this is working well.
Thank you for answering. I just feel like getting 16GB version doesn't sound as appealing in terms of price.
Another question: does your MBP swaps a lot? I've heard that SSD wears off much more quickly on M1 so that is also another concerning point.
I am a Java developer (unfortunately :)) but I don't think I will be running anything extremely demanding on my personal laptop. I might rent a VPS and ssh into it for a heavy stuff. Not sure about how much it would cost.
The most attractive thing about Air for me is pricing. There's a huge price gap between base and 16GB models in my country. I would buy myself a MBP 14/16, but I'm afraid it will be collecting dust when/if I will get my work laptop.
- Swipe typing is so horrible I had to disable it.
- Notifications are extremely large and you have less control over what type of notifications you want to receive.
- You can’t transfer files by simply connecting your phone to a PC.
- Videos played in Safari don’t automatically rotate to landscape mode (nor there is a button to quickly do this) unless you disable portrait lock from control center. If you lock this again hoping it will stay in landscape it will switch back to portrait mode.
- You can’t set alarm on a certain date.
- You can only snooze the alarm for 9 minutes (I think you can configure this in iOS26, but this was unacceptable even 5 years ago)
- Apps get killed or stopped in background extremely frequently which means that if you have some long running task you need to keep the app open.
- Hotspot automatically disconnects even with a Macbook (Windows/Linux is much worse). I used to live without home internet relying on hotspot feature. IPhone hotspot proved to be extremely unreliable.
This is not even mentioning more technical things like sideloading, torrent client etc.