So it's been about six months or so since I picked up a new-in-box iPhone 14 from my friendly1 neighbourhood Rogers store, after having spent approximately all of the past decade or so using various flavours of non-Apple hardware — particularly PC, Tile, and of course Android. Here are my thoughts six months on, as someone whose last iPhone was a hand-me-down iPhone 5c.
Remember that one? Me neither.
Honestly fair given I've been so consistent about my opinion of Apple hardware/software and the company's vendor lock-in strategy. It's good business, I just didn't agree with it. But several factors converged:
I'd just gotten back from a roadtrip, and I found out on multiple occasions that Android does not even have the concept of a per-contact SIM card — and consequently, neither does Android Auto's Google Assistant hands-free calling. This was a Slight Issue, considering not all of my friends had my Canadian number and my American number.
The battery of the phone in question (a Pixel 8, bought new close to launch day in 2024) was also absolutely not having it. The nature of dual SIM/dual standby inherently nukes battery life regardless of phone, but looking back now, something about it on Android in particular completely destroys it; at one point, I think I was getting maybe three hours of useful time on a single charge, and now I get a lot more than that.
So when I was shopping for phones, I was — probably for the first time in a while — considering an iPhone as a very real possibility. I thought about why I was actually still using Android other than inertia; after all, when was the last time I actually downloaded an APK and "side-loaded" it, like I did with minecraft.apk as a child because I personally couldn't afford to buy it, which was actually the whole reason that I became a bit of an Android fanatic? Probably that exact scenario, in early childhood. Today, there are probably very few apps that I need to sideload, which I actually need to use and can't justify purchasing.
And then I found a good deal, and that was that.
Rogers was offering the iPhone 14 for $10/mo over 24 months, 0% APR, outright ownership thereafter. I'm pretty sure this was the cheapest device they had to finance, period, not just their cheapest iPhone. $240 does not get you a lot of phone in 2026, and here I was, given the option to have quite a bit of phone that will probably otherwise never be priced at this point.
Given that I was already a Rogers customer and I didn't really plan on switching anytime soon, the "carrier lock-in" was a non-issue. I could have gotten something newer, but they didn't have the 15, and the 16/17 were (IIRC) 3–4x more expensive and you had to pay a fee to buy out the phone completely after 24 months. I suspect the 14 had this pricing and policy to reflect its stature as the last iPhone to have a Lightning port, but part of it is probably also telco loss-leading, since non-telco 14s were still going for $600+. I didn't mind carrying an extra cable, so I decided to go with the 14.
There were, naturally, also Other Factors. The question of what those entail is left as an exercise for the reader.
Spoiler alert: most of this is the ecosystem, which should not come as much of a surprise, given that that is literally the entire point of switching to iPhone and/or another Apple device. That said, and as I'll show below, not everything about the ecosystem is sunshine and rainbows.
Apple Wallet, of all things, was the first thing that Just Worked for me, and probably the one thing that confirmed that my decision was the right one. For the longest time leading up to this purchase, I'd tried multiple times to add my Capital One credit cards to my Google Wallet, to no avail. I called Capital One support, I changed my Google Fi accountholder name to my legal name — nothing. Then I added the card to Apple Wallet and there it was, first try.
While Apple Wallet's transit pass feature did also Just Work at first, particularly when I was visiting SF, it'd be unfair to attribute the concept to Apple — Google Wallet supports it too, I just never had an excuse to use it. The infrastructure behind the Compass card (the transit pass for/operated by TransLink, Metro Vancouver's transit agency) still doesn't support digital transit cards, and digital Compass cards have been "years away" for the past several years.
FaceTime and iMessage are honestly social gamechangers, and I'm a bit sad I only unlocked these just now — while the vibe I get from people I know here in general is that iOS/iMessage tribalism isn't really a thing here, things are rather different for people in my age cohort specifically, likely due to our generation's cultural proximity to the United States and the adoption of American consumerism. This doesn't always manifest as a bad thing, but I think there is one example that's illustrative: one of my Toronto-based friends told me about one of their friends in tech in Vancouver, and did so by creating an iMessage group; we later met first over FaceTime before getting food together. This likely would not have occurred, or would have occurred through a much more frictionful pathway, if I were still on Android.
AirPods are great, and it's easy to undersell them because Everyone™ has them. As part of my new hire package at Asana, I was given the option of AirPods Pro 3 or Bose QC35s; since I got a pair of QC Ultras as a graduation gift and didn't have an Apple device (other than my work MacBook) to use the AirPods with at the time, I never exercised the option until now. But now it goes with me pretty much everywhere, and the ANC quality is quite good. I can almost hear myself think with ANC enabled in most scenarios.
Find My is pretty cool; as part of my Super Secret Initiation Ritual™ into the Apple Cult™, I bought a 4-pack of AirTags from Costco, and they've performed better than Tile so far. One might argue AirTags are more effective because they're part of the Apple ecosystem and therefore benefit from Apple's R&D spend, not just because they're more technically advanced in a vacuum. I think the real truth is probably somewhere in between.
I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention a discussion I had with a friend a while back; they noted that while Tile seems to have more false positives (and they do — when I was still on Tile, I was getting maybe three false positives a week), Find My tended to have more false negatives, or at least sufficiently delayed true positives such that they weren't actually effective in reminding you that you forgot something. Even though Tile is more "noisy," false positives are arguably the correct failure mode here. That said, I've also never lost anything since getting AirTags, so we'll see if this holds in the long run.
AirDrop is also pretty sick. I found myself using my work MacBook2 to AirDrop full-resolution photos from my camera3 to my iPhone fairly frequently, which was a much more frictionless way of moving images than Bluetooth sync between my phone and camera (finicky to pair, extremely slow, but guaranteed full resolution), or going through my desktop (external SD card reader on my PC -> Google Photos -> photos backed up in "Storage Saver" which nukes resolution and quality).
Finally, onto the honourable mentions.
I appreciated the fact that my banking apps would go blank in the app switcher. Not that this is a real concern for me (I have a privacy screen, something Spigen inexplicably doesn't make for Pixels), but it does show that Apple's privacy principles, however nominal and contested, do actually trickle down to the consumer in the most mundane ways.
During the time that I used Apple Maps for navigation purposes, I also appreciated that its highway shield logos were actually simplified versions of local highway shields, not just numbers in circles. The level of attention to detail in Apple Maps's map layers is also, generally, amazing and bordering on scary; the street in front of my house has a "bicycle path" pavement marking, and that's captured on Apple Maps.
This is not even "something I'm not fond of" anymore; it's probably the one thing that continues to piss me off, and it's the one thing that keeps drawing me back to the Pixel 8. Where do I even start?
Autoplay. Android Auto ships with this enabled too, but at least Google had the decency to make it something the user can toggle. There is no meaningful way to automatically accomplish this with CarPlay or iOS — every time I plug in my phone, whatever was just playing on Spotify is now suddenly being blasted through my car's speakers. This is not at all a bad thing when I'm driving myself; unfortunately, not everyone I drive around is an adherent of girl EDM4, and honestly sometimes I need a quiet drive. The only reliable way to prevent this from happening is to quit Spotify entirely before plugging in my phone; not even Shortcuts — might I add, at this point in time the "canonical" solution to this problem — can automatically pause audio playback completely (sometimes 1–2 seconds of audio will still play) or reliably (sometimes it just straight up won't fire).
Infotainment. For context, my car (the post-facelift first-gen Acura TLX, 2018–2020) comes with the classic Honda dual-screen infotainment that people know and "love," albeit brought into the Present Day with CarPlay/Android Auto support; the upper screen shows (among other things) your smartphone and is non-touch, and the lower touchscreen shows aux and some climate controls. I'm personally fine with it (the fewer touchscreens the better), though I would prefer even more physical climate controls, because having to wait for one's infotainment to boot up before being allowed to change the fan speed is a special kind of Hell that I would wish upon very few people.
The problem is that apparently this infotainment and CarPlay are a match made in Hell, so now I have to deal with double Hell on a sunny day when I've left the car parked outside.
Because the upper screen is non-touch, inputs are made using a control wheel and physical buttons on the centre stack. This works…fine…most of the time, but the ergonomics are noticeably poorer than when using Android Auto. Don't get me wrong, it's clear that neither platform was designed for non-touchscreens, but CarPlay definitely feels like it wants to be used on a touchscreen a lot more than Android Auto does.
The lower screen is also not without its own quirks. For some reason, CarPlay insists on sending a "track number" with each song title, so every song title comes up as "01 [Song Title]" even if it's not the first track of the record. For Spotify Lossless tracks (that is to say, all of my tracks nowadays), it also sends along "· Lossless" appended to the artist name. These are closer to nits, but I think it reflects a genuine difference in the protocol that CarPlay uses with Honda's infotainment versus Google's protocol, and it's one of those things that feels like it should be more polished given that it's Apple.
Navigation. My TLX also comes with a colour Multi-Information Display between the tachometer and speedometer5. When using Android Auto with navigation active, it was possible for the display to show turn-by-turn directions, which was legitimately useful. This functionality disappeared when I switched to CarPlay, and I'm still not quite sure why it did, because apparently literally nobody on the entirety of the Interwebs has run into this failure mode before. Since I drive with only music on, I've definitely noticed missing more turns compared to when I was using Android Auto, especially at some of the more esoteric intersection configurations.6
What, you expected more gripes from me? Say what you will about Apple, but they know how to make broadly good, directionally correct UI and an overall cohesive UX, which makes the CarPlay fail even more incomprehensible. The gripes that are left are, compared to CarPlay, nits.
That said, this post would be incomplete without nitpicking, so nitpick I shall.
I don't like that you can't hide a Messages/iMessage conversation without deleting the message history, and (relatedly) that you can't remove a conversation without a confirmation, because that deletes the conversation and Apple wants to make sure you're not doing something dumb by removing it. I appreciate the patronization because I do dumb things all the time — but for texts like OTP deliveries or Interac e-Transfer notifications, I just want to get rid of them without confirmation to declutter my Messages screen, with the understanding that they will come back some time in the future.
Also the default Mandarin Pinyin IME blows massively compared to GBoard's implementation, or honestly compared to literally any other implementation with more than rudimentary fuzzy Pinyin. It assumes that every letter you type is what you intended to type, which is honestly an extremely dangerous assumption when it comes to phone screens and I'm not sure why Apple chose to make this assumption. Consequently, when it encounters a cluster that isn't legal Pinyin (and it will encounter many such clusters due to fatfingering), it just dies.
Apple Maps, surprisingly, also gets a mention here; I'm still not a fan of how its Favourites list works, and at times its navigation has definitely suggested that I commit violations of the Motor Vehicle Act. I'll stick with Google Maps for keeping track of my recommendations and places I still want to go, and Waze for driving instructions.
The Lightning port is also its own thing, but I mean, I signed up for this one in the name of penny-pinching, so I can't really complain. It's partially redeemed by the MagSafe availability though, and by my work friends who carry both kinds of cables. Thanks guys.
I think the 14 is a keeper, and I think my next phone will also be an iPhone, which is probably not a sentence I would conceived of six months prior. Honestly, depending on if Rogers is nice to me, I might even try to upgrade sooner — the base 14's camera is…fine, but now that I am allegedly a photographer it's woefully insufficient, and the events I'd like to make lasting memories of (concerts) are not going to let me bring my camera in. I need something with more optical telephoto reach and more megapixels.
The CarPlay thing is a real miss on Apple's part, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But it'll just be something I'll have to live with, and until I figure out a solution, it'll in all likelihood continue to piss me off. Honestly, whatever solution I do come up with may have to involve Android Auto after all, so I could probably make a fun weekend project out of it.
Now, as for the other iThings.
Apple Watch is also a no-go, not just because I just upgraded my Garmin, but because it's not my kind of watch. I'm sure the ecosystem interop gets better with one, but it's not going to give me the granular data my Garmin currently gives me. Because of my granular data needs, I'm also kind of locked into the Garmin ecosystem (watch and chest HR strap), which is its own kind of irony.
Also with that being said, even though the MacBook/iPhone interop specifically is so nice, I probably don't see myself switching to a MacBook anytime soon. I already use one 40 hours a week, and the rest of the time I kinda don't use a laptop like…at all. Hardware is so damn expensive right now, and are the interop frictions that I have currently worth hundreds if not thousands of dollars, and the relief from not using my work laptop for personal stuff because I shouldn't? I don't think they are. Think of all the lenses I could buy instead.
Plus, tarjan (my laptop from school, the humble Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11) is still going strong. I bring it along when I travel and use it maybe once a month otherwise, and while it has its share of software and hardware Quirks, it's still in the land of the living. And all the stickers7 it's accumulated — all the people, all the memories, All The Feelings — make it hard for me to even think about getting rid of it.
[dubious — discuss][original research?] ↩
I know, I know. ↩
More on that in a future post. But yeah, I should probably update my homepage with this. ↩
You should listen to Ninajirachi right now I am no longer asking ↩
Both of which are, thankfully, analog. ↩
The left turn onto Blue Mountain Street from Brunette Avenue in Coquitlam is complete bullshit and you cannot convince me otherwise. ↩
12 mm (24 mm-e) · ƒ/5.6 · 1/25 s · ISO 3200 ↩
