A Defective iPhone 6

I’m traditionally a PC guy, but after being a loyal Android user for many years with Verizon I switched to the new iPhone 6 in 2014.  All my Androids had the problem of fragmenting and slowing down to a crawl after 18 months and I’d be stuck trying to use the damn thing for another six months before my contract was up.

So with my wife, my mother and my two teenagers, we all switched to the Apple culture.  It just made sense.  My wife’s a real estate agent and the vast majority of the real estate world is on an iPhone (at least in the St. Louis area).  I’m IT part/time for her real estate broker and need to be able to support those agents.  My mother is virtually computer illiterate which makes an iPhone perfect for her (I’ve said for years even idiots need computers/phones too, so God created Apples for them), and my kids could honestly care less as long as they can text, snapchat, instagram and play games.  And until last November, we’ve had zero problems with the hardware despite the fact my wife and I still miss the Android culture for a number of reasons I’ll outline in a minute.

In November, my phone started sending random texts to people, and there were times when I couldn’t use the touch screen (see video).  I scheduled an appointment at the Apple Store, and after waiting an ass-numbing two hours (yes I scheduled an appointment online three days prior), the problem wouldn’t replicate for him; he plugged in the phone, ran diagnostics and said that even though the phone was still under warranty, because he couldn’t find anything wrong I’d have to pay full price for a new phone if I wanted one.  Great!  But no.  So I lived with the goofiness for as long as I could, hoping I could wait it out to get a new phone when my contract expired again in a year (at the time).  I learned if I bent the phone slightly (but carefully), I could get the phone to work for short periods of time.  Six months later, the phone is now virtually unusable.  I’m lucky if I can touch anything when I login, and when I do get in, the phone has a mind of its own.

When I went to Verizon this morning, the rep initially said I was shit out of luck, but he kindly took the phone to his manager who apparently tried a few tricks on it with no luck, and graciously approved a replacement.  Thank you Verizon!  I have to say you kind-of won me over with this.  Definitely have no plans to change carriers anytime soon.  You guys get a gold star for the day.

On that note, as an iPhone convert I thought I’d final issue a final verdict on the product after 18 months of use.

For starters, I’m walking proof the iPhone is no less prone to hardware failure than any other phone.  And having supported Apple devices the past three years in a corporate environment, Apple devices are no less prone to viruses or failure than Android and/or Windows phones alike.  Opened PDFs seem to be the common culprit lately.  If anything, with Apple phones dominating the mobile device market, viruses tend to be written for them.  Nothing escapes common sense here.  If you don’t know what it is or who it’s from, don’t open it.  And if you haven’t seen the 60-minutes video on phone hacking, watch it and cringe… this is real folks.  My favorite part is the hacker convention where they ALL say hacking ANY phone is “trivial”, meaning it’s easy.  I was doing network spoofing for fun a number of years ago and I’m not a hacker.  I can only imagine how easy it is for the guys actually know what they’re doing.

Here’s my list of pros and cons:

• Screen rotation – this has become less a problem as I’ve acquired more Bluetooth devices and use the auxiliary adapter less and less, but why the hell won’t the screen rotate upside down so the jack can be on top when I put the phone in my cup holder/wherever in my car?  Props to Android for figuring this out and it not being an issue from the get go.
• Why isn’t the power button on the top where it’s supposed to be on every other mobile device?  No, I’ve never gotten used to this because that spot for my thumb should be a volume rocker and a simple pointer finger reach for the power is what’s natural.
• I miss my widgets.
• The lack of push in Gmail kinda pisses me off… if I want insta Gmail I need to download the app, which is stupid.  And to be honest, e-mail is one of the things Apple has going for it, which is better than Android.
• Siri ummm… sucks.  She’s worthless and could just go away.  I spend almost as much time cussing at Siri as I do cussing at the XBOX One voice commands.
• Why is placing the cursor in the middle of a word (not between words) so damn difficult?  Props to Android again on this one.
• THE KEYBOARD!!!  OMG this is the absolute worst part of the phone and could easily be fixed even though Apple chooses not to.  It seriously takes EVERY iPhone user twice the time to hammer out a text than even the most amateur Android user.  Holy crap I miss press and hold for numbers and special characters.
• One thing I do absolutely love is the stability.  My iPhone (before the hardware took a shit) is just as fast today as it was when I bought the thing.  I love that.
• Voicemail on the iPhone is brilliantly done.

My final verdict?  Even though my cons seem to outweigh the pros, my family’s too far into the Apple culture for me to leave… at the moment.  The reality is the Android isn’t a drastic enough change for me to really care, despite the fact I utterly loathe the Apple keyboard.  And it seems that aside from routine upgrades to features and hardware, there seems to no major innovation on mobile devices to convince me to sway to one side or the other.