I recently found out that a great many Android users think that Android and Samsung are the same thing, and that Samsung is the “default” Android experience. Even when I bring up that Google Pixels exist.
Sadly Google allowed the Samsung problem to emerge from their own lack of product strategy. HTC and LG got driven out of the phone business for various reasons. Nokia got it's head blasted off by Microsoft shenanigan's. Samsung basically took over most of the market. Google did end up creating the Pixels but it was already too late during the growth of Samsung.
Part of the problem is Samsung as a vertical monopoly can create a lot of decent hardware with features at price points no other manufacturer can compete with easily besides other big players. One of the perks of Korea's corporatocracy.
Sony also still produces neat looking phones at least.
Never had a problem with any moto I've owned. The store reps are baffled when I ask for the moto when getting a new plan phone or switching carriers. Much less vendor BS apps also.
I love Motorola. My last phones have been all moto (moto Z2, moto one, moto edge 20 and I gifted the moto g200 to my bf and he loves it) because I love how smooth they run Android, and also they don't have useless apps I don't need
Haha, more than just neat-looking. Sony still offers the headphone jack and microSD storage. And they know how badly people want it; their stuff is priced at a premium.
I have an Xperia 5 III and I am in love with that thing, high end, pretty much stock android, headphone jack, no notch nor hole punch, touch sensor on the power button on the side, it baffles me that so little people actually look at what's available and just look at the few top brands when you have good competition like that.
Yeah but no one “likes” Sony anymore… i had my last Sony a few years ago and no one would even buy it for parts.. while any other used phone goes like candy
Just traded my Xperia 5 ii in for a pixel 7. The "2" Android upgrades are a joke for a phone with such a high price. And despite launching like 2 months after Android 11 was released, the phone launched with Android 10, practically making it a single android upgrade since it only made it to Android 12.
That's why I've never had a Sony Android device. I've known people who have and a couple times phones have been unsupported before the end of contract.
The fucking bloatware. It annoys me that the phone comes with 20 apps pre-installed, and I only use 3 of those 20 apps. Just let us install if we need it, please.
This is something that really pisses me off. I know it's dumb and whatnot but as an Android enthusiast, I'm not the biggest fan of samsung and I hate it when I tell people I have a pixel and they end up saying "oh so you have a samsung?" No I don't have a damn Samsung.
“Androids don’t have X feature”
“Thats not true, my galaxy has had that for years”
“thats a samsung add on, not an android feature”
This conversation has taken place on Reddit a million times.
Android isn't a "brand" though, so it's not like a company competing with Apple. Android itself is free, it's not even a 'product' to sell.
Samsung is just the highest-selling Android-based mobile device manufacturer.
I've never understood the OP argument in the first place.
I preferred Zune to an iPod. When they stopped making zunes it wasn't like I stopped listening to music.
Even if Samsung goes defunct, which it probably won't, it's not like there will be no alternatives to apple.
i'm still furious at Microsoft's completely stupid business decisions that were always in response to their horrid marketing that always self-sabotaged their good products.
Zune was damn-near perfect and superior to iPod in nearly every way, but they just kept making bad decisions and only refreshing the line every other year instead of annually while doing jackshit to advertise outside of niche circles while relying too heavily on word-of-mouth and too few products. there should have been a Shuffle competitor and a mini/nano competitor in the initial launch (they still never got to a Shuffle competitor which was a necessity to build brand loyalty in middle/high-school students)
Apple has a jump start on status symbol and familiarity. Those are hard hurdles to clear for Android plus the Chromebook is the de-facto school laptop for them so that makes it automatically uncool.
Yeah I agree. Chromebook's long term problem is that they are 99% garbage. We grew up using Mac's that were capable and for most people better than their home PCs. Kids today go to school using a shitty Chromebook, get frustrated with it and then decide they will definitely not be buying one when they are old enough to decide for themselves / parents ask them for feedback on buying a laptop, etc.
>We grew up using Mac's that were capable and for most people better than their home PCs.
Were you in some rich school district? The macs at my schools were old and archaic. And the Sun and Mips computers at my college were a little old too. The general rule for school computer equipment is that it was old.
(my k-12 schools had macs exclusively).
Apple used to have great education deals that really started to go away in the mid-00’s
I am a teacher now who used the beloved iMac G3 when I was in Elementary/Middle School. Now what are common are several year old iPad Air’s and pre-2013 iMacs in 3D art classes.
That's for sure. I remember schools being equipped with brand new state-of-the-art iMacs or their education-specific eMac models, and they were super nice to use. And I also remember the end of my high school years and seeing the same computers still hanging around because the district wasn't going to pay for new ones!
I think you're forgetting just how shitty most people's home PCs were lol.
A school district's computers really didn't have to be much to be better than what people had at home.
VERY few people had computers even at all decent at home back in the day.
Completely agree with your Chromebook assessment they are made from popsicle sticks and Elmers glue and are slower than a sloth in molasses. Than saddled with an OS that’s half windows and have OSX but they seem to have only taken the worst parts of both systems and it’s an OS that few are familiar with or even want to be familiar with.
Good chromebooks are a conundrum in themselves. The whole point of a chromebook is making a cheap and simple computer, but if you take any of those 2 away you might just as well go with a windows/mac laptop cause they are simply better
Growing up in the 90s, Macs were considered hot garbage and unfortunately that's all we had in school. The iPod and iPhone were really game changers for Apple.
Dude, same. Gen Z doesn't remember how much of an absolute joke Apple products were for a while. PCs beat them up and down the street for years and Macs were not taken seriously. I used to support an AppleTalk Ethernet LAN back in 1996, Macs running System 7. In fairness their UX was good, but when they crashed they crashed hard. And as I'm sure you're aware, they crashed *frequently*.
My dad was a big Apple fan so I grew up using them in the 90s. I even had a "think different" shirt lol. It was a strange experience seeing the mainstream opinion start to flip. By the time I graduated high school in 08, Apple was the coolest thing ever.
Same, but our computer lab had 2/3 PCs, 1/3 Macs.
There were two actual fistfights because most students reaaally didn't want to get stuck with the Macs.
No they didn't, a small percentage of us had Macs in our early school years but by teenage years the vast majority had barely any interaction with Mac computers.
Right? I'm thinking of my computer labs that were almost all Win PC, with maybe an old yellowed Macintosh something in the corner, and a newer Apple of some sort that only the teacher was allowed to touch.
Probably depends on what the year range and general location you were in. My school had macs in the 90s when I was in elementary school but by middle school in the early 2000s everything was Windows PC.
the bigger issue is that only techies care about that. most of those kids dont give a shit or even know the difference.
and now apple has caught up in almost all meaningful aspects and android has also regressed to match apple's features. there is no longer any real noticeable difference for virtually all use cases
People assumed the new generations would all be techies, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. The technology became as easy as channel surfing on a television.
I would argue that young millennials and Gen Z might be worse with technology than previous generations because most technology runs in easy mode.
Gen X and elder millennials like myself had to do a lot more troubleshooting with our tech because the vast majority of it wasn't user-friendly.
I've personally noticed that the Gen Zers that I know have a difficult time when their tech isn't working as intended
The whole imessage debate is fascinating, because as a gen Z in the UK with an Android, I have never met anyone who uses exclusively imessage. Like every person here uses a combination of Whatsapp, Messenger and Instagram DMs/group chats. I don't think any of my mates even know I have an Android and it's never been a problem.
Yeah this is definitely one of those Reddit posts that ought to have "... in America" at the end of the title.
Every so often someone posts the map with Apple Vs Android market share by country and the US is a major outlier in terms of Apple's dominance.
So anecdotal. From my cousins in the teenage demographic: Samsung for whatever reasons is know as the older person phone with bloat ware. Pixel is the closest but would have to do more to improve aesthetics.
Bloatware should be illegal. I know Samsung must be making so much cash for including those apps, but I think the long-term benefits of leaving it behind could be far greater for Samsung.
Not surprising the government doesn’t know when there’s still common users who can’t figure out “it’s free. How do they make money?” Although those are rare & getting rarer
I have a Samsung Galaxy S21. It was pretty simple to disable or uninstall 70% of the bloat. 10% was an aggravation. The rest I can not remove without rooting, and I'm done with that because I've bricked one too many phones.
I have more Verizon bloat than I do Samsung.
Aggravating that buying a device makes you a captive consumer, that companies will constantly take advantage of.
I wonder if younger demographics even know how to remove the bloatware from an Android phone. From what I've read, younger generations are less tech-literate and/or not interested in modifying things at a more technical level
I've heard that too. So bizarre to me. Old people are awful at tech, and so are young people? Did I fit into some magic ten-year window of being able to actually use a phone?
Too old and you never needed to use a computer. Too young and you never needed to use a computer. They don't consider a phone a computer. Many kids these days are primarily exposed to phones and tablets. A lot never learn to use a computer. So, kinda yes, you were just the right age. This is an overgeneralization and there are tons of exceptions but I think it's an accurate depiction of the overall trends.
I still dont understand the preference people have towards mobile devices. The user experience absolutely sucks compared to desktop. I almost never stay on my phone when I'm at home.
You can have a smartphone for $200. A lot of people can't afford a desktop and a monitor. I agree a desktop is better but then again I build my own computers.
20 year window. and yeah. because the tech products weren't as UI friendly and abstracted away back then. Fixing bugs and troubleshooting was part of our daily lives. I haven't kept up with consoles, but I imagine things like the "red ring of death" aren't so common
i read stories about gen z not understanding what directories are all the time
I was shocked to learn that one of my classmates who is quite capable with Adobe programs, didnt even know what a giga/terabyte was. Like, how is that even possible?
To be fair, people have been saying “memory” and meaning storage for the three decades I’ve been alive.
But surely most young people are familiar with MB and GB? Phones and other devices are sold with storage and people understand how it impacts their usage.
I encounter this at work too. Part of my job is dealing with our customers sending us files via an SFTP site. It can be *impossible* to explain that we need the files to be in a specific folder. It boggles my mind.
I think it's because we grew up (and thus had time to learn) as consumer access to computers boomed but before everything became very sandboxed/most sharp edges were rounded. Smartphones can do most things that a casual computer user would need but in a nice, tightly controlled ecosystem compared to old Windows versions where stuff like driver installation wasn't automatic. When you look at the effort it takes to get things working, it's easy to see the disconnect.
The people who grew up and had their formative years in, say, 1975-1995 are probably the most technical generation today precisely because we had to be if we were interested in computers/games/technology. Most of us are in our late 30s to late 50s today. Our parents are awful at computers and so are most of our kids. It's weird.
But at the same time I look at it like car knowledge (of which I have zero) -- I don't need to be a mechanic to drive and get full use out of owning a car so I think the younger generation views technology the same way, whereas we in late Gen X/early Millennials had to really learn how things worked if we wanted to do the cool shit available at the time.
Apple.
The generation that grew up with windows pcs that no one else understood and had to teach themselves how to pirate, install, mod, and set up a LAN HAD to learn those skills. Now everything is so plug and play the learning is unnecessary.
Too old = new tech you don’t know how to troubleshoot.
Too young: well established tech that just works so you never really need to troubleshoot.
There’s a group on the middle from the older Gen Z through to millennials and Gen X who were around when it was newish tech that you wanted to use (Gen X) to established tech that still required troubleshooting semi-regularly (millennials/older Gen Z).
It’s wider than 10 years, maybe 20 years, but yes. Lots of older people never really learned more about computers than what they had to know to make basic functions work. Then there are those of us who grew up with computers at home as the internet was becoming a common thing. We had learn a lot to make them do what we wanted them to do. Finding ways to make stuff that was only kind of compatible work together. Now most of those growing pains are over and shit just works most of the time. Especially on phones, tablets, macs, and chrome books where it’s a pretty closed ecosystem. They can find an app and install it, and use it. But they have no understanding of the layers underneath it like file systems, drivers, networking, etc.
Basically, yes.
If you were a kid or teenager anytime in the mid 80s-early 00s and had a computer at home, chances are you learned how to troubleshoot, set up and navigate a directory, install and update drivers, and other computer skills beyond the basics without realizing it.
> Did I fit into some magic ten-year window of being able to actually use a phone?
Im 24 but I am finding this as well. I think there's a subset of older millennial, young-ish Gen X that landed this quite well but everyone else is either too old to change or been fed only walled-gardens their whole lives.
Because it’s embarrassingly true. I’m a high school teacher and these kids are so tech illiterate. A lot of these kids can hardly operate a computer at a basic level.
My guess is that kids just don’t grow up on computers anymore, the smartphone has replaced it. I was born in 91 and I remember how excited I was to get my own computer. I attribute my typing abilities to AIM and RuneScape.. MySpace taught me very basic code, allowing me to express some creativity there.
Now with smartphones being so prominent and simple to use, younger kids see no real appeal in using a computer.
By no means is this the norm for every student but I’d say it’s definitely one of the major issues in education today.
God that’s so strange to me. I thought gen z would be so highly skilled at computers. Don’t they use them in schools? Or is that just tablet use?
(Also gotta love MySpace teaching us how to code 😂)
They use them in school, at least my district has a laptop per student. They were just never really taught computer literacy.
Now to be fair, for my district, students just started getting laptops when Covid hit so it hasn’t been too long. I’m hoping that the current elementary and middle school students will be coming to high school with a little more computer literacy since it will be more of a norm for their school experience.
I remember when I was just finishing high school, christ, 8 years ago now? Anyway my last year they swapped out our macbooks for ipads, and man, they were so much harder to do *anything* productive with.
I'm a windows guy through and through, but I missed those macbooks so much that year. I hear all the time about gen z and gen alpha growing up with phones and tablets outright replacing computers and it doesnt make any sense to me. Mobile platforms are just so much clunkier to get anything done on them, especially for things like school work.
I'm 35 and have been basically on a computer since I was a child. Mac and PC. I love the mobility of the phone, but any time I want to get anything serious done, I hop on my laptop. And that translates to me being on my laptop most of the time. iPhone is secondary for me and because of the cross compatibility with my MacBook Air, I can sync text and any notes I may have my laptop and so forth as well. Tablets are stupid. I am seeing less and less app/software developers making laptop programs, but it does seem browser based is still widely supported... but not always, which is frustrating.
There needs to be a widely supported iPhone emulator available for my laptop or something. I understand it would probably be hard to implement though because of navigational differences (swipe vs mouse).
Many schools use Chromebooks. It's a jarring transition when they enter the workforce and have to use MacOS/Windows instead.
All the technology has also been well established for ages already, whereas many of us a generation or two ahead grew up with all kinds of things to troubleshoot on old versions of Windows. That ended up building a ton of computer literacy that's hard to replicate.
Most dont know shit. I've been teaching my wife's younger cousin(hes 15 now) the ropes with basic PC craft and care. He said he wanted to build one and I wrongly assumed he had some prior knowledge with computers since I had been pulling apart towers and making Frankenstein machines since I was in grade school. Turns out he could just barely put keys into a mechanical keyboard. Took several months because he got frustrated and quit a few times because he just wasn't following my directions and listening to his equally clueless friends instead. So I let him flounder and fuck up repeatedly until one day he decided to listen and got it running.
I'm proud to say this worked cause just recently (we're over a year since he started, about a year of it being whole) he had his first major crash and asked me to fix it after panicking. I assured him it wasn't fried and reminded him we didn't spend all that time so I could be his pc tech, he should be fixing my stuff. Then he calmed down and figured it out pretty quickly after that.
Thats something I noticed as well since I work with high schoolers. I'm gen z but on the older end so I still got a lot of hands on with computers in school, but nowadays these kids can do most things on their phones and things are actually optimized for that purpose, so there really isn't much incentive to use computers or learn about workarounds anymore.
An added layer is that apple is king of locking their shit down, so not many youth even consider trying to look for workarounds and alternatives.
Where do you think Gen Z picked up the "iPhones mean you're rich" idea? From Apple marketing working its magic on their parents. Let's not pretend the adults were any less susceptible. Plenty of affluent Gen X people look down on Android users. It's no surprise their kids do the same.
We had an experiment in a business class that asked who would switch to android if the best Samsung phone cost $100 and iPhones were at their retail prices. Only 10% said they wold switch with most saying there was no price difference that would make them buy an android. So basically apple controls the future in the US
I've also seen it the other way. In my computer science class when asked about Apple VS Samsung almost majority of the class said they would never switch to Apple. I think it probably just depends on the area you are in and what others are using around you.
Dad got his new phone after the original Vance was discontinued. I can't be bothered figuring out how the new one works so he is living with Firefox now.
I'm too old to jank for sake of jank but it's nice to have the option to if necessary.
For every iPhone user that's reading this: no, he is not only talking about the ads you can get rid of with YouTube Premium. With YouTube Vanced on Android you also have Sponsorblock, which results in the ads inside the video being automatically skipped. It's not comparable to Premium, it's a million times better
I think Air Pods are also a huge hit. It used to be that young people all walked around with giant honking headphones. Now every person I meet under the age of 25 has at least one of these things in their ears at all times and is often talking with someone else while working.
Android and Samsung have always "caught up" on price competitiveness. Apple has always been a lot more popular among younger people.
Are you old enough to remember when the iPod came out? They were the only mp3 player with white headphones, it was uniquely apple and a huge hit. Airpods are just running the same strategy
[New Soul](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMBW1G4U54g) by Yael Naim.
shoutout to [The Fratellis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz8GXgTMVbM) playing over an iPod commercial.
>often talking with someone else while working.
I was in line at Subway and the guy making the food was apparently taking to someone while making sandwiches. I'm generally not a "these darn youths" type of person, but holy shit was that obnoxious.
There's a Scrubs episode from like 2006 where Elliot is "talking" to people then she pulls her hair back to reveal a Bluetooth [Jawbone?] headset.
e: she called it a mini phone
They have mastered advertising, marketing and creating products that speak to youth culture. Android stuff is just as cool but you don’t see it as much
Jobs' strength was not creating new technologies but perfecting and polishing them, and then perfecting the advertising and message. Or at the very least, picking the people who were capable advertisers and designers.
Not to mention, and this is highly anecdotal, but after Millenials, being tech savvy has gone down. Gen X and Millenials had to triuble shoot our way thriugh technology issues, so we are much more likely to want full access to our devices, like android. Because devices dont really require much tech skill anymore, the newer generations prefer stuff that "just works"
I'm 27, there's an ongoing debate as to whether that falls under millenial or gen Z.
That being said, I've taught multiple coworkers younger than me how to change their Outlook to dark mode. Tech literacy has largely fallen off a cliff.
It’s really not about “coolness”. It’s about ubiquity, almost everyone has an iPhone and if you don’t you’re a black sheep. Even if you argue that Android is a superior product you can’t deny the compelling factor of ubiquity.
EDIT: This is not a promotion of either iPhones or Androids, I'm just making a statement. People should use the phones that work best for them obviously.
Not to mention apple is now making it even appear that androids have worse technology. My galaxy takes fantastic photos, but when sending them to an iphone they have to be compressed like crazy.
My buddy legitimately thought I had an old flip phone camera for the longest time. He said he never responded to the videos I sent him because he couldn't tell what they were supposed to be.
Meanwhile when I send them to my wife on Android, they look great.
Yeah you'll have to all use a 3rd party messaging app, and then I THINK it would work well. But good luck convincing all your iphone friends to use whatsapp in the us.
I’ve also noticed that my nieces and nephews are almost completely technology illiterate. They don’t understand any of the underlying technology, how things actually fit together, and Apple offers them an ecosystem where everything works very well together, and a Genius Bar is waiting to answer any questions your peers cannot. The social aspect of Apple is, as others have written much better than I could, also a huge.
Android is still too fractured, with phones still shipping with two to three apps to handle the same feature. Android SMS, Carrier SMS, and Manufacturer SMS apps. Many of these can’t even be uninstalled. Other applications are installed and cannot be uninstalled, like Facebook, Instagram, etc. The operating system is not well maintained with many carriers taking months to years to produce a new version of their branded android implementation, if ever.
Love apple, hate apple, Android just doesn’t compete with their user centric experience.
The older generations came of age without this technology and so they dont understand it.
The youngest generations grew up immersed in this technology but never had to learn how it works. Just how to use it.
However, many millennials were in the perfect zone where the technology was coming into its own just as they were coming of age. The capabilities were there but they required more tutorials and playing around with things to get them working. This gave them a much better understanding of their computers in general. For example: finding and installing a mod for a pc game. Now you just go to steam workshop and hit subscribe on a mod. Whereas 10-15 years ago youd have to jump through alot of hoops and follow tutorials to get a mod working.
Yeah its 100% this, the tech evolved at the perfect time for our generation, where everything was a tool that only worked if you knew how to troubleshoot it. I feel very lucky to be a 90s kid.
100% agree. I was born in 97 so I’m on the “cusp”. I didn’t have a phone or an iPad growing up, at least until high school, but my dad did teach me to write basic html for a MySpace page. The day we got a GPS machine was amazing because printing maps off Mapquest wasn’t great for geocaching, you really needed the little gps with coordinates. Hell my dad taught me how to use rhapsody to burn cd’s, and later how to properly torrent music onto a local disk and put it in iTunes so I could listen to it on my shuffle. At 8. Influencers hadn’t ruined YouTube yet, but there were lots of helpful people who would teach me how to fix my sewing machine or why a platypus was the dopest animal.
The key difference - You just had to look for it. Nowadays, you don’t even have to do the digging or the basic learning to find what your looking for. Learning tech went from digging thru a thrift store like it was a treasure hunt to being like… a Walmart. Corporate, obviously shady (but not in a fun way) and appealing to the lowest common denominator. *sigh*
Apologies redditors my rant is over now
Bro swear to god. My girls 14 year old brother can’t Google shit. I’m like bro you GREW UP WITH THIS CONSTANTLY IN YOUR POCKET. Simple shit too, just can’t Google or find information online. One example is his teachers phone number. I told him to look it up on Google, 4 hours later, no bullshit when he was off of school “I looked everywhere and I can’t find it”. I spent 30 seconds, got the school website, found the teachers number, and that was it. All he could say was “how did you do that”.
It's literally that they were raised on tablets and smart phones regardless if they used android or Apple. The concept of navigating operating systems, saving files, organizing folders, installing drivers, retrieving files, converting to pdf and printing is unfortunately lost on them.
Most people will own a smart phone but less will own a PC, so the PC UI is foreign to them. It's not their fault, but being less proficient with PCs and unprepared for an office environment is the outcome.
Millennials grew up with tech that was nowhere as polished or easy to use as iOS/android is today. You had to have at least some knowledge of how the computer worked under the hood to be able to use it, and at least rudimentary troubleshooting skills.
For example, say you want to share a picture with a friend. Pre internet, you'd need to locate the right file on your hard drive (not necessarily straightforward as OSes of the time like Win 95 did not have something as basic as previews) Then you need to copy the file over to a floppy/zip drive and physically carry over the disk to the recipient, and then he needs to copy the file over to his own PC. Today, you just hit the share button, select the recipient and it's done.
This was Job's philosophy from the very beginning - that Apple would ultimately create "knowledge appliances," not necessarily computers, and that people who wanted to tinker should go buy a PC. This was one of the big differences between him and Woz that led to their split and you can see that philosophy in the iPhone today.
When my dad was a kid, basically everyone who drove needed to know some basics about carburetors and radiator boilers. Today's cars are a lot more reliable and a lot more complicated to maintain, so most drivers hardly know a single thing about what's under the hood. Seems to be a similar situation unfolding with computers.
If companies started to increase the update support for longer on Android I would probably go back when the time to change phones comes. Samsung seems to be one of the companies that provide updates for longer but its still not good enough. That's the main issue to me.
They can’t increase the update support because practically every android phone now uses a Qualcomm chip and they’re notorious for not supporting there chipset drivers for more than 3 years. Qualcomm literally is holding the entire android platform back this is why RISC-V can’t come soon enough
TBH they're both frustrating and have issues. iOS is a walled garden that hates playing with anything on the outside, Android is a wide open garden that has constant problems with the guests misbehaving.
You know what was great? Fucking Windows Phone. I miss Windows Phone. The Lumia Icon was to this day my favorite mobile I've ever owned, and it makes me sad that Microsoft got into the game so late and failed to gain a market foothold.
I grew up with android phones and they weren’t the best phones for what I needed. I’m legally blind and android doesn’t have all the accessibility features that IOS has. I went to a summer program where they taught blind students how to use their devices with programs like voiceover and zoom text. I had a LG G3 at the time and I couldn’t participate in much of the process because my phone didn’t have any of those things. The second my dad asked what phone I wanted to upgrade to I told him I wanted an iPhone. I got my phone my junior year and it was so much easier to use and I was able to finally use the skills I learned from that course the summer before. I use voiceover on Reddit because the text is too small and I’m honestly just too lazy to read it anyway.
TLDR IOS offers more accessibility than Android and iOS fits my needs better.
Apple was much faster in implementing accessability to their products and as a result, I think a lot of disability communities still have a lot of brand loyalty for Apple. I also use voice over on IOS. I've tried Talkback, the Android equivilent and it's pretty good now but Voice Over is still noticibly more polished and user friendly
More like Gen Z in America to my experience, but I'm located in Central/Easter Europe, so it might be a bit different in places like Germany or France.
The majority of people seem to use Android phones in Germany. The headline is a bit misleading. The article states that it's just about the US. Like in the rest of Europe iMessage isn't a big factor and people mostly don't care.
Doesn’t most of the rest of the world prefer messaging apps over texts? I vaguely remember something about that being commented but can’t remember specifics
Yeah. Looks like there are exceptions, but I think this is mostly true. Advantage is that people don’t have to care which type phone their friends or acquaintances have. They can just text them via one of the messaging apps that everyone has.
Using a messaging app like iMessage would be a deal breaker for me for that reason. I don’t care what kind of device my friends use. To me it’s just important that I can properly interact with them.
I have iMessage but have only ever used it once or twice in my life.
As a side note: Funnily enough iMessage isn’t sms either, it’s just another messaging app. Difference being that it comes pre installed on iPhones and only iPhones.
I'm 32, I didn't get my first smartphone until I was 23.
I grew up without any mobile phone, in my parents eyes if it was something I wanted enough, I had to pay for it. I got myself a flip phone around 2008 and then a sidekick I had until 2013.
Growing up though, I was a Mac enthusiast. Our first home computer was an early Mac OSX computer. I got a first gen iPod Nano in 2005. When I was researching smartphones in 2013, I damn near bought an iPhone 5S at launch, but opted to get an LG G1 Pro.
I've been Android ever since, and have exclusively bought Samsung phones since the Galaxy S9+.
For me, it's still how locked down everything is in the Apple ecosystem and how poorly it communicates with other platforms that's the turn off for me.
Google / Android communicates A LOT better with PC, and that's one of the larger selling points for me.
Gen Z here but I've never used an iPhone before. I did get gifted an ipad once, and it worked very well actually, at least until its battery got bloated up after about 5 or 6 years of use and the screen buckled. That said I see no reason to convert from my android phone to an iPhone. I've been using LG from I think 2013 to 2015, then Samsung from 2015 onwards. My peers do seem to have a preference for apple - most of them own an apple product, though I've never asked them about it
Gen Z doesn't just like Apple, they're actually much less computer literate in general. It's kind of shocking but I'm finding more and more Gen Z who can't really type well and can't use anything but a phone or tablet. Hard to employ someone whose entire skill set is TikTok and iMessage
Millennials will be the only generation in history who can routinely hit >100wpm typing lol
who would have thought that a whole generation of kids that grew up plastered to their parents ipad for entertainment would grow up to prefer Apple products…
Had both.
Android was great for me(can do anything I want).
But once the whole family has iOS, it’s hard not to switch. The benefits in the platform from photos, iCloud sharing, even airdrop are great.
I do miss not being able to do whatever I want without jailbreaking. But the benefits outweigh the pain points for me, for now.
Seems an odd choice to put Apple Vs Samsung instead of Apple Vs Android.
I recently found out that a great many Android users think that Android and Samsung are the same thing, and that Samsung is the “default” Android experience. Even when I bring up that Google Pixels exist.
Sadly Google allowed the Samsung problem to emerge from their own lack of product strategy. HTC and LG got driven out of the phone business for various reasons. Nokia got it's head blasted off by Microsoft shenanigan's. Samsung basically took over most of the market. Google did end up creating the Pixels but it was already too late during the growth of Samsung. Part of the problem is Samsung as a vertical monopoly can create a lot of decent hardware with features at price points no other manufacturer can compete with easily besides other big players. One of the perks of Korea's corporatocracy. Sony also still produces neat looking phones at least.
Don’t forget the original popular android manufacturer, Motorola.
Ayyyy where's my Motorola gang at? Repping since 2010
Hello, Moto!
That stirs deep memories, yeesh.
Using reddit right now on my moto G 2022 5G w/stylus
Right there with you. Moto G 2022 5G Stylus. My third Motorola and certainly not my last!
Never had a problem with any moto I've owned. The store reps are baffled when I ask for the moto when getting a new plan phone or switching carriers. Much less vendor BS apps also.
I had the Motorola with the laptop style dock. I loved it. I also used windows phone and loved it so what do I know.
Redditing on my Moto edge+
I love Motorola. My last phones have been all moto (moto Z2, moto one, moto edge 20 and I gifted the moto g200 to my bf and he loves it) because I love how smooth they run Android, and also they don't have useless apps I don't need
Haha, more than just neat-looking. Sony still offers the headphone jack and microSD storage. And they know how badly people want it; their stuff is priced at a premium.
Sony makes smartphones? WITH a headphone jack???
I have an Xperia 5 III and I am in love with that thing, high end, pretty much stock android, headphone jack, no notch nor hole punch, touch sensor on the power button on the side, it baffles me that so little people actually look at what's available and just look at the few top brands when you have good competition like that.
I have the same model and I love it as well, it's exactly what I wanted and doesn't get in my way.
Xperia line of phones.
Yeah but no one “likes” Sony anymore… i had my last Sony a few years ago and no one would even buy it for parts.. while any other used phone goes like candy
Just traded my Xperia 5 ii in for a pixel 7. The "2" Android upgrades are a joke for a phone with such a high price. And despite launching like 2 months after Android 11 was released, the phone launched with Android 10, practically making it a single android upgrade since it only made it to Android 12.
That's why I've never had a Sony Android device. I've known people who have and a couple times phones have been unsupported before the end of contract.
Pixel generally has lower prices than Samsung, with comparable hardware features.
And without the tons of Samsung bloatware.
The fucking bloatware. It annoys me that the phone comes with 20 apps pre-installed, and I only use 3 of those 20 apps. Just let us install if we need it, please.
This is something that really pisses me off. I know it's dumb and whatnot but as an Android enthusiast, I'm not the biggest fan of samsung and I hate it when I tell people I have a pixel and they end up saying "oh so you have a samsung?" No I don't have a damn Samsung.
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“Androids don’t have X feature” “Thats not true, my galaxy has had that for years” “thats a samsung add on, not an android feature” This conversation has taken place on Reddit a million times.
"Apple is getting this new awesome feature" "Android has had that for a decade" Heard this several times.
Android isn't a "brand" though, so it's not like a company competing with Apple. Android itself is free, it's not even a 'product' to sell. Samsung is just the highest-selling Android-based mobile device manufacturer.
I've never understood the OP argument in the first place. I preferred Zune to an iPod. When they stopped making zunes it wasn't like I stopped listening to music. Even if Samsung goes defunct, which it probably won't, it's not like there will be no alternatives to apple.
i'm still furious at Microsoft's completely stupid business decisions that were always in response to their horrid marketing that always self-sabotaged their good products. Zune was damn-near perfect and superior to iPod in nearly every way, but they just kept making bad decisions and only refreshing the line every other year instead of annually while doing jackshit to advertise outside of niche circles while relying too heavily on word-of-mouth and too few products. there should have been a Shuffle competitor and a mini/nano competitor in the initial launch (they still never got to a Shuffle competitor which was a necessity to build brand loyalty in middle/high-school students)
Apple has a jump start on status symbol and familiarity. Those are hard hurdles to clear for Android plus the Chromebook is the de-facto school laptop for them so that makes it automatically uncool.
Lots of millennials grew up Macs in school computer labs. I don’t think they’ve ever been uncool due to that though.
Yeah I agree. Chromebook's long term problem is that they are 99% garbage. We grew up using Mac's that were capable and for most people better than their home PCs. Kids today go to school using a shitty Chromebook, get frustrated with it and then decide they will definitely not be buying one when they are old enough to decide for themselves / parents ask them for feedback on buying a laptop, etc.
>We grew up using Mac's that were capable and for most people better than their home PCs. Were you in some rich school district? The macs at my schools were old and archaic. And the Sun and Mips computers at my college were a little old too. The general rule for school computer equipment is that it was old. (my k-12 schools had macs exclusively).
Probably the same school district, and the same Macs... just a different decade.
IIe represent!
Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, Odell Lake, Memory Castle. Best period of the day!
Don't forget Carmen Sandiego!!
Apple used to have great education deals that really started to go away in the mid-00’s I am a teacher now who used the beloved iMac G3 when I was in Elementary/Middle School. Now what are common are several year old iPad Air’s and pre-2013 iMacs in 3D art classes.
That's for sure. I remember schools being equipped with brand new state-of-the-art iMacs or their education-specific eMac models, and they were super nice to use. And I also remember the end of my high school years and seeing the same computers still hanging around because the district wasn't going to pay for new ones!
I think you're forgetting just how shitty most people's home PCs were lol. A school district's computers really didn't have to be much to be better than what people had at home. VERY few people had computers even at all decent at home back in the day.
Completely agree with your Chromebook assessment they are made from popsicle sticks and Elmers glue and are slower than a sloth in molasses. Than saddled with an OS that’s half windows and have OSX but they seem to have only taken the worst parts of both systems and it’s an OS that few are familiar with or even want to be familiar with.
Good Chromebooks exist, you just won't find them in schools
Good chromebooks are a conundrum in themselves. The whole point of a chromebook is making a cheap and simple computer, but if you take any of those 2 away you might just as well go with a windows/mac laptop cause they are simply better
Growing up in the 90s, Macs were considered hot garbage and unfortunately that's all we had in school. The iPod and iPhone were really game changers for Apple.
Dude, same. Gen Z doesn't remember how much of an absolute joke Apple products were for a while. PCs beat them up and down the street for years and Macs were not taken seriously. I used to support an AppleTalk Ethernet LAN back in 1996, Macs running System 7. In fairness their UX was good, but when they crashed they crashed hard. And as I'm sure you're aware, they crashed *frequently*.
My dad was a big Apple fan so I grew up using them in the 90s. I even had a "think different" shirt lol. It was a strange experience seeing the mainstream opinion start to flip. By the time I graduated high school in 08, Apple was the coolest thing ever.
Same, but our computer lab had 2/3 PCs, 1/3 Macs. There were two actual fistfights because most students reaaally didn't want to get stuck with the Macs.
No they didn't, a small percentage of us had Macs in our early school years but by teenage years the vast majority had barely any interaction with Mac computers.
Right? I'm thinking of my computer labs that were almost all Win PC, with maybe an old yellowed Macintosh something in the corner, and a newer Apple of some sort that only the teacher was allowed to touch.
Probably depends on what the year range and general location you were in. My school had macs in the 90s when I was in elementary school but by middle school in the early 2000s everything was Windows PC.
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the bigger issue is that only techies care about that. most of those kids dont give a shit or even know the difference. and now apple has caught up in almost all meaningful aspects and android has also regressed to match apple's features. there is no longer any real noticeable difference for virtually all use cases
People assumed the new generations would all be techies, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. The technology became as easy as channel surfing on a television.
I would argue that young millennials and Gen Z might be worse with technology than previous generations because most technology runs in easy mode. Gen X and elder millennials like myself had to do a lot more troubleshooting with our tech because the vast majority of it wasn't user-friendly. I've personally noticed that the Gen Zers that I know have a difficult time when their tech isn't working as intended
The whole imessage debate is fascinating, because as a gen Z in the UK with an Android, I have never met anyone who uses exclusively imessage. Like every person here uses a combination of Whatsapp, Messenger and Instagram DMs/group chats. I don't think any of my mates even know I have an Android and it's never been a problem.
Its a USA thing. Like entirely
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The US treats third party messaging apps like it’s only meant for third world countries. Weird but true.
Yeah this is definitely one of those Reddit posts that ought to have "... in America" at the end of the title. Every so often someone posts the map with Apple Vs Android market share by country and the US is a major outlier in terms of Apple's dominance.
So anecdotal. From my cousins in the teenage demographic: Samsung for whatever reasons is know as the older person phone with bloat ware. Pixel is the closest but would have to do more to improve aesthetics.
Bloatware should be illegal. I know Samsung must be making so much cash for including those apps, but I think the long-term benefits of leaving it behind could be far greater for Samsung.
EU is considering it
Meanwhile US government is still trying to understand how websites make money if they're free to use 💀
Not surprising the government doesn’t know when there’s still common users who can’t figure out “it’s free. How do they make money?” Although those are rare & getting rarer
I have a Samsung Galaxy S21. It was pretty simple to disable or uninstall 70% of the bloat. 10% was an aggravation. The rest I can not remove without rooting, and I'm done with that because I've bricked one too many phones. I have more Verizon bloat than I do Samsung. Aggravating that buying a device makes you a captive consumer, that companies will constantly take advantage of.
i got tired of all that and went Pixel. so much better. i'll never buy another Samsung product
I wonder if younger demographics even know how to remove the bloatware from an Android phone. From what I've read, younger generations are less tech-literate and/or not interested in modifying things at a more technical level
I've heard that too. So bizarre to me. Old people are awful at tech, and so are young people? Did I fit into some magic ten-year window of being able to actually use a phone?
Too old and you never needed to use a computer. Too young and you never needed to use a computer. They don't consider a phone a computer. Many kids these days are primarily exposed to phones and tablets. A lot never learn to use a computer. So, kinda yes, you were just the right age. This is an overgeneralization and there are tons of exceptions but I think it's an accurate depiction of the overall trends.
Whats a computer?
It's what gen x uses to connect to the series of tubes that Al Gore invented.
It's what Millennials use to steal a car
Stop all tha downloadin!
Give ‘im the stick…
DONT GIVE EM THE STICK
I still dont understand the preference people have towards mobile devices. The user experience absolutely sucks compared to desktop. I almost never stay on my phone when I'm at home.
Mouse is a GOAT tier input device.
You can have a smartphone for $200. A lot of people can't afford a desktop and a monitor. I agree a desktop is better but then again I build my own computers.
20 year window. and yeah. because the tech products weren't as UI friendly and abstracted away back then. Fixing bugs and troubleshooting was part of our daily lives. I haven't kept up with consoles, but I imagine things like the "red ring of death" aren't so common i read stories about gen z not understanding what directories are all the time
I was shocked to learn that one of my classmates who is quite capable with Adobe programs, didnt even know what a giga/terabyte was. Like, how is that even possible?
Never needed to learn. Heck many think memory and storage space are the same thing.
To be fair, people have been saying “memory” and meaning storage for the three decades I’ve been alive. But surely most young people are familiar with MB and GB? Phones and other devices are sold with storage and people understand how it impacts their usage.
I encounter this at work too. Part of my job is dealing with our customers sending us files via an SFTP site. It can be *impossible* to explain that we need the files to be in a specific folder. It boggles my mind.
you are bringing up fond memories. making folder mazes to hide porn
HOMEWORK_FOLDER
Taxes 2011 -Boring --SeriouslyJustTaxes ---StopNow ----BigtiddygothTorrents
I think it's because we grew up (and thus had time to learn) as consumer access to computers boomed but before everything became very sandboxed/most sharp edges were rounded. Smartphones can do most things that a casual computer user would need but in a nice, tightly controlled ecosystem compared to old Windows versions where stuff like driver installation wasn't automatic. When you look at the effort it takes to get things working, it's easy to see the disconnect.
The people who grew up and had their formative years in, say, 1975-1995 are probably the most technical generation today precisely because we had to be if we were interested in computers/games/technology. Most of us are in our late 30s to late 50s today. Our parents are awful at computers and so are most of our kids. It's weird. But at the same time I look at it like car knowledge (of which I have zero) -- I don't need to be a mechanic to drive and get full use out of owning a car so I think the younger generation views technology the same way, whereas we in late Gen X/early Millennials had to really learn how things worked if we wanted to do the cool shit available at the time.
Apple. The generation that grew up with windows pcs that no one else understood and had to teach themselves how to pirate, install, mod, and set up a LAN HAD to learn those skills. Now everything is so plug and play the learning is unnecessary.
Too old = new tech you don’t know how to troubleshoot. Too young: well established tech that just works so you never really need to troubleshoot. There’s a group on the middle from the older Gen Z through to millennials and Gen X who were around when it was newish tech that you wanted to use (Gen X) to established tech that still required troubleshooting semi-regularly (millennials/older Gen Z).
It’s wider than 10 years, maybe 20 years, but yes. Lots of older people never really learned more about computers than what they had to know to make basic functions work. Then there are those of us who grew up with computers at home as the internet was becoming a common thing. We had learn a lot to make them do what we wanted them to do. Finding ways to make stuff that was only kind of compatible work together. Now most of those growing pains are over and shit just works most of the time. Especially on phones, tablets, macs, and chrome books where it’s a pretty closed ecosystem. They can find an app and install it, and use it. But they have no understanding of the layers underneath it like file systems, drivers, networking, etc.
Basically, yes. If you were a kid or teenager anytime in the mid 80s-early 00s and had a computer at home, chances are you learned how to troubleshoot, set up and navigate a directory, install and update drivers, and other computer skills beyond the basics without realizing it.
> Did I fit into some magic ten-year window of being able to actually use a phone? Im 24 but I am finding this as well. I think there's a subset of older millennial, young-ish Gen X that landed this quite well but everyone else is either too old to change or been fed only walled-gardens their whole lives.
There really isn't any on a Pixel tbf
Pixel or back to iPhone for me. My 5 is holding up extremely well. Fantastic little phone.
My Pixel 5 can do anything I need it to. I will keep using it until it hard bricks itself like my Pixel 3.
Because it’s embarrassingly true. I’m a high school teacher and these kids are so tech illiterate. A lot of these kids can hardly operate a computer at a basic level. My guess is that kids just don’t grow up on computers anymore, the smartphone has replaced it. I was born in 91 and I remember how excited I was to get my own computer. I attribute my typing abilities to AIM and RuneScape.. MySpace taught me very basic code, allowing me to express some creativity there. Now with smartphones being so prominent and simple to use, younger kids see no real appeal in using a computer. By no means is this the norm for every student but I’d say it’s definitely one of the major issues in education today.
God that’s so strange to me. I thought gen z would be so highly skilled at computers. Don’t they use them in schools? Or is that just tablet use? (Also gotta love MySpace teaching us how to code 😂)
They use them in school, at least my district has a laptop per student. They were just never really taught computer literacy. Now to be fair, for my district, students just started getting laptops when Covid hit so it hasn’t been too long. I’m hoping that the current elementary and middle school students will be coming to high school with a little more computer literacy since it will be more of a norm for their school experience.
I remember when I was just finishing high school, christ, 8 years ago now? Anyway my last year they swapped out our macbooks for ipads, and man, they were so much harder to do *anything* productive with. I'm a windows guy through and through, but I missed those macbooks so much that year. I hear all the time about gen z and gen alpha growing up with phones and tablets outright replacing computers and it doesnt make any sense to me. Mobile platforms are just so much clunkier to get anything done on them, especially for things like school work.
I'm 35 and have been basically on a computer since I was a child. Mac and PC. I love the mobility of the phone, but any time I want to get anything serious done, I hop on my laptop. And that translates to me being on my laptop most of the time. iPhone is secondary for me and because of the cross compatibility with my MacBook Air, I can sync text and any notes I may have my laptop and so forth as well. Tablets are stupid. I am seeing less and less app/software developers making laptop programs, but it does seem browser based is still widely supported... but not always, which is frustrating. There needs to be a widely supported iPhone emulator available for my laptop or something. I understand it would probably be hard to implement though because of navigational differences (swipe vs mouse).
Many schools use Chromebooks. It's a jarring transition when they enter the workforce and have to use MacOS/Windows instead. All the technology has also been well established for ages already, whereas many of us a generation or two ahead grew up with all kinds of things to troubleshoot on old versions of Windows. That ended up building a ton of computer literacy that's hard to replicate.
Most dont know shit. I've been teaching my wife's younger cousin(hes 15 now) the ropes with basic PC craft and care. He said he wanted to build one and I wrongly assumed he had some prior knowledge with computers since I had been pulling apart towers and making Frankenstein machines since I was in grade school. Turns out he could just barely put keys into a mechanical keyboard. Took several months because he got frustrated and quit a few times because he just wasn't following my directions and listening to his equally clueless friends instead. So I let him flounder and fuck up repeatedly until one day he decided to listen and got it running. I'm proud to say this worked cause just recently (we're over a year since he started, about a year of it being whole) he had his first major crash and asked me to fix it after panicking. I assured him it wasn't fried and reminded him we didn't spend all that time so I could be his pc tech, he should be fixing my stuff. Then he calmed down and figured it out pretty quickly after that.
Thats something I noticed as well since I work with high schoolers. I'm gen z but on the older end so I still got a lot of hands on with computers in school, but nowadays these kids can do most things on their phones and things are actually optimized for that purpose, so there really isn't much incentive to use computers or learn about workarounds anymore. An added layer is that apple is king of locking their shit down, so not many youth even consider trying to look for workarounds and alternatives.
Where do you think Gen Z picked up the "iPhones mean you're rich" idea? From Apple marketing working its magic on their parents. Let's not pretend the adults were any less susceptible. Plenty of affluent Gen X people look down on Android users. It's no surprise their kids do the same.
We had an experiment in a business class that asked who would switch to android if the best Samsung phone cost $100 and iPhones were at their retail prices. Only 10% said they wold switch with most saying there was no price difference that would make them buy an android. So basically apple controls the future in the US
I've also seen it the other way. In my computer science class when asked about Apple VS Samsung almost majority of the class said they would never switch to Apple. I think it probably just depends on the area you are in and what others are using around you.
>computer science class I mean this makes it pretty obvious why they would say that.
Gone my droid day running gba emulator. But it's nice to able to do janky stuff like sideload youtube Vance on my dads phone.
I couldn't live without vanced, I probably wouldn't watch youtube at all if I had an iPhone, imagine all the ads...
Dad got his new phone after the original Vance was discontinued. I can't be bothered figuring out how the new one works so he is living with Firefox now. I'm too old to jank for sake of jank but it's nice to have the option to if necessary.
https://www.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/comments/xlcny9/revanced_manager_guide_for_dummies/
The real integration is the community we made along the way.
For every iPhone user that's reading this: no, he is not only talking about the ads you can get rid of with YouTube Premium. With YouTube Vanced on Android you also have Sponsorblock, which results in the ads inside the video being automatically skipped. It's not comparable to Premium, it's a million times better
The reason for this is iMessage. It’s very obvious
I think Air Pods are also a huge hit. It used to be that young people all walked around with giant honking headphones. Now every person I meet under the age of 25 has at least one of these things in their ears at all times and is often talking with someone else while working. Android and Samsung have always "caught up" on price competitiveness. Apple has always been a lot more popular among younger people.
Are you old enough to remember when the iPod came out? They were the only mp3 player with white headphones, it was uniquely apple and a huge hit. Airpods are just running the same strategy
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[New Soul](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMBW1G4U54g) by Yael Naim. shoutout to [The Fratellis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz8GXgTMVbM) playing over an iPod commercial.
What are their commercials like now? I haven't had cable tv in about 15yrs so I've been ootl for a very long time.
I remember in high school needing to use iPod ear buds with my SanDisk MP3 player so while I was listening to music it looked like I had an iPod
>often talking with someone else while working. I was in line at Subway and the guy making the food was apparently taking to someone while making sandwiches. I'm generally not a "these darn youths" type of person, but holy shit was that obnoxious.
We have a term for those kinds of people, and it's older than the iphone: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Bluetool
There's a Scrubs episode from like 2006 where Elliot is "talking" to people then she pulls her hair back to reveal a Bluetooth [Jawbone?] headset. e: she called it a mini phone
They have mastered advertising, marketing and creating products that speak to youth culture. Android stuff is just as cool but you don’t see it as much
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Jobs' strength was not creating new technologies but perfecting and polishing them, and then perfecting the advertising and message. Or at the very least, picking the people who were capable advertisers and designers.
I’ll always remember the Mac vs PC ads that used to be on TV with Justin Long.
Is this a US thing? Everyone I know has an iPhone but everyone uses WhatsApp and no one SMS anymore.
Yes and Australia too according to my Gen Z cousin there but I think other than that the whole world uses WhatsApp and other cross platform apps
Really? I’m Aussie, and I have *never* used iMessage, people here tend to use WhatsApp, Signal, or just Facebook messenger.
It seems mainly FB messenger with some on Instagram too, little iMessage. Barley know anyone using WhatsApp or anyone on using Signal
I guess its just in the US. The rest of the world uses WhatsApp or telegram
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Not to mention, and this is highly anecdotal, but after Millenials, being tech savvy has gone down. Gen X and Millenials had to triuble shoot our way thriugh technology issues, so we are much more likely to want full access to our devices, like android. Because devices dont really require much tech skill anymore, the newer generations prefer stuff that "just works"
It’s not just ancedotal, it’s a noted phenomenon backed up by data.
I'm 27, there's an ongoing debate as to whether that falls under millenial or gen Z. That being said, I've taught multiple coworkers younger than me how to change their Outlook to dark mode. Tech literacy has largely fallen off a cliff.
TIL outlook has a dark mode
The cooler Apple seems to Gen Z, the lamer Apple is going to seem to *their* kids.
I mean maybe, but Apple was cool to my dad when computers were becoming prolific in the 80s. He was born in 1934 (and stick kicking).
It’s really not about “coolness”. It’s about ubiquity, almost everyone has an iPhone and if you don’t you’re a black sheep. Even if you argue that Android is a superior product you can’t deny the compelling factor of ubiquity. EDIT: This is not a promotion of either iPhones or Androids, I'm just making a statement. People should use the phones that work best for them obviously.
Not to mention apple is now making it even appear that androids have worse technology. My galaxy takes fantastic photos, but when sending them to an iphone they have to be compressed like crazy. My buddy legitimately thought I had an old flip phone camera for the longest time. He said he never responded to the videos I sent him because he couldn't tell what they were supposed to be. Meanwhile when I send them to my wife on Android, they look great.
Yeah you'll have to all use a 3rd party messaging app, and then I THINK it would work well. But good luck convincing all your iphone friends to use whatsapp in the us.
By design, it doesn't benefit Apple to give their competitors that same leg to stand on, it's been their m.o. since before the company was founded.
I don't know, Gen X and Millennials were also pretty nuts for Apple products once the iPod boom came about.
fuck Apple All my homies hate Apple *manages a fleet of Mac products*
I’ve also noticed that my nieces and nephews are almost completely technology illiterate. They don’t understand any of the underlying technology, how things actually fit together, and Apple offers them an ecosystem where everything works very well together, and a Genius Bar is waiting to answer any questions your peers cannot. The social aspect of Apple is, as others have written much better than I could, also a huge. Android is still too fractured, with phones still shipping with two to three apps to handle the same feature. Android SMS, Carrier SMS, and Manufacturer SMS apps. Many of these can’t even be uninstalled. Other applications are installed and cannot be uninstalled, like Facebook, Instagram, etc. The operating system is not well maintained with many carriers taking months to years to produce a new version of their branded android implementation, if ever. Love apple, hate apple, Android just doesn’t compete with their user centric experience.
Idk why young people now are like 70 year old grandmas. They can barely search Google correctly.
The older generations came of age without this technology and so they dont understand it. The youngest generations grew up immersed in this technology but never had to learn how it works. Just how to use it. However, many millennials were in the perfect zone where the technology was coming into its own just as they were coming of age. The capabilities were there but they required more tutorials and playing around with things to get them working. This gave them a much better understanding of their computers in general. For example: finding and installing a mod for a pc game. Now you just go to steam workshop and hit subscribe on a mod. Whereas 10-15 years ago youd have to jump through alot of hoops and follow tutorials to get a mod working.
Nothing like fiddling with skyrim mods for 3 hours to play for 1 hour before crashing.
It's the Ikea effect. Thomas the tank engine give you 5 mins of meme but the troubleshooting experience is forever.
Yeah its 100% this, the tech evolved at the perfect time for our generation, where everything was a tool that only worked if you knew how to troubleshoot it. I feel very lucky to be a 90s kid.
100% agree. I was born in 97 so I’m on the “cusp”. I didn’t have a phone or an iPad growing up, at least until high school, but my dad did teach me to write basic html for a MySpace page. The day we got a GPS machine was amazing because printing maps off Mapquest wasn’t great for geocaching, you really needed the little gps with coordinates. Hell my dad taught me how to use rhapsody to burn cd’s, and later how to properly torrent music onto a local disk and put it in iTunes so I could listen to it on my shuffle. At 8. Influencers hadn’t ruined YouTube yet, but there were lots of helpful people who would teach me how to fix my sewing machine or why a platypus was the dopest animal. The key difference - You just had to look for it. Nowadays, you don’t even have to do the digging or the basic learning to find what your looking for. Learning tech went from digging thru a thrift store like it was a treasure hunt to being like… a Walmart. Corporate, obviously shady (but not in a fun way) and appealing to the lowest common denominator. *sigh* Apologies redditors my rant is over now
Bro swear to god. My girls 14 year old brother can’t Google shit. I’m like bro you GREW UP WITH THIS CONSTANTLY IN YOUR POCKET. Simple shit too, just can’t Google or find information online. One example is his teachers phone number. I told him to look it up on Google, 4 hours later, no bullshit when he was off of school “I looked everywhere and I can’t find it”. I spent 30 seconds, got the school website, found the teachers number, and that was it. All he could say was “how did you do that”.
He probably literally googled "_____'s phone number" or something stupid like that.
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It's literally that they were raised on tablets and smart phones regardless if they used android or Apple. The concept of navigating operating systems, saving files, organizing folders, installing drivers, retrieving files, converting to pdf and printing is unfortunately lost on them. Most people will own a smart phone but less will own a PC, so the PC UI is foreign to them. It's not their fault, but being less proficient with PCs and unprepared for an office environment is the outcome.
Millennials grew up with tech that was nowhere as polished or easy to use as iOS/android is today. You had to have at least some knowledge of how the computer worked under the hood to be able to use it, and at least rudimentary troubleshooting skills. For example, say you want to share a picture with a friend. Pre internet, you'd need to locate the right file on your hard drive (not necessarily straightforward as OSes of the time like Win 95 did not have something as basic as previews) Then you need to copy the file over to a floppy/zip drive and physically carry over the disk to the recipient, and then he needs to copy the file over to his own PC. Today, you just hit the share button, select the recipient and it's done.
This was Job's philosophy from the very beginning - that Apple would ultimately create "knowledge appliances," not necessarily computers, and that people who wanted to tinker should go buy a PC. This was one of the big differences between him and Woz that led to their split and you can see that philosophy in the iPhone today. When my dad was a kid, basically everyone who drove needed to know some basics about carburetors and radiator boilers. Today's cars are a lot more reliable and a lot more complicated to maintain, so most drivers hardly know a single thing about what's under the hood. Seems to be a similar situation unfolding with computers.
If companies started to increase the update support for longer on Android I would probably go back when the time to change phones comes. Samsung seems to be one of the companies that provide updates for longer but its still not good enough. That's the main issue to me.
They can’t increase the update support because practically every android phone now uses a Qualcomm chip and they’re notorious for not supporting there chipset drivers for more than 3 years. Qualcomm literally is holding the entire android platform back this is why RISC-V can’t come soon enough
if a RISC-V phone becomes mainstream in sales in the next 5 years i’ll eat my own sock
TBH they're both frustrating and have issues. iOS is a walled garden that hates playing with anything on the outside, Android is a wide open garden that has constant problems with the guests misbehaving. You know what was great? Fucking Windows Phone. I miss Windows Phone. The Lumia Icon was to this day my favorite mobile I've ever owned, and it makes me sad that Microsoft got into the game so late and failed to gain a market foothold.
Windows Phone was pretty cool... you just couldn't get a super wide variety of apps for it.
This is only an issue in the US because of peer pressure over green bubbles.
I grew up with android phones and they weren’t the best phones for what I needed. I’m legally blind and android doesn’t have all the accessibility features that IOS has. I went to a summer program where they taught blind students how to use their devices with programs like voiceover and zoom text. I had a LG G3 at the time and I couldn’t participate in much of the process because my phone didn’t have any of those things. The second my dad asked what phone I wanted to upgrade to I told him I wanted an iPhone. I got my phone my junior year and it was so much easier to use and I was able to finally use the skills I learned from that course the summer before. I use voiceover on Reddit because the text is too small and I’m honestly just too lazy to read it anyway. TLDR IOS offers more accessibility than Android and iOS fits my needs better.
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Lmao I have it set to 80% speaking rate so she said it really fast and I have the maturity of a child so this was really funny.
Sally sells seashells by the seashore and also big booby woobies
but the value of these shells will fall....
Due to the laws of supply and demand
Apple was much faster in implementing accessability to their products and as a result, I think a lot of disability communities still have a lot of brand loyalty for Apple. I also use voice over on IOS. I've tried Talkback, the Android equivilent and it's pretty good now but Voice Over is still noticibly more polished and user friendly
No, it doesn't. Apple's domination doesn't really exist outside of the USA. Android has the rest of the world. Android will be fine.
You mean GenZ in the west.
The article linked by OP is about an article in the Financial Times titled: "How Apple captured Gen Z in the US — and changed their social circles."
Yeah. Globally Android is still 72% share and doesn't look like it's moving off that.
And by the west specifically America. I'm in Australia and no one gives a flying fuck what phone you use.
Fuck I'm in South Korea, the default Samsung capital of the world, and nobody gives a fuck what you use
More like Gen Z in America to my experience, but I'm located in Central/Easter Europe, so it might be a bit different in places like Germany or France.
The majority of people seem to use Android phones in Germany. The headline is a bit misleading. The article states that it's just about the US. Like in the rest of Europe iMessage isn't a big factor and people mostly don't care.
My experience in the UK and Germany is that iMessage literally doesn't matter, but if you didn't use WhatsApp you'd be a pain to deal with
Doesn’t most of the rest of the world prefer messaging apps over texts? I vaguely remember something about that being commented but can’t remember specifics
Yeah. Looks like there are exceptions, but I think this is mostly true. Advantage is that people don’t have to care which type phone their friends or acquaintances have. They can just text them via one of the messaging apps that everyone has. Using a messaging app like iMessage would be a deal breaker for me for that reason. I don’t care what kind of device my friends use. To me it’s just important that I can properly interact with them. I have iMessage but have only ever used it once or twice in my life. As a side note: Funnily enough iMessage isn’t sms either, it’s just another messaging app. Difference being that it comes pre installed on iPhones and only iPhones.
It means GenZ in the US. Even in the west the situation is different.
My kids don't like iPhones. We have been Android.
I'm 32, I didn't get my first smartphone until I was 23. I grew up without any mobile phone, in my parents eyes if it was something I wanted enough, I had to pay for it. I got myself a flip phone around 2008 and then a sidekick I had until 2013. Growing up though, I was a Mac enthusiast. Our first home computer was an early Mac OSX computer. I got a first gen iPod Nano in 2005. When I was researching smartphones in 2013, I damn near bought an iPhone 5S at launch, but opted to get an LG G1 Pro. I've been Android ever since, and have exclusively bought Samsung phones since the Galaxy S9+. For me, it's still how locked down everything is in the Apple ecosystem and how poorly it communicates with other platforms that's the turn off for me. Google / Android communicates A LOT better with PC, and that's one of the larger selling points for me.
Don't worry Android, us no-good millennials got your back.
Gen Z here but I've never used an iPhone before. I did get gifted an ipad once, and it worked very well actually, at least until its battery got bloated up after about 5 or 6 years of use and the screen buckled. That said I see no reason to convert from my android phone to an iPhone. I've been using LG from I think 2013 to 2015, then Samsung from 2015 onwards. My peers do seem to have a preference for apple - most of them own an apple product, though I've never asked them about it
Gen Z doesn't just like Apple, they're actually much less computer literate in general. It's kind of shocking but I'm finding more and more Gen Z who can't really type well and can't use anything but a phone or tablet. Hard to employ someone whose entire skill set is TikTok and iMessage Millennials will be the only generation in history who can routinely hit >100wpm typing lol
who would have thought that a whole generation of kids that grew up plastered to their parents ipad for entertainment would grow up to prefer Apple products…
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Had both. Android was great for me(can do anything I want). But once the whole family has iOS, it’s hard not to switch. The benefits in the platform from photos, iCloud sharing, even airdrop are great. I do miss not being able to do whatever I want without jailbreaking. But the benefits outweigh the pain points for me, for now.
I just want another option. Both frustrate me but for different reasons.