Why did you buy an iPhone?

[MandoPanda]

[dalekphalm]

3 hours ago, MandoPanda said:

Well at least that "Let's keep it 50/50" bullshit failed

[MrSpiral]

Hi, Linus and everyone else. I'm new to this forum but a longtime fan of the YT channel and the information it imparts; I just had to register and jump in on this thread, because my loyalty to Apple phones/tablets and iOS revolves around a use case that will hopefully provide a bit of extra insight as to why at least one small percentage of the iOS user community is so loyal to the platform.

 

I regard smartphones as computers that you can also make calls with, and I pay large sums for them because I expect to be able to get a lot of real work done with them. I'm an audio professional, and when I say 'work', I mean handling music, which requires incredibly tight and stable flow of audio and MIDI (control) data with reliable and consistent timing and as little buffering/latency as possible. The human eye can be fooled into thinking that sixty (or even thirty) photos per second is equivalent to seeing something happen in real time, but the untrained human ear can easily spot timing jitter measured in fractions of a millisecond. Audio is hard, really hard, to get right... and iOS devices have audio nailed down tight. Because iOS' CoreAudio protocol for handling audio is baked in at the kernel level, there are no third-party device drivers or software specs for handling these types of data. You do it Apple's way or you don't do it at all, and that means it always just works.

 

Yes, yes, I know: there goes Apple again, with the walled garden and the my-way-or-the-highway decrees from on high... but in the music industry, we have decades of evidence showing what happens if this stuff is left to competing third parties, and it ain't pretty. Driver conflicts and inconsistent applications lead to unreliable audio performance, and for a professional worrying about delivering music to paying clients in good time with no compromise in quality, the possibility of maybe getting one's system wrenched for slightly better throughput often isn't worth the risk of not being able to deliver at all. Apple remembered the horrible problems creatives had with conflicting driver standards in System 7/8/9, and that's why this stuff was baked into OS X... and iOS, which has been a specialized subset of OS X since Day One.

 

When dealing with music data, Android is—to put it very, very politely—a steaming cesspool of fail. A few truly determined manufacturers like IK Multimedia have created hardware/software ecosystems with drivers that work well, but step outside their little walled gardens and you sink into the mire pretty quickly. The only really reliable music workflow on Android is using web-based apps to remote-control things like digital audio mixers, but moving a knob is far more forgiving of a couple dozen milliseconds' latency than trying to record or play music in real time. Meanwhile, iOS stuff just works, clean and fast, tight and solid, every time.

 

My first iPhone was a 5 that I got about six years ago, and I still use it for live shows and studio work today. My iPhone 6S has gone on stage with me at festivals from Arcosanti to Helsinki and has never let me down. My original iPad 1 (!) is still in my studio, running apps that were orphaned by the move to 64 bits with iOS 11, and shows no signs of conking out; ditto my iPad mini 4 and my first-gen iPad Pro. I sold my iPad Air 2 last year for a percentage of its original cost that would have most Android tablet buyers shaking their heads in disbelief.

 

Other folks on this thread have touched on reasons why I rely on these devices every day—security, reliability, longevity, connectivity, blah blah—but the fact that their tightly integrated software and OS allow me to leave my Mac and PC laptops at home when I go out to play music, and worry far less about crashes than with either other platform, will keep me loyal to the iOS ecosystem for years to come... because even if the newest devices don't have a damn headphone jack (WHY, for God's sake?!), my old ones will keep on cranking for a long time yet. (The fact that all my Macs are from 2013 or earlier is a topic for another thread, thank you very much.)

 

I know that my use case is way out in left field. Still and all, I'm running a multitrack recording and live performance software rig, all controllable via multitouch UI, that wasn't even possible on a $2000 computer (Mac OR Windows) seven years ago, as a part of my everyday career. I own and use and love iOS devices because they can do that stuff for me reliably and never let me down. I consider them to be no more and no less than Apple computers—and like my other Apple computers, I spent good money on them and expect them to do great work for a long time. So far, I haven't been disappointed.