my first iPhone

Tomorrow, my first iPhone arrives. I’m excited and dubious, in equal parts. I’ve used and loved Android phones, Android tablets, and Android Wear watches for more than ten years now, starting with my beloved HTC Hero in 2009.

But Google can’t commit. They let products die slow, agonizing deaths. I loved my first Android Wear watch, a second gen Moto 360. By the time the watch died after several years of everyday use, Moto had quit making watches, and more importantly, Wear OS was neglected and languishing with no meaningful support from Google. I loved my Nexus 7 tablet, but today’s Android tablets just seem underwhelming and overpriced. I’ve been a devoted Nexus and Pixel phone owner for multiple generations now—but the latest iPhones do look pretty great. I have a MacBook, I have an iPad… maybe it would be nice to just be in a consistent, cohesive ecosystem?

Besides, I’m getting more and more itchy about the amount of information Google has on me. I became annoyed enough about Gmail that I started paying for a non-Google email account this year. I’m not attempting a complete breakup with Google—that isn’t even anything I can reasonably do, given our home integrations and my work Google Suite, not to mention Google’s propensity for buying other products I’m using, like Nest and Fitbit. It’s not that I think Apple is better than Google somehow. I don’t. But Apple wants to sell me products. With Google, maybe they will sell me the product I want! Or maybe they’ll kill it! In either case, with Google services, I am the product. And I’m just kind of tired of all of that.

So my iPhone gets here tomorrow, and I’ll spend the next couple of weeks figuring out if I can live with the tradeoffs. Is a consistent ecosystem better than, for example, being able to deeply customize my phone, even down to the launcher? I mean, here’s my current phone’s home screen:

I am super happy with this home screen! So, we’ll see, I guess. For now, I’m going to lean into Apple and see what it’s got to offer.