By John Joy ’18, Contributor
In the words of the rapper Drake: “Oh man, oh man, oh man.” The Android VS Apple debate, the race war of the modern world. I probably know what you’re thinking right now: “Someone let the world’s most biased Android fan boy out of his cage and he’s about to spew a bunch of crap about Big-little processing cores, CS to CMD latency and 2133 to 3200 M/Ts signaling.” To the three of you who managed to make it through those words without feeling the sudden urge to jump off a building, I won’t be talking about the performance of the hardware whatsoever in this elongated rant. Surprisingly, the first difference between the two ecosystems that I’ll cover is the virtually limitless hardware combinations that come with Android and the gigantic sum of 2 hardware combinations that Apple provides its clients. While I could go on for days on why I think this alone forever proves the superiority of the Android Master Race compared to the subhuman iOS sheep, I also invested way too much of my life into figuring out what hardware combinations work and what combinations don’t. Buying an iPhone is similar to ordering food at In-n-out Burger: you more or less choose how large you want your phone to be, and voilà you’re done. Buying an Android phone is closer to ordering a pizza at a made-to-order place. You choose your crust (flagship phone, last year’s flagship, a potato clock with a screen), after that you need to choose your sauce (aluminum body, upgradeability, a pink body you’ll regret in a week). Before even figuring out who makes your phone, you’ve already seen more options than Apple has provided on every iPhone since Steve Job’s stole all the credit for it.
Continuing on with the In-And-Out Burger vs made-to-order pizza analogy, it’s nearly impossible to mess up the spec of iPhone whereas it’s almost an inevitability that you’ll mess something up figuring out what Android phone to get. Other than the weird reception errors on some early iPhone 4s’s and screens that seem to have the durability of a saltine cracker, my family is yet to have a problem with their iPhones. I cannot say the same about the miscellaneous Android phones I’ve had throughout the years. My Samsung GS4 decided that it didn’t want to have an operating system a year into ownership and instead wanted to live out its life as small plastic brick. After that my HTC one with its famous “built in beats by Dre” apparently didn’t like the music I listened to so it snapped the AUX jack in half and stopped recognizing its speakers about a year into its disappointing life. At the price of innovation and competition, by being the sole developer and manufacture of IOS devices they have produce a very consistent and reliable phone. Going back to the food analogies yet again, an iPhone is like a cheese pizza: serious effort is require to make one taste bad. Although the iPhone 5 proved Apple was willing to put the effort in—not to mention everyone and their dog knows how to make one. Yet there are few, if any award winning cheese pizzas; they’ll never be anything more than “fine, but nothing special.” An Android phone is like a pizza with white parmesian sauce, a two-ingredient crust, fresh mozzarella, bell peppers and salami aribiata. 90% of these pizzas are going to taste like garbage, and almost nobody on earth carries white parmesian sauce. Yet the other 10% that don’t taste unlike anything you’ve ever experienced become a new benchmark for anything food related.
Lastly it’s time to talk about software, that weird series of 1s and 0s that control the terminator and never seem to work. Moving away the iOS operating system is harder to screw up than a bike with train wheels. It’s clean and simple, but the form follows function. You more or less see what you get the first time you boot up your phone. IOS is to a pig what Android is to a race horse; just like how you wouldn’t try to race in the Kentucky derby with a pig, you wouldn’t want delete the entire OS on an iPhone and continue to update your phone even when your manufacturer forgets it exists. Sure you could try to race through the weird horse-pig gene-splicing that is jail breaking your phone, but your limited to what one underpaid teenager can make in their free time compared to what a team of thousands of highly paid professionals do for a living. While a racehorse can compete when it matters, that doesn’t mean they can’t be a complete pain when the conditions aren’t perfect. You can’t just tell a racehorse to do something without any experience. Before you can even form the necessary bond, you need years of training and be willing to devote hours of your time to learn its quirks.
I’d like to close this convoluted mess of awful metaphors with this: The whole iPhone experience is similar to taking a regular class over an honors class; it’s easier to do that the alternative and yields results that are more than enough for most people. The Android experience is taking every honors class you can, working 6 hours when you get home every day and questioning if it’s worth it or not a 2:00 A.M. before you go to bed. But the feeling of gratification you get every time you talk to your college counselor, every time you get an A on a test you spent eons studying on answers that question. And the answer is always yes.
