Again, I want to remind you that a $1,000 phone winning against a $150 phone is not a victory at all. The iPhone should have absolutely kerb-stomped mine. The fact that it is even competitive is the point I am trying to make.

You can visualise a sort of bell curve of battery life. My phone is probably somewhere around the 30-40th percentile (and note that a 90th percentile phone is not 2× better, it’s probably only 50% better). A bit worse than average but not terrible. It’s a cheap phone, after all.

But the issue is that (new) Apple phones I presume are placing consistently around the 60th percentile, which is good and better than average. The issue is that you’re paying 80th-percentile prices for 60th-percentile performance. That is the point I’m trying to make. It’s relative performance to price, not absolute performance. These numbers are made up but illustrate the point I’m trying to make.

If the iPhone were priced at $400-500, it’d be an excellent value and I would recommend it to a lot more people. That’s what I feel a comparable Android would cost. Maybe it could go up to $550 since Apple products do have better build quality and the Apple ecosystem, but at $700 for the latest base model iPhone 14, I think it’s just not delivering the value for money compared to Android phones. Of course, that’s my opinion. I make decisions based on hardware. Others may make decisions based on the fact that they like the iOS experience and the ecosystem it provides, or even because they just like using Apple products. And yes, the fact that Apple products are of consistently above-average quality does count for something.

I’m not attacking you if you own an iPhone and like it, and I don’t judge you for it. I will criticise Apple though, because I feel that Apple is short-changing their customers on the technical side by providing mediocre hardware for not-mediocre prices.