Full disclosure, I'm anything but brief. Fully understand if you aren't looking to read a novella about a phone. Apologies in advance. TLDR at the bottom.

Some quick history. I've primarily used Android phones since they were released. My first smart phone was an OG Moto Droid on Verizon. Through the years I've had Android phones from Motorola, HTC, LG, and Samsung. My most recent phone was a Samsung Galaxy S20. I did own an iPhone 4s as well, until a mild fall destroyed the screen. I'm not remotely brand loyal, and don't feel any particular strong attachment toward an OS either.

My motivation to switch to an iPhone after over a decade with Android phones was pretty simple. I was bored with Android. I think both OS's are at a point where changes are becoming far more incremental, and there's significantly less overhaul. I'd chalk this up as a good thing, as I remember how frustrating many of the early versions of Android and iOS could be. However, as a consumer I was starting to feel the stagnation, and wanted to change things up.

My S20 was starting to feel sluggish, and I was constantly bombarded with iPhone evangelicals going on and on about how superior of a product they had, so I figured the release of the 14 series was a good opportunity to change things up.

First the pros:

My first impressions were great. The hardware has a very premium feel. I've always preferred the flat squared off edges of iPhone screens to Samsung's rounded edges, so I was happy to experience that as well. The phone is incredibly fast, which is to be expected, but it really showed off compared to my 3 year old S20.

One aspect of the S20 that stood the test of time was the screen. The 120hz high resolution OLED on the S20 was always a standout, and as most of you know, once you experience 120hz, you cant go back to 60hz. It's rather baffling that the non pro iPhones still don't offer 120hz, but I have no doubt that's a strategic move by Apple to push the pro models. The screen on the 14 pro max looks fantastic. The 120hz is smooth as silk, and paired with Apples legendary animations, the experience is really second to none. Even compared to a Pixel 7 pro, the iPhone still feels smoother when navigating around. This is likely a personal preference thing, but out of the box, my phone with True Tone turned on had a noticeably yellow hue to it. Full disclosure, I'm quite colorblind, so this is likely my own eyes playing tricks, but turning that off dramatically improved the look of everything for me.

The battery life is also ridiculous. I've heard the 14 pro max doesn't live up to the 13 pro max, but compared to my old S20, and basically every phones my friends and family own, it runs laps. I can go all day, with only having my phone plugged in while driving, and end the day comfortably at over 90%, which is insane. I'm a pretty heavy user too, streaming music throughout the day, and decently high social media use, with average screen on time of around 5 hours, so this is crazy impressive in my opinion.

Apps. This one is pretty much universally known at this point, so I wont harp on it too much, but it is pretty clear that apps in general seem to be better optimized for iPhones than Android. It's pretty much a better experience across the board, with very few exceptions if any. I'm a heavy Google user (maps, home, gmail, photos, etc.) and even those apps seem to run just as well on my iPhone as they did on my Android. Also, Apple specific apps like the Wallet seem to be better implemented than something like Google Pay. I use the Wallet app all the time. I almost never used Google Pay.

The camera. This is another universally known feature at this point too. The camera is excellent. It's near instantaneous to use, the photos look fantastic, editing is quick and easy, Pro Raw is a cool feature I'm far too inexperienced to get any value out of, but I appreciate anyway, the low light performance is insanely good, video in HDR is incredible, and swapping between zoom levels is extremely smooth too. There's almost nothing I can think that I don't enjoy or like about the camera. Across the board, it's been a great experience, and provides great quality.

Face ID. Holy crap is this nice. Crazy fast, very secure, and you can use it for basically anything. Love Love Love. Fingerprints are dumb now.

Now the Mid stuff (These aren't inherently negative, just areas where I think things could be improved):

Dynamic Island. This is fine. I thought it would be cooler, and I'd utilize it more than I do. I also don't understand why I need to long press on the island to get the small menu to pop up, as opposed to just tapping on it which brings up the entire app. Seems these should be reversed. It's fine overall. Definitely nothing overtly negative about it, just not as ground breaking as I was hoping.

iMessage... This one may even be a con, but I'm admittedly still learning. I've heard time and time again how incredible iMessage is, and how Android users really ruin the experience, and blah blah blah. I gotta say, I don't get the hype. Google Messages has a ton of the same features, and works better across platforms for pics, video, etc., than iMessage. Sure memoji or Animoji or whatever are cute and fun, and after day three I've used them zero times. My family and friend group is a mix of Android and iPhone users, and in mixed company, Google Messages is so vastly superior, they're not even in the same ballpark anymore. The fact that I cant customize group chat names, and I have to send pics and videos through MMS is inexcusably bad. I have yet to find some redeeming feature that iMessage offers that isn't available either at an equivalent experience, or often times, a superior experience on Google Messages, Signal, or WhatsApp. Hell, even Facebook messenger sends multimedia in higher quality across platforms. Giving iMessage the benefit of the doubt, it's entirely possible I'm missing something. I'd love to hear from experienced users what is so incredible about this app. Oh, one more thought. I cant stand that whatever I decided to name a group chat with other iMessage users, it names the group chat for them too.

Apple Carplay. I love the look of Carplay. The layout is excellent, and it seems far more intuitive to me than Android Auto. When it works, its awesome. It also seems to be riddled with bugs, and is an inconsistent mess. Time and time again, I'll plug my phone in when I start up my car, and Carplay will appear on my cars list of icons, and clicking on it will bring up nothing. I'll have to unplug the phone, and replug it in to get anything to show up. I'm not sure why, but apart from Apple Maps, both Google Maps and Waze will appear to be totally frozen or timed out, and there isn't a clear way to get them working without going into my actual phone to manually open them. I'm assuming this is iOS simply putting certain apps to sleep after a certain timeframe of not being used, and there's probably some menu I can access to change this, but it's not entirely obvious what the solution is, and as a consumer this is frustrating. Lastly, and most frustratingly, approximately half the time I go to open Spotify in Carplay, and select a song, it will inexplicably play the song through my phone, and not through my cars speakers. This is maddening, and I cannot figure out how to fix it, as the problem isn't consistent, and I haven't nailed down what the variables are to cause it. The worst part, is that the only fix I've found, is to manually restart my phone (and even then, it hasn't fixed the issue 100% of the time)

Now the Cons:

Customization. I knew going into this that customization was Androids thing, and that was a change I'd need to be ok with. Apple has seemed to push more and more customization in their presentations though, so I thought I wouldn't be missing too much. I was wrong. Even something as simple as having apps available to move to lower rows isn't possible. I don't know why iOS insists on defaulting apps to the top rows, especially considering how big phones are. Why it wont allow you to do something as simple as filling in a screen from the bottom is a total mystery. Widgets are nice, but are miles behind Android. I don't want to have to download multiple third party apps to get the same functionality built in by default with Android. Also, the app library? WTF is that? The grouping seems random at best, and the groups seem to jump around on occasion totally ruining any flow or habit forming. What a wildly dumb idea.

Settings fits into this as well. Again, I wasn't expecting the depth offered by Android, but it's not even in the same realm. Android has plenty of issues with consistency and settings layouts depending on which manufacturer they use, but they've been improving this aspect, and the lack of intuitive settings in iOS can drive me nuts on occasion. Basic stuff is laid out very nicely, and is easy enough to navigate, but finding specific settings to change can be rough. Even searching is inconsistent.

Always on display. This is a stupid implementation. To be blunt, I don't give a shit about my background showing up dimly lit. Show me the basics. Time, date, notifications, battery. That's it. I have it turned off. Make it simpler Apple. Android has had this figured out for years.

Autocorrect. This legitimately sucks compared to Android. I've never had so many typos in my life, and some of the words Apple assumes I'm typing out seem to be 100% randomly selected. It's so unintuitive, and will inexplicably "correct" something multiple times despite me retyping it and selecting the correct word I want. The keyboard falls into this as well. Why is there no punctuation on the default keyboard? Why on earth do I need to go into a second menu to select a comma? I don't need a dedicated emoji button. The space bar, and return do not need to take up as much real estate as they do. Shrink them down even a little, and throw in a period or comma.

NOTIFICATIONS! Holy hell this is so bad. So SO bad. I don't understand how Apple users haven't revolted over this. It's entirely possible the majority simply have no idea what they're missing. I've tried every which way to set up my notifications, and will still consistently miss things coming in. If I don't seem them when they immediately pop up, it's likely I will simply miss them until I go into the app. I always found it mildly annoying that Apple users would sometimes take days to reply to a message or an email, but I get it now. I've been in the same boat. It's an awful system, and there is no excuse for it to be this bad in 2022. Why can't there be small icons across the top bar to show me new and unread texts or emails? I've missed multiple important emails because I simply dont know they've arrived in my inbox. I've put them on high alert, time sensitive, you name it, and nothing. I also don't understand why I cant simply have the icon on the home screen display a simple dot or a number of new notifications like they've had on Android since the dawn of time. I'm not going to notice a new email to my primary inbox when the option is either have no notification on the app at all, or have 30,156 emails that includes the unread and promotional junk. The notification pull down is laughably bad. To add to this the layout of the other pull down screen that shows you the flashlight, Wi-Fi, etc. is also poorly implemented. I'm begging you Apple, just copy Android for both those features, which again, have been around for years and years. This feature alone makes it likely I'll make the switch back to Android, it's that bad.

Bugs in general. I've seen this repeated my normal iPhone users as well, so I don't feel like I'm crazy, but man iOS releases seem to have had a lot of bugs. It's mostly small weird things, and multiple software updates seem to have solved them, but the initial experience was not good. Carplay is still a mess for me, and I'm not sure what the solution is apart from sit and wait. I'm hoping future releases will have more stability, and fewer issues. Apple is know for "it just works" but I have yet to see much evidence of that.

*Honorable mention*

Apple Watch. Damn this thing is nice, and it is so well implemented with my phone. Android is miles behind the curve on this one. While notifications may push me back to Android, the Apple Watch may keep me around.

Conclusion/TLDR

Overall, I highly enjoy my iPhone. It has great hardware, a fantastic screen, and ridiculously good battery life. It's incredibly fast, smooth, and very consistent after a few software updates. The apps all work wonderfully (apart from Carplay), and the internal apps like Health, Wallet, and others are wonderful to use. The camera is fantastic. The Apple Watch is also incredible. It's to the point now where after a couple months, I don't notice big differences anymore between iOS and Android (apart from some major issues with autocorrect and notifications), but the day to day experience is overall awesome. I'm desperately hoping they can improve areas like notification, fix the Carplay nonsense, and keep improving the keyboard, and autocorrect, but overall, I'm incredibly happy with my purchase.