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Notes -
Some thoughts about online political ads:
For the last couple months pretty much all of the ads I get on YouTube have been political. I figure this time of year must be a ripe harvest for Google in terms of ad revenue. Maybe it can buoy them through the recent drop in tech stocks.
Interestingly enough, every single ad I've gotten that mention abortion has been strongly pro-choice. I've strongly pro-life myself, and for most of these ads the effect is that I now know who to vote for (namely, the person they're warning me against). This is a very useful service because all the Republican candidates are keeping their stance on abortion on the down low. It often isn't even listed as an issue on their official campaign website, I have to google around until I can find some interview where they were asked about it in order to learn their stance. The Democrats are definitely making this an abortion centered campaign, and the Republicans are trying to keep their heads down. For someone like myself, who will not vote for a pro-choice candidate, it means I have to do a lot more legwork.
Also interesting is that I saw the same ad more than a dozen times (which is normal) when I suddenly realized that the names in the ad were different every time. Turns out they are cycling through every Republican running for the state legislature, slotting each name in for "If X gets elected, women will have to travel out of state to access reproductive healthcare." It occurred to me that online it can be difficult to tell what district a viewer is in, so I guess you have to have a shotgun approach.
Though for all the abortion focused ads, I did notice none of them actually say the word "abortion": it's always "reproductive rights" or "women's health." The most notable euphemism I heard also happened to be the only time I think I've seen genuine "dog whistle" in the wild: a candidate declared (along a list of other issues) that they would preserve our "constitutional privacy rights". Excellently manufactured so that anyone who cares about the abortion debate will hear "I am pro-choice" while the average voter who doesn't care about abortion doesn't hear it at all. So, ads are big on abortion but mostly wants to talk to the base.
Which is the other odd thing: ads like this are meant for pro-choice voters. It does nothing good for them for a staunch pro-lifer like me to see them. Yet I did see one openly pro-life online ad this election season, and it was on my wife's computer! My wife, who is much more moderate on the issue than I am. Even curiouser, this ad was on a probably-not-quite-legal manga scan-lation site. How and why are pro-life ads ending up on a manga website? Don't manga readers skew female? Doesn't YouTube's audience skew male? I had assumed I was only getting pro-choice ads because most people online lean left, but now I'm not so sure.
I always have to ask... in this day and age, why do people volunatarily still watch ads on YouTube? While it has given you fodder for an interesting post, simply using UBlock, or Brave, or any one of the dozens of other ways to block Youtube ads is a really easy way to upgrade your quality of life to a surprising degree.
iOS has no on-device ability to block ads. Yes, you can do it if you set up a custom VPN, but that's work and added expense.
Android has several, including NewPipe and the fact that Firefox actually runs natively there (and as such uBlock works), but their devices are twice as expensive, get vanishingly few updates, and their top-end processors are 4 years behind what is available in an iPhone for half the price.
So you're stuck with an expensive boat-anchor or a nice device with ads; I don't begrudge the latter their choice.
I suspect that most people don't need a flagship phone, though. And if you're just using your phone to browse the Web, well, $250 gets you an Android 6a, which is about on-par with an iPhone 10 and also you can block ads.
Frequent updates, too, you're just wrong about that one.
No, not really. iPhones tend to enjoy 6-7 years of major updates; the next runner up is 3-4 for Google (and to an extent, Samsung), and shorter than that for everyone else (almost like they're optimizing for the case where you to buy a new phone when your term is up). And since the phones themselves are significantly more powerful, they remain more useful over that time.
Also, for 200 bucks, I can get a second-gen SE, which will be supported for longer than the Pixel 6A, and it's still faster (being an iPhone 11 inside). Apart from Apple mobile CPU design is still lacking; too bad there was only one PA Semi to buy out.
Sure, you have support after the fact provided you have an unlocked bootloader, where you just don't with iOS devices, but that's still more work and far from guaranteed anyone will bother (though I suppose if you buy a Pixel it's less of a concern than it is if you buy something from, well, Samsung, since community support is better on devices that aren't actively hostile to developers getting other things to work on them). Maybe they've improved over the years, though.
OK, first of all, length of updates is not the same as frequency of updates. You've shifted the goalposts there. But, even on that front, 3-4 years is plenty sufficient length of updates for most users (who tend to get a new phone every 2 years). So yeah, the iPhone is theoretically better here, but not in a way that actually makes a difference for most people.
Similarly, your point about CPU power is irrelevant for most people. I haven't had a phone where the CPU mattered in about 10 years or so. It is a solved problem these days. Phones don't do much - you dick around on the internet, and you watch some videos, and call/text people. You don't need much of a CPU to do that. So again, you're correct that iPhones are theoretically better, but you're incorrect that it actually makes a difference to most people.
Honestly, you're entitled to your preference for an iPhone if that's your thing. I would never use one but different strokes for different folks. But your arguments in favor of that position are not very good, and your initial description of Android devices ("expensive boat-anchor") is just an insane hyperbole that has no basis in reality. Use what you want, and stop dissing perfectly good devices with poor arguments.
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