Long story short, despite swearing up and down that I was going to run my 15PM until the wheels fell off, I caved and ordered an iPhone 17 Pro Max (in GameCube Orange, no less) after running the numbers, looking at things, and realizing I can do this with effectively little cost to myself.
I do also realize I said I was done giving Apple money for the near term because of their...kinda troublesome behavior. I went back on my word, and I don't really know what to say other than I acknowledge this and if you want to call me weak-minded for it, I completely understand. I also wish I had better self control because this is one of those times where my brain is just so ridiculously done with something that if I see an opportunity to get out, I'm taking it.
A screed about Android
I'll lay out my rationale and such in a sec, but one of the things I wanted to take a second and talk about is, well, why not Android? Because I've been flirting with the idea of just...leaving the Apple ecosystem as a whole. For the longest time, I justified sticking with Apple because while I disliked Apple, I simply disliked Google more. (I know, the irony of this blog being hosted on a Google service isn't lost on me. But hey, can't beat free.)
With Apple's moves as of late, that dislike almost reached equilibrium, and I was openly talking about my next phone being an Android of some sort.
And then Google whipped out a Redeemer, aimed it squarely at their feet and pulled the trigger.
I'm an Android OG. I've been on and off the platform since all we had was T-Mobile and the G1, and none of us were sure Android had any staying power. I lived through the glory days of when we'd have to flash custom ROMs because Android updates? Yeah, you'd be lucky if you even got a single one because manufacturers sucked ass at post-launch support.
Unsurprisingly, I was pissed when Google started beating us over the head with SafetyNet (now known as Play Integrity). It felt like a betrayal to those of us who stuck by Android from the beginning, enjoying it even though its future was not necessarily guaranteed. SafetyNet was more sinister than anything Apple could do, because at least jailbroken iPhones never lost Apple Pay, and while some apps would detect jailbreaks, you could work around them, at least until the next update for that app (if it made any tweaks to the detection methods).
SafetyNet is all server-side, so Google could stealth update it and you'd have no idea anything was wrong until an app you use would no longer launch, or Google Wallet/Pay/Whatever they're calling it this week would stop working out of nowhere. This made the cat and mouse game with SafetyNet extremely volatile, and if I were to hazard a guess, this caused less people to root.
SafetyNet would also be updated to become more strict. Originally it only triggered if you were rooted. Eventually, it was updated so that even the presence of an unlocked bootloader would be enough to trigger it. Ick. As if that wasn't bad enough? Core functionality is lost if SafetyNet is triggered! Because you'll be locked out of RCS until it's happy.
*deep breath*
Back to the present: As if Play Integrity's current form wasn't enough of a slap in the face, requiring sideloading apps to be signed by Google is the ultimate betrayal to those of us who appreciate Android for being a mobile OS that can be tweaked and changed to our heart's content. It takes Android from being a true opposition to Apple, and instead turns Android into iOS but with a fun mascot (that I'm surprised hasn't been killed off, yet).
It's bad enough that at least poking around threads in /r/Android it felt like an alarming amount of people who would otherwise never consider iOS were now thinking about jumping ship.
As such, with this move and until Google walks it back (if they ever walk it back, that is), Android is dead to me.
I really wish we still had a third competitor in this space, I really do. Choosing a phone these days feels like being stuck between a rock and a hard place because there's iOS and...iOS, Made by Google Edition, Now With More AI. Both kinda suck, but one to me is way less sucky than the other, especially with Apple having seemingly learned their lesson from last year and having AI take a backseat this year.
(Hell, I just miss the presence of there being more high-end options on the Android side for you to choose from. At least here in the US, for top-end, well-supported phones, you're between Samsung and Google and both really feel like two sides of the same coin. Motorola and OnePlus are kinda out there somewhere but I'm not much a fan of either, at least not in the way I was for, say, HTC. There's also Nothing but far as I know they don't have an official presence in the US. Sucks.)
Oh yeah, this was about the iPhone 15 Pro Max
As I alluded to earlier, we've had a...complicated relationship. The 15PM was really a fluke, I was just seeing what the numbers would be if I were to finance one and instead of asking me to confirm everything...it just went APPROVED! and charged my card immediately. I really liked my 13 Pro, but I hungered for the longer battery life that the Max models offered. Figured this was the best time so I rolled with it.
At first, I really liked the 15PM. I didn't care much for the titanium finish, but other than that, the dynamic island was pretty cool, and under ideal conditions the camera took some awesome shots.
But then, the bugs started setting in. The 15PM is my sole video camera, and I do content create a fair bit, so I need this thing to be rock solid. Rock solid it was not. The camera app would frequently crash, or it would just...stop recording, no audio cue or anything like that. If I'm recording something longform, this would be a huge, HUGE problem. (And yes, I've tried restoring. It didn't help.)
This bug wasn't truly fixed until almost the end of iOS 17's lifecycle. This soured me a LOT on the 15PM. Such that I was openly considering selling it and going back to a 13PM.
The epic battery life wasn't long for this world either, as the 15PM's battery aged like milk. Within the first few months, I was down to 92% battery health with less than 200 cycles on the battery. For reference, my 13PM with 500 or so cycles in the first year only dropped down to 99% not long after the warranty lapsed. (And my girlfriend? Who has a regular 15 and isn't as careful with her charging habits? Still in the 90%+ range after as many cycles. Sigh.)
As I type this I'm sitting at about 520 cycles with 86% battery health remaining. Better than the 400 cycles we had before? Sure. But do I trust this to make it to the 1000 cycles Apple has rated it for? Nah.
These days the battery melts incredibly fast if I do anything remotely demanding on it, such that if I had a traditional job like I used to way back, making it to the end of the day would be a struggle. Considering 60% of the justification for getting the 15PM was the battery life, this hurt.
Speaking of melting, the 15PM runs hot. I thought for the longest time that it was okay, because I mean, I've handled Android phones that got pretty toasty. But the 15PM gets uncomfortably hot under load. The last phone I had to do that with was an old HTC One M7 and that was only if I was playing an AR game outdoors whilst jacked into a power bank. If I want to consume brain rot while the 15PM is charging I usually just reach for the beta mule (SE2) to doomscroll while the 15PM charges because that's how hot it gets. And I'm only using the 18W charger that comes with iPads.
But hey, it has USB-C, at least! If there was anything that worked overtime to keep me from ditching the 15PM, it is how game changing USB-C is to have on an iPhone. Being able to plug in an Ethernet dongle to do network diagnostics from my phone has been an invaluable tool that has saved me from having to lug a laptop everywhere.
But alas, that did not really ease my feelings toward this phone. I mostly grew to tolerate it rather than love it (unlike my beloved 13 Pro). Multiple times I entertained the idea of trading in for a 16 Pro Max if only to get something different. But the 16 Pro Max--once you strip away Apple Intelligence (which I don't give a shit about)--just feels like a huge nothingburger of a phone. The stench of Apple's desperation to get on the AI bandwagon at the time was also fairly off-putting.
The 17 Pro, however, feels more substantial, but I was still confident I was not going to upgrade if only because it felt like an incremental upgrade. But it grew on me. I hated that it grew on me. I didn't want to like this phone, damn it.
The vapor chamber and aluminum unibody being pitched as helping thermals. This told me that they realized the thermal design of the previous two iPhones kinda sucked and needed to be addressed.
The camera upgrades. This addressed one of my huge gripes with the camera system of the 14 and 15, that due to the 42MP sensor the minimum focus distance has become noticeably longer, so in a lot of instances with the types of photos I take, I would be shooting with the ultrawide camera which was completely unchanged from the 13 Pro I once had. Way too much of the time, I never got to enjoy the main camera upgrades because of this. Now that the second and third cameras have been upgraded, this pain point has been (hopefully) addressed.
The battery upgrades. Hopefully this means this time around the battery health won't age like milk. A man can dream.
That orange color. Oh my god, Apple finally found the saturation dial and turned it up for the Pro models. And it's GameCube Orange! Fuuuuuck I'm supposed to not like this phone but HNGHHHH.
Lastly, seeing the announcement itself, or rather summaries of it (as I just don't watch Apple events anymore, they lack the soul of the live ones): Apple did the right thing with their AI initiatives and while they didn't do the ideal thing and abandon them, they put Apple Intelligence on the back burner. Short of the store page where you actually buy Apple's new phones, you really have to dig to find any mention of Apple Intelligence on the product pages. Thank fuck.*
The straw that broke the camel's back has been the camera becoming increasingly unreliable as of late, something I'd chalk up to software bugginess more than anything, but I've had the camera app just dump me into a respring and then back to the home screen a fair number of times since upgrading to iOS 18.
This, couple with talking about it in a group chat, put my brain into that dangerous mode, that mode I haven't been in since 2018 when I finally, finally settled down and stopped changing phones every 6 months: "I am half past done with this phone. I have reached my tolerance limit. This phone must leave my presence at any cost."
Sure, I had learned to tolerate it for the last two years of ownership. But something in my brain clicked and I just felt like I was tired of tolerating this phone. I wanted a phone I could love again, much like my 13 Pro. And the 17 Pro Max feels like that phone, at least on paper. And running everything, I can do it with no negative effects on my finances (yay, good trade in values) so, why not?
I know I cherished my 13 Pro as I put it into the box to be sent back to Apple. I don't feel the same way about my 15PM. My feelings on it come down to, effectively: "You're Apple's problem now. See you never."
* I really think if Apple is to make a difference in the AI race, this is really the way to do it. Sit back and let others lay the trail (for those who come afte-wait a second) and then do things The Apple Way and do them right. As of right now AI is a solution looking for a problem, but if Apple decides to pivot this into listening to customers and trying to actually solve quality of life issues with Apple Intelligence versus just chasing it because omg shareholders, I could maybe, possibly see myself coming around to it.
But we're a far ways away from that, and it isn't until this dumb bubble finally bursts that I think it's going to happen.