A Wild Year for Smartphones (Premium)

There are things of which I am sure. I very much prefer Windows to macOS, for example, despite the obvious problems. But there are also things of which I am not sure. And that’s where Android and iOS land, or, more specifically Pixel and Android.

I’ve gone back and forth on this so many times I can’t keep it straight in my mind. Rationalizing, I can state the obvious and note that my job basically requires me to go back and forth between the two platforms. But which I prefer shifts according to the quality of the respective hardware and software upgrades that Google and Apple deliver each year. There is rarely an obvious choice, and I miss specific features from one platforn when I switch to the other.

Looking back in time is pointless, but looking at just this past year is perhaps instructive. And it’s confusing. Coming into 2024, after having reviewed the iPhone 15 Pro Max and Pixel 8 Pro, I thought I had come to a rare but not unprecedented point in which my choice was clear: Though the iPhone was (and still is) terrific on almost every level, I very much preferred Google’s entry, with the Pixel finally overcoming the nagging little problems of the past and delivering that experience I had long wanted. I was good.

Except that I wasn’t.

The same week I published my Pixel 8 Pro review, I inexplicably ordered a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra for two reasons that seemed meaningful at the time: The explosion of AI features coming to the best-selling Android brand and an expanded partnership with Google which had, to that point, kept its hardware-accelerated AI advances to itself. Looking back on this now, I semi-regret it. I was never going to switch to the Galaxy full-time–I can’t stand Samsung’s unnecessary software bloat, for starters–but I wanted to be open-minded and fair, and I knew that the phone would find a good home with my wife, who was still using a Galaxy S22 Ultra at the time. And sure enough, the Galaxy S24 Ultra landed where I think I knew it would, though the AI functionality was surprising half-baked and disappointing. Whatever, my wife loves it and I moved on.

What I didn’t do was move on to the Pixel as expected. Instead, when we were in Mexico for February and part of March, Apple announced the MacBook Air M3. And while I didn’t mention this at the time, I immediately decided that I needed to buy one: PCs based on Qualcomm’s explosively good and Arm-based Snapdragon Elite X platform were due by mid-2024, the company was specifically targeting the Apple Silicon M3, and it seemed like–and was, still is–the correct head-to-head comparison to see how well Qualcomm had really done. And so I purchased one. And dear God is this a fantastic computer. Thin, light, and gorgeous, with an epic display and 15 hours of real-world battery life, the MacBook Air M3 is astonishingly good. The only thing holding it back, frankly, is macOS.

But before I was able to come to that conclusion, I knew that any reasonable evaluation of this device would require to me spend time exploring the unique integration–which critics correctly call lock-in–functionality that Apple offers between its devices, software, and services. This is the “it just works” stuff that Apple fans often cite–also correctly–as a key reason for giving up choice and doing things the Apple way. And it’s fair to say that my experiences in that ecosystem have been mostly positive this past year. But keeping this conversation on track and focusing solely on the smartphone piece of that puzzle, what this meant was that I went back to the iPhone 15 Pro Max and not the Pixel. I did so assuming this shift would be temporary.

Everything’s temporary. But my move back to the iPhone 15 Pro Max was longer lasting than expected. In part because of my late realization that the bulky case I had gotten for the Galaxy S24 Ultra had biased my view of its size and heft, I spent an inordinate amount of time this past spring investigating cases for each of my phones, and with the iPhone, I finally settled on an astonishingly good “phone back” from Suti that offers no protection at all but allows customers to actually enjoy the gorgeous and expensive phone they purchased. I was nervous about this going in, but I used the iPhone with a hunter green silicone phone back throughout most of 2024, traveled with it extensively, and never had any issues. When I finally traded it in for an iPhone 16 Pro Max in September, it was still in mint condition and I got the full $650 in trade-in value that Apple offered. (Yes, I ordered a Suti phone back for the new iPhone, in olive green. It’s waiting for me back in Pennsylvania.)

But this isn’t really about me. Yes, it was an unusual year of back and forth with smartphones for me personally, and yes, I ended up sticking with the unexpected choice for most of 2024. But that kind of thing is arguably an annual event. 2024 will mostly likely go down in the books as the strangest year of the modern smartphone era. We’ve never seen anything like it.

For Apple fans, the weirdness started in June, when Apple announced its long-awaited and arguably late to the game AI push in the form of Apple Intelligence. Nothing about Apple Intelligence is normal. It is a sweeping set of helpful features that will reach into all the obvious apps and services across the ecosystem, but focusing on Apple’s core platforms: iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. It will not be made available in China (because China) or in the EU, thanks to Apple’s belligerent and indignant reaction to that geography’s sweeping antitrust reforms. None of the many features Apple announced at WWDC would ship in the annual OS upgrades that Apple would deliver in September. And that meant that Apple’s biggest hardware release of the year, the iPhone 16 series, would likewise ship without its marquee new set of features.

That this parallels what happened to Microsoft with Copilot+ PC, Windows 11 version 24H2, and Recall is interesting on some level, I guess. And while Apple fans have tried to rationalize the staggered release of Apple Intelligence by pointing to how the company “always” has some feature that it announces for new iPhones that isn’t delivered until post-launch, this is unprecedented. The sheer scope of Apple Intelligence is impressive, as impressive as what Google is doing mostly in Android (but also to some degree in Chrome OS). And it’s arguably more impressive than the Copilot and Copilot+ features Microsoft is offering in Windows; indeed, Apple appears to be giving away the types of features that Microsoft is trying to charge customers for with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Less obvious, perhaps, I’ve spent much of 2024 wrestling with the bizarre and chaotic way Microsoft has updated Windows 11, and I feel very strongly that it’s led to a serious crisis of quality in the product. Microsoft wasn’t just off schedule in 2024, it was off script and unpredictable. This, too, seems to parallel what we see with Apple Intelligence. There’s part of me that wants to compliment the company for what feels like a mature decision to not just release it all, as Google has done with Gemini and other AI features in the 2019 Pixels. But Apple is also giving off the same “we’re making it up as we go” vibe I see with Windows 11 this year. It feels … wrong.

Whatever. Apple will launch some Apple Intelligence features in iOS 18.1, which is expected by the end of this month. It will deliver more in iOS 18.2, which is expected by the end of 2024. And then it will deliver the rest of the Apple Intelligence features it announced in June, and some others, in iOS 18.3, perhaps in March. And I think we can all expect even more features throughout the rest of next year, including of course whatever happens with iOS 19.

Apple’s September hardware announcement was in some ways lackluster, with minor hardware advances, and some curious entries like the Camera Control button that I was initially excited about. I finally decided to buy some iPhone, and after seriously considering the colorful new iPhone 16 Plus, I opted instead for an iPhone 16 Pro Max, a decision I still second-guess. The latest versions of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS–and Apple’s other platforms–all arrived on cue, and without Apple Intelligence as expected.

While much of the fan base was a bit too focused on that bit, I had noticed something interesting in testing iOS 18 over the summer. The new home screen personalization features, which include dynamic Dark and Light modes, mirror but also exceed work Google has done in Pixel Android over the past few years. And in finally giving customers the ability to put app icons anywhere they want on the home screen, the most obvious missing feature in iOS since 2007, Apple has finally closed the loop on the personalization advantages that Android has long provided. No, more than that. The ways I can now customize my iPhone that are meaningful to me now exceed what I can do on Pixel. For example, Google doesn’t let you remove the At a Glance widget or Search bar from the Pixel home screen.

With that experience, I figured my iPhone use would continue. I had already someone landed back in the Apple ecosystem, had in fact expanded that use with more Apple services and even Apple smart speakers, something I would have laughed off as impossible not so long ago. I felt like I was decidedly shifting to Apple, and maybe ending this silly internal debate, thanks to slow but steady progress on Apple’s part. Things were lining up that way.

But then Google announced the Pixel 9 series in August, two months earlier than usual. And that’s when the strangeness of this past year in smartphones expanded to include Android and Pixel.

Android development has followed a familiar pattern for many years now. Google announces a first developer preview in February, mostly aimed at developers (of course) but with a few new features and hints at others. It then delivers a first beta, often at its annual Google I/O event in May, though a few weeks earlier than that in recent years. And then it finalizes the system in August before pushing it out to AOSP (the free and open source Android) and then supported Pixels. In 2023, Google intended to accelerate this process and perhaps release Android 14 a month early for reasons I’m not sure it ever communicated. But 2024 was going to be different. This time, Google would release the next version, Android 15, early. It would do so, so it could beat Apple to market with new Pixel devices.

Google has been trying to accelerate the Android development cycle for years. Android 12 was the last release in which it announced a Beta 1 at I/O. With Android 13, 14, and 15, it shipped Beta 1 a bit earlier in the year each time. This year was the earliest yet, April 11, and for the rest of the spring and early summer, it seemed like Google would hit its earlier than ever release date. The final beta arrived in July, and then Google revealed it would launch the Pixel 9 series in August. It was all coming together. Except that it wasn’t: Google never finalized Android 15, and by the time it announced the Pixel 9 series, it was clear that these phones would launch with Android 14.

This was odd on so many levels. For starters, it marks the first time in the Pixel era that new flagship devices didn’t launch with the next OS release. But more oddly, Android 15 was imminent. Why not just wait on that?

It’s hard to say. But the Pixel 9 series–which expanded to include Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL, and Pixel 9 Pro Fold models–was clearly a new bar for product design, quality, and desirability. I had described the Pixel 8 Pro as “the perfect Pixel,” but the Pixel 9 Pro XL I ordered–after assuming I’d simply skip this year—is a major step forward from a design and hardware quality perspective.

And there was that platform uncertainty again. After assuming I was going all-in on Apple, and knowing that the broader Pixel ecosystem is lackluster, not just compared to Apple but generally, I was once again not so sure. The Pixel 9 Pro XL arrived, it is as jam-packed full of AI as expected, both useful and chaotically unready–and … I love it. Somehow, Google, long dogged by hardware quality problems, has raised the bar. The Pixel 9 Pro XL is a stunning achievement, my only complaint being the newly raised price points.

Google’s roll out of AI functionality on Pixel stands in sharp contrast to Apple’s on iPhone, iPad, and the Mac. Where Apple is taking a measured approach, Google is spraying AI all over the place like a child playing Paintball for the first time. That this work is happening outside Android is interesting. For the past two months, Android fans have been waiting on the release of an Android 15 that was supposed to land early, not late. But this release was late in unprecedented ways. Google delivered Android 15 in AOSP form in early September. But it didn’t ship to supported Pixels until this week. Two long months after Google announced the Pixel 9 series.

I spent much of this year using the Android 15 beta on my Pixel 8 Pro, just as I had used the iOS 18 developer beta on my iPhone 15 Pro Max. When I traded in that Pixel for the Pixel 9 Pro XL, I unenrolled it from the beta and wiped it, and Google gave me the full $699 trade-in value as expected. But when the Pixel 9 Pro XL arrived, I immediately enrolled it in the Android 15 beta, knowing that the final release was imminent and that I would be able to seamlessly update to stable and then just stay there until sometime in 2025 when the Android 16 beta arrived.

That is not what happened.

As the weeks ticked by, things got weird. In late August, Google quietly delayed the Android 15 release to October. I had unenrolled the Pixel in anticipation of this release, knowing that doing so would just put me in stable. But the OTA (over-the-air) update Google delivered to my Pixel had an ominous new message. This OTA would “exit with data wipe.” That is, I would be pushed back to Android 14 and would need to set up my Pixel again. What?

I waited on that. And then the OTA update description changed to include news of the October delay plus a new plan of action. “If you are waiting for the Android 15 stable update,” it now read, “please ignore this OTA till Android 15 is available in October.” (Yes, that says “till.” I don’t know.)

Huh. I’d never seen anything like that. But what I did see, every single day for the next two months, was a notification each morning telling me to install that OTA. An OTA that would wipe my phone and put me back on Android 14. And so every day, I dismissed the notification. And I waited. And waited. And waited.

Two months can sometimes pass in a blur. But from my perspective, those two months dragged on and on. Yesterday, we learned that Google is following up its release of Android 15 on Pixel–a release that did not come to those, like me, who are OTA-sitting and waiting on a change–with one for people like me. I keep checking. But it’s still stuck on that “exit with data wipe” OTA. Supposedly that will change. What’s two months between friends?

Worse, something odd has happened during those two months. The iPhone 16 Pro Max arrived, and I’ve been using it ever since. There are things I like about it, of course, including the iOS 18.x personalization capabilities, the Dynamic Island, the AirPlay and other Apple ecosystem niceties, even the new Photos app. But some of the key differentiators that I figured would put this device over the top, like Camera Control, disappoint. That new button is superfluous and hard to use. The Camera app needs to be divided into Pro and normal control sets, as we see on Pixel, and the new Photographic Styles is a nightmare. I hate it.

And while I will discuss all that in my coming review, I am experiencing the opposite of what I experienced this past spring when I went back to the iPhone. Then, I had expected to land back on Pixel but stuck with the iPhone. Now, I had expected to land back on Pixel, but in using the new iPhone and experiencing daily frustrations with the camera experience, a key part of any smartphone decision, I’m leaning in the other direction. I can’t wait to go back to my Pixel 9 Pro XL.

This is a problem. My review is at this point only blocked out with my real-time notes and observations. And I almost don’t to even write it. The issue isn’t that the iPhone is bad or whatever, it’s a terrific device as you would expect. It’s that the Pixel is sitting over there, calling to me. And I almost have to force myself to stick with this thing. Despite all the inherent benefits of the hardware, the software, and the broader ecosystem. What was briefly certain is now back to the same old uncertainty. Go damn it.

As I write this, we’re a week or 10 days out from the public release of iOS 18.1. But I’ve been using iOS 18.1 for months, so this won’t be a big milestone for me. There’s some good stuff in there, but anyone who has used things like Magic Eraser in Google Photos or any Gemini features in Pixel Android will not be impressed. This is Apple meeting the bar, doing what it must, but not really exceeding the competition. Table stakes, though I hate terms like that.

The bigger issue for me is the day to day. The way that iPhones don’t filter out spam calls and texts like Google does on Pixel. The terrible notifications. The that damned camera system with all its complexity. I just want to take pictures, for crying out loud. Apple catering to “Pros,” whoever they are, is fine, but ignoring the needs of its normal majority of customers is misguided. I’ll push on that more in my review. But it’s frustrating.

This year has been a glorious mess. That’s true whether you look at Windows, Android, Pixel Android, or Apple’s platforms. And it’s all AI’s fault. Whether this AI era comes and goes as the bubble I think it to be or it transforms our personal computing experiences and brings us ever closer to some nerdvana in which everything just works, and we no longer need to navel-gaze over specific hardware, software, or services platforms is unclear. Maybe it’s a mix of both, I don’t know. But I feel strongly that 2024 will be long remembered for the frenzied, rapid-fire embrace of AI regardless of reason.

Perhaps things will slow down in 2025. I hope so. And I suspect I’m not the only one looking forward to that.