The Apple Problem ⭐

A friend texted me the other day and randomly (to me) brought up a topic that's been on my mind for years and surfaced here most recently in How I Configure My Phone Camera Apps for Snapshots ⭐️. Like me, he's a digital photography enthusiast, but we approach this process from entirely different directions. That is, I prefer an "it just works" shoot and click experience, which is one of many reasons I prefer Pixels over iPhones for photography, whereas he typically shoots in RAW and then edits and manages photos in Lightroom.

As I told him in my first reply, this is a topic I obsess over, and it's something we'd discussed more than once in person. Which makes sense, as it comes up here on Thurrott.com in different ways as well. As I wrote in The Perfect Phone (Premium) two years ago, there is no one perfect phone, and I wish I could combine elements from the iPhone, Pixel, and Samsung Galaxy into a single phone that would be, to me, perfect. But that's a fantasy, and so I and many others have to compromise, regardless of which device we pick.

Of course, there is one major difference between me and the typical consumer: I always have multiple phones, the later generation of each, and I move back and forth between them to stay up on the latest platform and hardware developments. It's part of my job, as I see it. This creates some complexities, but it each time I switch phones, I'm reminded, often instantly, of those things I prefer on each, but also those things I miss that are better elsewhere. Again, there is no perfect phone.

My friend's text message was about an ah-ha moment he had while doing some research using AI. I don't know what led him down this path, exactly, but we had had a conversation months ago about this notion that professional photographers and other creators tend to gravitate to the iPhone, and most ignore the Pixel entirely. I find this odd, given how good the Pixel camera systems are, but also because the iPhone camera experience is a nightmare thanks to convoluted user interfaces (like Photographic Styles, a great idea ruined by the worst UI since Apple Watch's ridiculous grid view of bubble-like app icons) and missing features (like on-screen controls for white balance, exposure, and shadows in the view finder, as you can enable on Pixel).

The way that I walked into this topic is a bit convoluted, but the short version is that I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of phone-based video recording as part of my series of articles and reviews of the Pixel 10-series phones. In the course of this research—meaning, searching Google and YouTube—what I found is what I note above, that there are tons of professionals out there that use and recommend the iPhone for photography and videography, but there's precious little on the Pixel side. I wrote about this in From the Editor’s Desk: Seeking a Little Expertise ⭐ in November, and that's probably what triggered the conversations I later had with this friend. Who uses...