From the Editor’s Desk: Reasons ⭐

I often write that important decisions are like a matrix of smaller decisions, each weighted subjectively by the individual. Choosing a smartphone is an obvious example, and while my personal choices are complicated by my profession, I’ve always valued a few key features more than others. But over the past few months, a new variable has emerged. And this raises some questions I hadn’t considered.

What happens when one or more of the most important features becomes a non-issue? How does that change the decision making process?

I’ll keep this to phones for the most part, since that was the impetus for this and it’s an easy way to frame the discussion. But these questions could apply to any decision-making process. More on that in a bit.

Last April, I wrote there was no perfect phone and that the top mobile platforms, Android and iOS, each had their respective strengths and weaknesses. This determination, is of course, subjective. Many align strongly with either platform, or perhaps even for Samsung One UI, the most popular Android option, and never consider switching sides. Just sticking with what they know is the biggest factor for many when it’s time to upgrade.

But as a reviewer and personal technology enthusiast, I’ve had more difficulty. I have preferences like anyone else. But most years I move back and forth between Android and the iPhone, often several times. I see the pros and cons of each. I miss something from the other platform when I switch, just as I enjoy whatever advantages the new phone has.

The single most important feature on a smartphone, to me, is photography. Thinking back, I can credit the amazing Nokia Lumia 1020 for this, as this was the time, mid-2013, when I switched fully to smartphones for photography, dropping the standalone digital cameras I had been using previously.

This didn’t always work out well. An early iPhone model I took to Paris one dark and dreary January produced some of the muddiest, low-quality shots I’ve ever taken. But there have been some truly great smartphone cameras, too, and in recent years, almost any mainstream smartphone can take great photos and videos.

I was a big fan of the Nexus 5X and 6P, and Google Pixel has consistently been at or near the top in this capacity more recently. To be clear, I think of this as snapshot photography. That is, when I pick up a Pixel and just take a photo without any customization or additional work, the resulting shot is nearly perfect almost 100 percent of the time. Consistency is wonderful. But consistently perfect is rare, and the Pixel has almost always managed to pull that off for photography.

Each time I switch back to a Pixel, I have that satisfying moment when I take that first photo, review the shot, and think, “oh, right. This just works.” The iPhone can take terrific photos, but it has always required a bit of work. I need to review shots to make sure they’re not blurry, off-focus, or otherwise deficient. Sometimes I forget and when I look back on a set of pictures, there are a few duds. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s long been an issue for me.

Late last year, I purchased a Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold and iPhone 17 Pro Max after having reviewed the other, more traditional Pixel 10 series handsets. Each of the Pixels, including the Fold, delivers that satisfying photography experience, regardless of the camera hardware. That says a lot about Google’s computational photography strengths, of course. But time marches on. Other platforms improve too.

I don’t take a lot of personal video, so I was researching the topic for my Pixel Diaries series and came across an interesting phenomenon that I discussed in From the Editor’s Desk: Seeking a Little Expertise ⭐: Despite the Pixel being generally better for photography than the iPhone, creators, including professional photographers, routinely choose the iPhone over other alternatives. This was curious to me, but it was also clear that these folks had figured out how to wring really high-quality shots out of the iPhone. Perhaps I needed to do some work.

Well, I did do some work. This involved what others might call research, though to me it was just reading and watching some videos and then applying what I learned to my iPhone camera configuration. Without getting into the weeds, I still despise the interface for Photographic Styles, and I will never understand some of Apple’s quirky design choices. But there is power hidden in there, too. And as strange as this is to me, Apple has very real advantages in photography too.

I will probably write more about that if anyone is interested, but long story short, I did get the iPhone to a point where it’s almost Pixel-like in its ability to consistently deliver great shots without babysitting it. Not literally as good, but close. Close enough.

Close enough to eliminate photography as a reason for me to choose or prefer one smartphone platform over the other?

Yes, I think so. I didn’t walk into this explicitly, I instead realized over time that my mindset had shifted to focus on other aspects of each phone. And in doing this, I realized that, despite some very real issues—again, nothing is ever perfect—I prefer iOS over Android. Even Google’s Pixel Android.

This was an unexpected development.

Eliminating the Pixel’s biggest advantage as a factor in deciding which phone to use served to amplify the iPhone’s strengths. But it also amplified the things I don’t like about the Pixel 10 Pro XL, in particular. (That Pixel lines up most closely to the iPhone 17 Pro Max.) Its weight and thickness. Its poor battery life. Its weak ecosystem of hardware and services, in particular compared to AirPlay.

This made me think about Windows 11 and PCs, and why I put up with the enshittification. I know why, of course. I stick with the PC because I prefer it, and because I find myself more productive using Windows compared to a Mac, Linux PC, or Chromebook. It’s not just familiarity, and to my credit I do routinely use these other platforms. But I can’t get off Windows, in part because the alternatives just don’t meet my needs as well. And so the enshittification continues, and I put up with it as I can, worried that one day the workarounds and fixes will stop working.

But what if I could eliminate this problem? What if those things that made Windows work so well for me could be made to work on other platforms? What if I could eliminate enough of the issues I have with one of those alternatives? What if I could switch?

I will try to answer these questions this winter. My February or March focus will be about exploring alternatives more deeply than I’ve done to date. So I will write more on that topic soon.

For now, consider that this thinking could be applied to any decision. Or anything, really. Many of these things are more important than phones or PCs, for sure. That’s just navel-gazing, ultimately.

For example, when my son was one year old he almost lost his life to bacterial meningitis. A particularly good doctor prevented that outcome, thankfully, but our son did lose his hearing completely. And so we faced a difficult and unknown future in which our son, who could once hear, would now be profoundly deaf. We were lost.

But what if he could hear? What if that variable was simply removed from the equation?

Like most people who had never really considered deafness or its implications on day-to-day life, my wife and I had never even heard of cochlear implants, a miracle technology that can restore hearing in the profoundly deaf. It’s not perfect, nothing is, but it is perfect compared to deafness, and our son was an ideal candidate. His surgery was successful and 27 years later, he’s done quite well for himself. He can hear and speak clearly, and he knows sign language, so he has these two worlds he lives in.

You don’t always need a miracle, and you don’t often get one. If cochlear implants didn’t exist, we would have learned sign language too and life would have gone on. But I’m intrigued by this notion of removing micro-decisions, or reasons, from the broader decision matrix. It’s like removing a piece from the game board and seeing how that changes things. It can be dramatic.

We unknowingly applied this thinking when we moved to Pennsylvania. It was something I had wanted to do many years earlier, but I would have never uprooted my kids from their friends, schools, and activities. Time went on, and our son graduated from high school and went to college. Our daughter was still in high school, so I never considered moving. But then she announced she was interested in that, and off we went. That variable was removed from the equation. The reason we had stayed in the Boston area no longer applied.

I need to think about this more. But as my views on iPhone photos shifted, so did my views on smartphones more broadly. And now I am curious where else this might be applied. I will keep looking.