Why I'm Getting an iPhone

I'm sure there's about a million articles on the endless battle between Android phones and iPhones. Especially with the brand new phones that came out recently. But before I go into it, here's a little bit of a background.

I was raised in an anti-Apple family. My dad has always despised Apple and always went with Android phones, meaning I always got Android phones as well. I never really cared that much about what kind of phone I had until I started high school. I realized very quickly that everyone had an iPhone and that instantly made me feel left out. But me being the way that I am, I just just thought who cares? I don't need an iPhone. And I went on living my life.

One day though, that changed. I was home with my brothers and my parents were out shopping, as they often did. My dad called me, which I thought was weird. My dad starts with "Hey, they have this crazy deal at the store we're at, do you want an iPhone?" I could not believe it. My dad was offering me an iPhone. I had mentioned maybe a couple of times how everyone at school had one, and I guess he remembered that. He got me the iPhone. It was an iPhone 5C and it was white. Let me tell you, I LOVED that thing. In fact, I still have it sitting in my drawer. Unfortunately it doesn't work anymore due to my brother putting it through the washer not once, but twice. But that's a story for another day.

I was as happy as one could be with my iPhone. I had iMessage and everything and I felt cool again. Fast forwarding a couple of years, after my iPhone died tragically, my dad got us new phones. He, again, got a crazy deal and brought home four Samsung Galaxy J7s. Yes, J7, not S7. The J7 is basically a cheaper (not as good) version of the S7. I wasn't that excited about it, but I was grateful since my iPhone wasn't working anymore.

It took me a pretty good amount of time to really get used to Android again, but I got there. Two years later, an iPhone 7, an iPhone 8, and an iPhone X later, I'm still using my Galaxy J7. No, it was not by choice. I just haven't had enough money laying around to get a better phone. And for a while now, I've been planning on sticking with Android actually, especially since the Pixel 2 came out with that killer camera.

That was my plan. As you might know, Apple has just released the iPhone XS and XS Max. They have announced the iPhone XR as well, which will be released at the end of October. I am definitely going to buy the iPhone XR mainly because it is quite a bit cheaper. If that wasn't enough, the XR is, for the most part, just as good as the XS and XS Max. Just those two facts won me over, and then they threw in all the color options. That's what I loved the most about the iPhone 5C. Now if all of that still wasn't enough, the camera. Oh, the camera. Rocking only one camera on the back, the XR's camera is supposedly the same camera that is on the XS/XS Max models. It still has portrait mode, but that is achieved through software, which I'm totally okay with.

Now, another pretty big reason why I'm getting an iPhone is the fact that it feels like everyone has one. No, I don't mean that I want to be like everybody else. The thing is that everyone that I interact with (especially my family) has an iPhone. I have found myself countless times at someone's house, in need of a charger, and there simply isn't one. Do you know how annoying that is? The fact is that if you have an iPhone, chances are that you probably don't know.

If it wasn't for Apple's impossible-to-break-ecosystem, I would probably be okay without an iPhone. But everything they make only works well with other Apple products or other iPhones. Biggest example: iMessage. How well Apple's texting system works is almost a joke. In case you don't know, iMessage only works when iPhones are texting each other. If you use an iPhone to text an Android phone, it's just a normal text. All the things you can do on iMessage just make it miles better than any texting experience I've had on Android. And that, to me, is a pretty big deal.

Just to summarize all this rambling: nowadays, I think is practical to have an iPhone since most people have one, I love the colors of the XR (and it is cheaper), and iMessage just seems to good to ignore. If you read this article because you're trying to decide whether or not to buy an iPhone, I recommend you do. However, it's always up to you. It's up to how much you use your phone, or how many of your friends and family have iPhones, or even how avid of a phone photographer you are. Above everything else, make sure that you are confident and happy with your decision, because it can be a pretty serious investment.