Linus Sebastian’s Thoughts After Switching to an iPhone for 30 Days

I’ve been meaning, since it came out in December, to link to this video from Linus Sebastian of “Linus Tech Tips” fame, and with the iPhone 16e dropping this week, now seems like a good time. It’s a common genre that dates back decades before YouTube was even a thing: longtime user of platform X switches to rival platform Y for a few weeks, and then explains what they liked, what they didn’t, what confused them, etc. This sort of thing always raises hackles because there’s a natural human tendency to get tribal — if not downright religious — about one’s platforms of choice. And Sebastian’s intro — playing to YouTube’s algorithm — frames it in a way that makes it seem like his overall take on iOS is going to be inflammatory. Right in the first 30 seconds of the 20-minute video, he says:

Just a few days into my iOS challenge I started to look a little differently at the Apple users in my life. They describe Apple products with marketing slogans like “it just works” as though they actually believe them, and it made me wonder, does Apple have one version of their products for the True Believers and then a different one for the scrubs like me? Because my time with the iPhone 16 Plus has been absolutely riddled with unintuitive design choices, unnecessarily limited functionality, and some of the weirdest bugs that I have encountered on a supposedly finished product in years.

The first time I watched the video, my finger started hovering to the close-tab button at this point. But that provocative opening isn’t really representative of Sebastian’s actual observations and complaints at all. It’s just the YouTube/social-media style. Me? I would start an essay, on, say, the things that bug me the most about Android, in the least inflammatory way possible, to open people’s minds and get as many Android proponents as possible to relax, and listen to my arguments. And then I’d try to make my case, building to a crescendo where I deliver my perhaps inflammatory conclusions only at the very end. YouTube works the reverse way — you start out in provocative fashion to raise hackles, because outrage drives engagement, but then sort of work your way back toward reasonableness.

Sebastian is a long-time Android user, but he’s not really a phone guy at all. He doesn’t review phones, typically. His own personal Android phone is several years old. His interest and renown is entirely in the field of PCs. So his video isn’t really “Android power user reviews iOS”, but more like “PC power user who is also an Android user tries an iPhone for a month”.

I like these sort of videos because I’m all-in on iOS at this point. I’ve kept an Android phone at my desk since the Google Nexus One in 2010, but the one still at my desk is a five-year-old Pixel 4. I feel more out of touch with the state-of-the-art on Android than ever. So a video like this, from the perspective of someone who is himself way out of date with the state-of-the-art on the iPhone side of the fence, is really interesting.

Sebastian winds up making a bunch of astute critiques of iOS and the iPhone experience. None of them were new to me, and none of them really left me with any sense of missing out by not being part of Team Android. But most of his complaints are completely legit — and a lot of them are things Apple should address. He complains repeatedly about iOS’s animated transitions making everything feel slow. That’s 100 percent true. As an everyday iPhone user I’m just completely used to that. But those animations really do make iPhones feel slower than they are. In terms of tech specs iPhones are literally the fastest phones on the planet. Apple’s A-series silicon is, and always has been, years ahead of the best silicon money can buy in an Android handset. But a lot of aspects of iOS feel slower than Android because of animated transitions for which iOS offers no option to speed up. It should. And the Accessibility setting to completely turn off animations doesn’t solve the problem; what I want, and I think what Sebastian wants, is faster animations. (Sebastian also justifiably complains about the fact that so many useful iOS settings are buried under Accessibility. Many of the settings in Accessibility are related to accessibility, but a lot of them would be better found in an “Advanced” section of Settings that doesn’t exist.)

Sebastian also correctly skewers iOS for its confusing audio volume settings; Android definitely wins here. Rearranging home screen icons sucks on iOS. CarPlay has annoying bugs. His fresh eyes were annoyed by something mine just accept: that Apple’s first-party apps tend to put their preference settings in the Settings app, but third-party apps tend to keep them in-app. (But now Apple is starting to do that too, with new apps like Sports.)

Give the video a watch. Again, it didn’t leave me with an iota of envy for life on the Android side of the fence, but it reminded me about a bunch of things on iOS that don’t make sense, and seemingly are the way they are only because that’s how they always have been.

★ Sunday, 23 February 2025