I had wanted to write this post for a long time, but kept putting it off—probably for a whole month. As I approach middle age, it feels as though there is very little time that truly belongs to me. Seventy percent of the day goes to work, twenty percent to family and meals. At night, seventy percent goes to sleep, and twenty percent is left for myself. More and more, I feel that time and energy are a person's most fundamental wealth.
I started using an iPhone in 2016, when I was at university. On the campus network, I found someone who specialized in selling secondhand iPhones. I went to his dorm room, where a chubby guy pulled out a very new-looking iPhone 5s and said, “It's a display unit from a US store. Take a look—it's practically new.” I took it, reset the system, and, as I remember it, bought it for 2,000 yuan. That was still the era of the Home button. The iPhone 5s stayed with me for a year or two. When its battery started failing, I replaced it myself with one from ZEALER. I was delighted and felt a real sense of accomplishment, but the replacement battery was poor quality and did not last long either.
Later, I moved to an iPhone 6s with a bigger screen. While still at university, I also stretched my budget to buy an 8,000-yuan MacBook Pro. That laptop helped me enormously; it was the first truly important tool in my life. A few years later, I started an internship and had a little income, which went toward phones from the iPhone X, iPhone XR, and iPhone 12 generations. I was probably also among the early buyers of AirPods and the Apple Watch.
As the saying in Fortress Besieged goes, people on the inside always want to get out. I had long wanted Android's useful ADB commands and the freedom to manage my own file system. I could use scripts to synchronize private documents and photo collections across devices, without subscribing to any service. Eventually, I made the decision: I sold my iPhone 12 and bought a standard Xiaomi 13, with the largest storage option, 512 GB.
At first, everything felt fresh. Xiaomi's animations were not as smooth as Apple's, but as an R&D engineer, I knew those were just flourishes—visual effects in the UI, nothing more. I downloaded Clash and Li Tiaotiao, tools that push back against intrusive software. I turned off every advertising setting I could find, installed and configured the essential apps, and looked forward to a delightful new experience.
For the first six months, Android was quite enjoyable. Perhaps the novelty outweighed its shortcomings. Gradually, though, I discovered a series of problems I found difficult to accept. Photography was the biggest one. I enjoy taking photos: at university, I bought an A6000 camera and a prime lens, and took many pictures that mean a lot to me. Recording beautiful or ordinary moments lets me return to the past whenever I want—to its cold, warmth, happiness, and everything else. But when I picked up the phone to photograph that day's meal or a funny moment with my baby, I found the standard Xiaomi's color reproduction terrible, at least to someone who had used Apple phones for seven or eight years. Faces were given unnaturally high saturation and looked dark and yellowish. Food colors were wildly exaggerated, with very strong contrast. I never turned on the so-called AI photography feature, because I regarded it as a collection of crude algorithms. How good could an algorithm be if it had to run in real time on a phone? Eventually, I felt reluctant every time I opened Xiaomi's camera, because the resulting photos disappointed me.
Xiaomi's system is actually quite good. The trouble is that app developers cannot tailor their software to that system alone. Some widgets cannot be placed on the screen to the left of the home screen. Small animation details vary wildly between apps and lack a coherent sense of beauty. The inconsistent push-notification system, including the recurring problem of missing WeChat notifications, often left me speechless. Still, I could see the effort and attention to detail in HyperOS, especially in the built-in apps and Settings interface.
I had always thought Android was an open system. Later, it did not seem so open after all. Without root access, I entered the phone's directories through adb shell and found that crontab had long since been stripped out. I could not access /data, or the running data and resources of apps. I pushed several thousand photos from my computer to the phone so that I could browse them anywhere, at any time, but the gallery app would not refresh to show the photos I had transferred. To this day, I do not understand the logic behind Android's photo gallery.
One day, after a little over a year of using it, I finally made up my mind and spent 10,500 yuan on an iPhone 16 Pro with 512 GB of storage. Shooting and editing video, taking and editing photos—everything felt natural and effortless. Paired with macOS, it reminded me that Apple's sense of beauty had never fallen behind.
Thinking about it afterward, perhaps using the most refined products is what makes us accustomed to pursuing excellence in everyday work and life. And if we are accustomed to pursuing excellence in work and life, perhaps only the most refined products will feel right to us.
Qiang
2024/12/06, Shenzhen