The University of Massachusetts Amherst
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Operating System

Amazon Prime: An Analysis

Amazon Prime: How it can Work for You

Amazon Prime is essentially Premium Amazon, and it comes with a variety of services. The full price of Prime is $10.99/month; but students get a 6-month free trial (which is pretty generous for free trial times) and then a 50% discount to the subscription price.

 

Amazon Prime Shipping, aka The Reason Everyone Gets Prime

If you’ve ever used Amazon, you’ve probably seen the little Prime symbol, probably accompanied by the words “free two-day shipping for Prime members.” Needless to say, this service is a fantastic bargain, especially when, say, you lose your headphones and have to order a new pair.

This is probably the Prime feature that lures the most customers in, mostly because it’s the easiest to find; the other features are a lot more hidden. Unless you pay for music or movies or TV shows AND buy them from Amazon, you probably won’t run into the other features as much. Regardless, free two-day shipping is an integral part of the Amazon experience, and, if you’re lucky, you may run into a few items with free one-day shipping, or even free same-day pickup.

 

Amazon Prime Video, aka The Thing People Find After Getting Prime

Amazon Video is probably the second most popular Prime feature. This is Amazon’s way of competing with Netflix; they have Amazon original TV shows, and a moderate selection of movies and regular TV shows.

One of the interesting features that Amazon implemented is that every so often they will make pilot episodes available to watch and then Prime members can vote for which show they want Amazon to make. This is called the Amazon Pilot Season, and I personally find it to be one of the most interesting features Amazon has implemented, as it allows the viewers to be more involved with the process, and it keeps the shows’ futures in the hands of the customers, to some extent.

Another unique feature of Amazon Video is how Amazon pairs it with their devices. If you have a Kindle Fire, you can actually download Prime movies and TV show episodes to watch offline. Of course, the Kindle Fire as a tablet has its own flaws, but this feature in and of itself is pretty cool.

 

Amazon Prime Music, aka The Hidden Gem of Prime

As Prime Video is Amazon’s Netflix competitor, Prime Music is Amazon’s Spotify competitor. While Prime Music doesn’t have as extensive a selection as Spotify does, I have found that it actually has a few songs that Spotify doesn’t. Also, I have personally found that Amazon’s app tends to work better than Spotify’s; the shuffle seems to actually shuffle your music around more, and the albums are alphabetized by album title, as opposed to artist, as Spotify has it.

 

Amazon Prime Reading, aka Amazon’s Library Feature

This feature is great for any avid reader who is looking for something new to read without breaking the bank, or anyone who wants to get into reading. This feature provides a decent amount of books for free to Prime subscribers; of course, you have to either have a Kindle, or the Kindle app installed on your phone, computer or tablet, and the book selection isn’t always the best. However, it’s still a great way to discover new titles or jump in to reading without paying tons of money for books.

 

Amazon Prime Pantry, aka Get Food Delivered to Campus

This feature isn’t really as much of a benefit to college students, unless you find yourself drowning in instant ramen cups. Essentially, Prime Pantry allows subscribers to purchase food items in normal sizes, as opposed to the bulk sizes that non-subscribers are limited to. I know I would personally prefer the bulk sizes, but sometimes you don’t need to pick up twelve boxes of tissues and carry them back to your dorm.

 

Amazon Prime Photos, aka Just When You Thought Prime Couldn’t Have Any More Features

Finally, Amazon Prime has a separate app, much like its Music app, for photo storage. Because, technically, you are a paying customer, you get unlimited storage, and you can have the app automatically back up every picture on your device. You can also arrange your pictures into albums, or share them with people, or put them in what Amazon calls the “Family Vault.”

The Family Vault is a place where you and your family members can, if you so choose, share your photos with one another. You can add all of your photos or pick and choose which ones you want to share. This is a great feature for parents who love to see their kid’s photos and want the opportunity to use said pictures in photo albums or other places.

Prime Photos also has a face tagging system where it automatically separates photos out by a person’s face, and you can rename this semi-album–this allows you to view all pictures of one person at any time. There is also a feature to hide photos and videos, so they can only be accessed from the “Hidden Photos and Videos” folder.

 

So is it worth it?

In my opinion, Amazon Prime is 100% worth it. For one thing, the 6 free months are a great deal and a great way to try out the features for yourself. For another, $5.50 a month really isn’t very much to pay, if you consider all the features you get with that money. It’s less than a dollar per service! What a great deal!

Categories
Operating System

AT&T Joins the Online Video Streaming Game

With the increasing popularity of online video streaming and the vast decline of tradition TV packages, it’s no wonder why AT&T wants to get in on that market share. Like most companies trying to break into a new market, AT&T is starting with very low prices. If you sign up now or shortly after the service starts, you’ll be getting 100 channels for $35 a month. Any time after that, and $35 a month will only grant you access to 60 channels in total. At 5x the monthly cost of Netflix, you’d hope to be getting some more value out of this new service, and from the channel lineup it looks like you do. Signing up for 3 months of service at the start will get you a free Apple TV and Siri remote, while signing up for one month will instead get you a free Amazon Fire Stick. Premium channels like MTV, Oxygen, NHL Network, FXM, GOLF, and NBA TV are all included in the 100 channel package. If you want to keep up on Game of Thrones on HBO, you can do that too, but you’ll be adding an extra $5 to your monthly cost. One of the big draws to this service is that they offer “100-plus premium channels … [not] the junk that nobody wants” says AT&T director Randall Stephenson. This claim is bolstered by the addition of more channels provided with their recent acquisition of another major cable company, Time Warner. While this all seems well and good, there are a few downsides to AT&T’s new service. Like any streaming service, there is a limit to the amount of people who can watch, and the limit here is pitifully low at only two concurrent users. This would prove difficult for a four person family if each member wanted to watch their own shows. There are also some vague issues with availability for local channels and regional live sports channels. No set top box is needed for the connection, and all you need is a broadband internet connection to get started, so this is an attractive offering for college students.

Categories
Hardware

Organic Light-Emitting Diode Displays

The screen you’re reading this on is most likely a Twisted Nematic, or TN for short, screen. TN screens are the most ubiquitous and oldest screens still used today. TN panels tend to be cheap to produce, have terrible viewing angles where colors quickly become distorted at an angle. But these types of panels generally have low power draw and the ability to produce high frame rates, which make them a popular choice for laptops and gaming screens respectively.

If you’re viewing this on a higher quality screen, or a computer or phone where you’ve spent more than the average price tag, you probably have an In-Plane Switching display, or IPS. These panels offer a wider range of accurate and vibrant colors, and offer them more consistently at angles, making them a good choice for viewing photos, or sharing images or videos with friends all watching on one screen.

However, both these screen technologies share similar inherent disadvantages. Both screens function similiarly, utilizing a backlight to display a colored image to the display. This takes up valuable space, produces more weight, and can be less efficient to display certain ranges of colors.

In come Organic Light-Emitting Diode Displays, or OLED for short. Working without a backlight, OLED displays individually can light up each pixel on an array, creating richer colors and a more vibrant display. For example, to display the color black, the pixel tasked would not turn on at all, creating a much richer black color (instead of it being backlit). Not only can OLED displays can be smaller, but they can be more power efficient when viewing darker colors and blacks, as the pixels don’t have to be on at all. Additionally, OLED displays will be thinner, more power efficient, have better viewing angles, and will have a better response time than any other type of LCD panel.

OLED panels aren’t quite where we want them yet though, as manufactures still work out problems. OLED panels are very expensive, because only a handful of manufacturer’s produce them. Once more manufacturers start seeing the need for a future of OLED panels, manufacturing prices will go down and companies start to invest in the materials and machinery needed to produce such panels. The other issue is battery life in a negative sense. When displaying images that are all black, OLED panels are incredibly power efficient. But with screens that are all white, that require the most amount of power to produce, OLED panels can up to twice as much power to power the screen than a comparable LCD screen. Finally, OLED panels have significant problems with their longevity, as problems such as ghosting, burn-ins, and consistency to display a certain brightness all become problems as the panels age.

Overall, OLED panels will be the future of displays. They have several advantages over modern LCD panels such as TN or IPS displays, but as a relatively new technology, there are many bugs that still must be worked out. Many laptops such as the Thinkpad X1 Yoga, HP Spectre x360, and Dell Alienware 15 all have options for them, there are also a few TVs available with such panels, the Apple Watch and Touchbar on the new MacBook Pro also feature OLED components. So as OLED panels become more ubiquitous in life, you may want to think about spending the extra cash to include one in your newest technology gadget, and enjoy its advantages.

Categories
Operating System

Side Effects of Virtual Reality

With the recent explosion of virtual reality in the tech world, many scientists are somewhat worried about the possible effects of long term VR use. While there are many potential benefits of VR, such as helping people suffering from PTSD and/or depression. There are also drawbacks, which due to how new the technology is, haven’t been adequatly studied and explored. These effects can range from something as simple as motion sickness (VR sickness) to people having disassociate experiences and even losing there sense of presence in reality. Due to the boom in popularity, many studies are now being performed to try and determine the extent of these effects; unfortunately, it remains quite difficult to get an accurate idea of the long term effects because of the age of the technology. While there is no doubt that some of these effects are somewhat dramatized, just like how people thought microwaves give you cancer, there is still a real threat of long term effects that may only be realized when it is too late.

As a gamer and a techie, I will be the first to admit that VR opens doors for technologies that were once the things of movies, and it is incredibly exciting and almost surreal. Although I also feel it should be approached with some degree of caution. An experiment on rats in virtual reality showed that certain parts of the brain, specifically in the hippocampus, would either shut down or behave erratically. The effects of VR on the eyes is also something to take into consideration, a professor at UC Berkley has been studying “vergence-accomodation conflict” which causes discomfort in the eyes when using VR. It is caused by the eyes needing to remain focused at the same distance (where the screen is), while the distance you’re eyes needs to converge or diverge at is changing (this is how the 3D effect of VR is generally achieved) which causes stress within the eyes.
VAConflictOverall, I am just as excited as everybody else about the endless possibilities of VR. I just want people to approach it with an air of caution, as it is still a new and relatively un-researched technology that could have some unforeseen effects.

Categories
Apps

Holiday Shopping the Smart Way

The Holidays are a time of comfort and joy, but preparing for them can be extremely stressful. We all put our shopping off as long as possible, and trying to keep track of everything we need to buy, find it and pay for it all in such a short amount of time usually seems like an impossible feat. Luckily, we live in the age of technology, and our Smart Phones can take a lot of stress out of our Holiday shopping. Here is a list of helpful little apps that can help make the process quicker and easier so you can focus on enjoying your Holiday Season.

RetailMeNot

This is one of the best apps for making sure you don’t miss out on any deals in your area. Available on both Android and iOS, RetailMeNot uses your current location to alert you on nearby sales and discounts. You can also select areas that you plan on visiting later and the app will let you know about any deals there as well. It even has in-app coupons that can be presented at checkout for a little extra savings. And if you need some nourishment while you’re out shopping, RetailMeNot can inform you about nearby food options as well.

Point Inside

How can you find anything in a mall full of people? Well, Point Inside can draw on its database of hundreds of shopping centers around the country and let you search for the item you need. It will tell you what stores to visit and even what aisle to look in! instead of wandering aimlessly around the store, let Point Inside do the finding for you. The app is available on both Android and iOS.

ShopSavvy

So you can find your item and be sure you aren’t missing a deal, but how can you be sure you’re getting the best deal? Enter ShopSavvy. Simply scan the barcode of the product using your Android, iOS or Windows device, and ShopSavvy will let you know where the best price is in your area and whether or not it is in stock. Once you scan an item, you can tell the app to notify you whenever there is a price change anywhere nearby so you are always up to date.

There are plenty of other helpful shopping apps out there as well, but these have proven to be the most useful and best reviewed. Try them out for yourself, happy shopping and Happy Holidays!

 

Categories
Security

Physical Security is Important Too

Although Cyber Security Awareness month is over, that doesn’t mean you can forget to lock your computer. One should always remain vigilant to protect their personal data. One aspect of security that is often overlooked by most people is physical security; the protection of the devices themselves.

On an individual scale, physical security is as simple as not leaving your phone/laptop/tablet unattended in dining halls or the library. If you must leave your laptop, be sure to lock your screen and get a laptop lock. A quality lock can be had for around $20 and is well worth the cost when compared with the cost of a new laptop, and losing any data you don’t have backed up. Also consider that many people store their passwords in their browser such as Google Chome’s auto-fill feature. While this is convenient for the user, if someone steals your laptop and is able to log in, they now have access to all of your online accounts.

One might argue, “Isn’t that the point of having a login password on my computer?” and they would be correct. But there is a saying in the security industry: Physical access is total access. This means that once someone has your device in their hands, they can do whatever they want given enough time. That is why in professional industry, security conscious businesses will have security experts conduct a “penetration test”. A security expert will go unannounced to the office being tested and try to circumvent the security in place at the office. This can be in the form of lock picking, social engineering (i.e. “look like you belong”), or simply finding an open door. Once the expert (or an actual criminal) is inside, they now have physical access to the company’s computer systems and data. From there, they can install key logging or other data gathering software, or simply steal encrypted hard drives to be broken into later.

While having a strong password is a good start to keeping your data secure, the importance of physical security cannot be overstated. One should always take precautions to prevent others from gaining access to their computer in any and every way possible.

Categories
Operating System

Good at Pictionary? Try Quick, Draw!, from Google!

It usually takes two (or more) players to play a game of Pictionary, or “guess what I drew”. Now, thanks to Google, it only takes one!

Introducing Quick, Draw!, an A.I. experiment created by Google designed to teach itself how to recognize drawings and match them to words. Today, I’ll be providing a very basic walk through on how the program works. If you saw the title and are just interested in learning about it yourself, skip to the bottom of this article for the link. MAIN SCREEN 1

Quick, Draw! is a neural network, an AI program designed to use machine learning to learn and remember the information it receives, so that it can better recognize it in the future. In Quick, Draw!’s case, it asks users to draw a picture of something to the best of their ability. Once the AI program is able to sufficiently recognize the picture, it moves on to the next one. If it cannot guess the picture within 20 seconds, it simply moves on to the next one. This is the first screen that will show up after starting:

BRIDGE

This is the screen that appears right before it asks you to draw whatever it asks for. Here, it wants us to draw a bridge. You will then be asked, to the best of your ability, to create your best interpretation of a bridge. If the computer can recognize it, you’ll automatically move to the next one!

Once you have completed (successfully or unsuccessfully) all six of your pictures, you will come to a results screen where you can analyze and see what other people drew for each picture:

results

From here, you can click on each picture to see what other people drew and what the computer recognized.

BRIDGE 2

Here we see that the AI was able to recognize the bridge, as well as showing what other words or items it may have thought you were drawing. Rainbow and fish were a couple of the other potential matches!

BRIDGE 3

Finally, if you scroll down, it will show you what other people drew that were successfully interpreted. As you draw, the Google AI uses a database of these pictures to try and help it identify what you are trying to draw. Naturally, the more pictures it has in it’s data bank, the “smarter” it will become, and the faster it will be able to detect what you are trying to draw. With some pictures, you can draw as little as two lines before it can tell what you are trying to draw!

Neural network AI is a newer technology that is just starting to get its legs. Earlier this year, Tay.AI, a Twitter neural network bot created by Microsoft, was “taught” to be incredibly rude in less than 24 hours, thanks to user input. As time goes on and the technology improves, we will begin to see a whole variety of uses for this type of technology.

It’ll only be a matter of time before the “Skynet” becomes a very real possibility.

To get started with Quick, Draw!, head over to https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/ to give it a try.

Categories
Operating System

Navigating Mac OS X Through the Command Line (Part 2)

 

Part I is available here.
Onward!

So last time we learned a few basic commands: ls, cd, and open.  That will get us through about 75% of what we would normally use the Finder for, but now we are going to address the other 50% (no, those percentages are not a typo).  In this article, I will address the following tasks:

-Copying and Moving

-Performing actions as the Super-User

-And a few little other things you may find interesting

Without wasting too much text with witty banter, I am going to just get right into it. However, I need to address one quick thing about the names of files and directories.  In part 1, we traveled through directories one at a time but in order to make things more quick and easy, we will have to do multiple directories at once.  How do we do this?

Remember in part 1 when I said the / symbol would become an important part of the directory name?  Well this is how it works: cd /directory1/directory2/directoryn.  If you have three directories with these same names on your machine and if directory2 is within directory1 and directoryn is within directory2, then you will have changed from your current directory directly to directoryn; bypassing directory1 and directory2 in the process.  Try it out with some of the directories on your machine.  Let’s say you wish to change directory from your root directory from your desktop; simply type in your cd command followed by /users/YOUR_USER/Desktop substituting the name of your user for YOUR_USER.  You should have just changed directory from the root directory to your desktop!

Alright!  Now that we can represent directories in a more intricate way, we can explore the more complex tasks that the command line is capable of!

 

Copying and Moving

If I could take a guess at the number one action people perform in the Finder, I would guess copying and moving files and directories.  Unless you know the position of every particle in the universe and can predict every event in the future, you’re probably going to need to move things on your computer.  You accidentally save a file from MATLAB to your Downloads directory and want to move it before you forget it’s there.  You just 100% legally downloaded the latest high-flying action flick and you want to move it from your Downloads directory to your Movies directory.  Additionally, you may want to create a new copy of your Econ paper (which you may or may not have left until the last minute) and save it to a thumb drive so you can work on it from another machine (#LearningCommonsBestCommons).

These tasks all involve moving files (or entire directories) from one directory to another.  The last task involves both duplicating a file and moving the newly created duplicate to a new directory.  How do we do this in the Finder?  We drag the file from one directory to another.  How do we do this in the Terminal?

  1. To move files we use mv
  2. To copy files we use cp 

Here is the basic implementation of these two functions: mv file location and cp file location .  In practice, however, things look just a bit different.  I will give you an example to help show the syntax in action and I will try to clearly explain the presence of all text in the command.  Let’s say we have a file in our root directory call GoUMass.txt and we can to move it to our documents folder so we can open it later in TextEdit or Vim and write about how awesome UMass is.  To move it in terminal we would type:

mv /GoUMass.txt /users/myuser/Documents/

After typing this in, if we ls /users/myuser/Documents, we would see GoUMass.txt in the contents of the Documents directory.  Need another example?  Let’s say we get cold feet and want to move it back to the root?  Here’s what we would type:

my /users/mysuser/Documents/GoUMass.txt /

So now that we know how to move, how do we copy?  Well, luckily, the syntax is exactly the same for cp as it is for mv.  Let’s say instead of moving GoUMass.txt from the root directory to documents, we want to copy it. Here is what we would type:

cp /GoUMass.txt /users/myuser/Documents/

Nice and simple for these ones; the syntax is the same.

One issue though: if you try to move an entire directory, then you will get a nasty error message.  To make this not the case, we employ the recursive option of mv and cp.  How do we do this?  After the command (same as it is written above) we provide one more space after the destination name and write -r.  This -r tells the computer to go through the mv or cp process as many times as it needs to get your directory from point A to point B.  Anyone who has taken a data structures course may recognize the word “recursion” and be able to see why it is implemented here.

You may also get a different nasty message here about permissions, the we will deal with in this next section:

…oh, and one last thing: if you want to delete a file, the command is rm.

 

Performing Actions as the Super-User

Permissions are a nasty thing in the computer world and can really hold you back.  The Finder will often deal with it by prompting you to enter in you administrator password.  Mac users who have configured a connection to Eduroam on their own (which I hope most of you have) will have had to do this an annoying number of times.

The Terminal will not pop up and ask you for your password, you have to tell it when you are about to do something which requires special permissions.  How do you do this?  You use a command called sudo.  sudo stands for super-user do and will allow you to do nearly anything that can be done (provided you are acting as the right super-user).  This means that those clever things that the folks at Apple Computers put in the Finder to prevent you from deleting things, like your entire hard drive, are not there.  For this reason, you can mess up some really important things if you use sudo, so I caution you.

So how does sudo work syntactically?  There are two things you can do with it: you can preface a command with sudo, or you can use sudo su to enter the super-user mode.

Prefacing a command is simple, you type sudo before whatever it is that you wanted to do.  For instance, let’s say our GoUMass.txt needed administrator privileges to move (unlikely but possible).  We would type in our move command the same as before but with one extra bit:

sudo mv /GoUMass.txt /users/myuser/Documents/

After you type this is, your computer will prompt you for your password and you will enter it and press return.  Do not be alarmed that nothing shows up in the command line when you press a key, that’s normal.  If you enter the correct password, then your computer will do the thing you asked it to after the sudo command; in this case, it’s mv.

You can also invoke actions as the super user using sudo su.  The su command will lock in the sudo privileges.  The syntax for this is as follow:

sudo su

That’s it!  After this, you will be prompted for your administrator password and then you are good to go.  The collection of cryptic text prefacing your command will change after you enter sudo su; this is normal and means you have done things correctly.  In this mode you can do anything you would have needed the sudo command for without the sudo command; sudo mv becomes just mv.

 

And a few little other things you may find interesting

The command line can be used for a wealth of other tasks.  One task I find myself using the command line for is uploading and downloading.  For this, I use two different apps called ftp and sftp.  Both do the work of allowing the user to view the contents of a remote server and upload and download to and from the server.  Sftp offers an encrypted channel when accessing the server (the ‘s’ stands for secure) and has the following syntactical structure to its command:

sftp username@server.address

If you server requires as a password, then you will be prompted for one.  Once you’re logged in to your server then you can use commands like get, mget, put, and mput to download and upload respectively.  It will look something like:

mget /PathToFileRemote/filename.file

mput /PathToFileLocal/filename.file

 

Wondering if your internet is working?  Try using the ‘ping’ command!  Pick a website or server you would link to ping and ping it!  I often use a reliable site like Google.com.  Your command should look something like:

ping www.google.com

You should start getting a bunch of cryptic-looking information about ping time and packets.  This can be useful if you are playing an intense game of League of Legends and want to know you ping time (because you are totally lagging).  The main use I find for the ping command is to see if the wireless network I’m connected to is connected to the internet.  Though rare, it is possible to have full wifi reception and still not be connected to the internet; ping can test for this.

 

Feel like you can do anything in the Terminal that you could do in the Finder?  Want to add the ability to quit the Finder?  Here’s what you type:

defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -boolean true

Follow this command with the following:

killall Finder

Your machine will glitch-out for a second but when things come back online, you will have a cool new ability in the Finder: command-Q will actually quit the Finder.  Here’s what you loose: Finder windows and your desktop.  This is the fabled way to improve your computer’s performance through your knowledge of the command line.  Finder uses more of your computer’s resources than the Terminal does so substituting one for the other can help if your computer gets hot often or runs slow.

Remark: if your computer is running outrageously slow, try running an antivirus scan, like Malwarebytes, or checking to make sure your drive isn’t failing.

 

In Conclusion

The command line, once you get a grip on some of the less-than-intuitive syntax, is an invaluable tool for using any computer system.  For everyday tasks, the command line can be faster and for slightly beefier tasks, the command line can be the only option.

And for those still in disbelief, I implore you to try installing a package manager, like Homebrew, and installing some applications to your command line.  If you can think of it, it’s probably out there.  My personal favorite is an application called ‘Links’ which is a text-based internet browser for the Terminal.

The command line, on any system, is one of the most important tools for navigation and operation.  Even for those who do not want to become one with the compute, the command line can really come in handy sometimes.

Categories
iOS

Finally Making the Switch: Android to iPhone

By now, as you’re reading this, I have made a life altering decision.

A decision not about school, work, stupid purchases, etc., but for the single thing I use everyday when I stumble out of bed in the morning and crash into the same bed at night. That’s right; I switched my brand of cellphone. Yes, I caved into an Apple technology dominated landscape and now own an iPhone.

I should premise this by saying that I am not anti-Apple or anti-Android. Not only have I owned at least 4 other Android phones before I got myself an iPhone (ranging from Samsung to LG to HTC), I also have a PC, Macbook Pro, iPad… you get the picture. So its safe to say I have been a mixed-technology kind of guy my whole life, I just (used to) prefer my phones be Android, sort of like how people prefer their eggs scrambled, shirts tucked in, black cars, how ever you compare it.

On to the good stuff…

The iPhone 6S Plus (source: three.co.uk)

This sexy piece of technology now sits snug in the pocket of my jeans or the pouch in my jacket every day, and follows me wherever I travel to. Being an owner of this device for the past two months, having never personally owned an iPhone, this device has completely blown my expectations out of the water. On the outside, a sleek design is highlighted by its large display, curvaceous edges, brushed aluminum that’s cold to the touch, and yes, that seemingly annoying camera bump.

I count on this thing to do EVERYTHING for me. My whole day is logged in to it. From schedules to work out plans to messages to health logging, this phone does it all for me. [Unpopular opinion trigger warning]: The iPhone is the better device. Over any Android phone, give me the S7, Note 7 (RIP), LG V20, G5, anything you name and I will surely be impressed with the function of my iPhone over them all.

Apple has done something right. For the past ten years, Apple has shown why they are the top dog in the smartphone department. People keep coming back to buy their newer iPhones and continue to be impressed. And this isn’t an opinion guys; this is fact.

U.S. Smartphone brand marketshare for 2015 (source: statisa)
U.S. Smartphone brand market share for 2015 (source: statisa)

According to statisa, the iPhone dominates the current smartphone market littered with many different brands, devices, and companies. Why has Apple, a company with one line of smartphone that comes out continue to have this much of a share over companies cranking out multiple smartphone lines every year? The answer is simple: Apple has perfected the smartphone.

The design, the operating system, the hardware inside, the features of the phone, you name it. All of these aspects continue to make the iPhone great (making iPhones great again). Yes, some Android devices may have stronger components, bigger storages, better cameras etc., but its the perfect blend of all the pieces together that makes the iPhone tower over the weaker competition. All of this, and I leave out the most important thing: functionality.

Functionality in an iPhone is much better than any Android phone I’ve ever used and owned. The iPhone is simply a smoother operating experience in its transitions, animations, multitasking, battery life. Its like upgrading to a brand new Audi, what a smooth ride, every time you hop in the driver’s seat and take it for a spin. After weeks of ownership, you can start to see a weakening in operation and delays in use on an Android phone. A couple months in, my iPhone shows now signs of slowing down.

Let’s face it folks, the iPhone is the best device you could buy. Sure, I’ll miss my expandable storage of my G4 (which is getting phased out of Android phones too), but for the best experience of a phone your money can buy, I’ll take it.