Apple is a shitty company but ok, as long as you're happy.
potustheplant
Some manufacturers do that and it sucks. But 1) that's a midrange phone that costs about half of what an iphone would cost 2) it's very gimmicky. The accesories idea is cool but it was never going to work and it made the phone overpriced for the chipset 3) this is something the manufacturer did, it's "android's" fault.
Next time buy from a brand that has a better reputation and stay away from gimmicks.
Well, sort of. The iPhone is a good option for people that have no idea what they're doing precisely because you're heavily restricted. Android gives you a lot more freedom. Which is why some people (or manufacturers) mess up their phones and then the users end up blaming the OS, even if it had nothing to do with their issues.
S9 is a crappy phone?
The hw? No. Samsung's android skin? Yes. One of the worst.
Regarding "my group", it's roughly 70% of the people that have a smartphone and I rarely hear people complain about their phone. The ones that do complain have a $150 5-year old phone usually.
I have stock android as well and it runs perfectly fine. Also, the OS does not need to be updated as much as it used to because it's been separated into modules that you can update from the Play Store. Only major changes require an OS update. Regardless of that, you do not need to update often to keep android running smoothly.
I don't know which phone you had because you're being very vague but it's likely that it wasn't actually vanilla android and the actual issue was either the skin from your manufacturer, the hw or both.
My dude, that's your carrier only. Buy an unlocked phone from a different store, it's not that hard.
You either picked crappy phones or installed random stuff on them that caused issues. Neither I nor anyone else that I personally know has had those issues with android.
It's also pretty slow
No my dude, tonality characteristics are about how each driver responds to each frequency signal. There's tons of research that goes into the materials and construction of headphone drivers, they're not all the same. Soundstage is also not subjective. Although I do not know how you can measure it, I've played audio through my open headphones to people and they genuinely cannot tell if the sound of an opening door for example is coming from the headphones or if it's real. That's the type of efect soundstage gives you.
So you've only tried a very siblant headphone (dt880) which isn't necessarily bad and a JBL wireless headset? Instead of reading so many forum posts, go to an audio shop and try the actual headphones before trying to lecture other people in things you have never experienced yourself. I'm sorry if it sounds harsh but you're trying to give advice on something you've never tried and have only read random forum posts about.
As I said there are plenty of audiophiles whose “lived experience” is that $2000 golden cables are necessary and that they can tell the difference between any $200 and $1000 DAC (even though a decent DAC in that price range already has a dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratio of 100-120dB which should be totally indistinguishable from perfectly clear audio for all humans
I am not one of those people. Even though there is snake oil in the industry, that does not mean that everything is snake oil. If a cable passes the continuity test then that's good enough. And regarding dacs, a lot of the advice I've read also says that going beyond $100 you won't find a big difference in sound.
Usability is kind of secondary
Usability, my friend, is king. When you get older and have to do tons of stuff, adding more things to the list ends up getting very annoying. Not just that, if you were to migrate to iOS for whatever reason, you'd lose the ability to eq your headphones. So an app existing and being maintained today and for 1 mobile os does not guarantee that the problem has been solved forever. You're depending on a random third party.
My man, do you have ears? Have you personally confirmed your theory? Because I (sort of) did. I've used earpods, earbuds (cheap sennheiser models like mx365 and mx200 and akg k312p), various headphones (AKG k44, k361, k712 pro, ath-m40x, sennheiser hd518 and hifiman edition xs). I've also always used eq when I can. Usually the ones from Oratory1990.
There are tangible and considerable differences between all of those headphones/iems. For example, no amount of eq is going to make a 5mm driver sound like a 50mm one. On top of that, the tonality characteristics of the driver can't be perfectly equalized to make all headphones sound the same. Soundstage is also not something you can eq for. No amount of EQ would make an Audio Technica ATH-M20X sound like a Sony MDR Z1R.
Additionally, have you considered usability? Not all platforms have a way to eq your headphones easily. Even if you can do it, it's not something integrated to the OS, most people don't even know what a low-pass filter and they do not know how to set it up. In other cases, such as android, you can use eq in your music player (I use poweramp for this) but it's not a system-wide eq. If one headphone is significantly better than another one out of the box then yeah, that has value.
So again, I ask, do you have any real-world examples for this theory of yours?
Even if productivity turns out to be the same, the 4-day work week would be better.