I'm no Apple fanboy but I do quite like a fair few of their products, and this argument is a very common one, but it always disappoints me a bit. This is the 21st century, technology is not solely about function and it hasn't been for a very long time, if ever. Technology is like any other product we buy and out of everything we own, there is something intrinsically personal about a mobile phone, we want it to do more than just function well.
Okay, I'll admit I sound like Jony Ive at a typical Apple keynote with that sentence but the look and feel of a piece of technology matters to a lot of people, and to me this year it ended up being the deciding factor on my choice of phone. At the end of the day, any flagship phone does a great job of everything. Most of these things are faster than the £900 laptop I bought at the turn of the decade. Whether you've got an iPhone or an S5 or a Z3 or whatever - it'll have a nice sharp screen that probably has more pixels than my telly, it'll have a camera which blows me away, it'll run all of my apps at breakneck speed, etc. I've put a lot of work into picking my next phone and these little extras that all the Android flagships have are not enough to tempt me (even after spending a lot of time trying them in person) because the differences are so minute in my ordinary usage because the iPhone already does what it does well enough for my purposes. But where Apple wins is in the design - in the look and feel of the product because that's something I notice in every single instance of using the device. Like a car, I don't want it to feel and handle like crap - why buy a Rolls Royce when you could buy a Mondeo? Because a Rolls Royce is ****ing awesome! When deciding my next phone the only place where I could really feel and notice the difference was in the feel itself. I don't want some plastic fantastic crap so that was half of the Android flasghips out of the water. I don't want a glass body either so that's most of the others. Money is no object so that's all of the financial concerns out of the water. The iPhone is a solid piece of metal that feels amazing to hold and use. The One M8 comes close but the HTC overlay is a bag of balls. It's the build quality that I notice when I hold that little guy. I know some people won't get this but I suppose it's just a different way of looking at things. As a slightly geeky CompSci pupil you'd expect me to be all about function but I still choose the 6 Plus because of how great it feels in my hands.
Shirts make a better analogy than cars. I could buy a shirt from Tesco and it'd have buttons, it'd have a collar, it'd be made of fabric... yep, it's a shirt! But I'd still rather buy a Ralph Lauren shirt, as would many young people. They do the same thing, hell the Tesco shirt does the same thing for a tenth of the price, but that RL shirt feels ****ing amazing and looks amazing. The iPhone feels amazing and looks amazing. Obviously that applies more to fashion than technology, but we don't have to live in this grey depressing world where the only thing we care about is what the gadget does, there's something so very USSR about that. The way a piece of technology makes us feel matters too. Some people will get that, other's won't. As I said, there's something very personal about a mobile phone, we never go anywhere without it.