The first smart phone I got was a Blackberry. At the time I was quite happy with it. The iPhone came along. I was in the US at the time, and it was only available with AT&T, and their service had so many holes where I lived. Therefore I went the Android route with a Motorola Droid. I rather liked its slide out QWERTY keypad. In fact I recall that I positively didn’t want a touchscreen phone!
Over the next few years, I upgraded. I moved to England, and for a while ended up with a fairly cheap HTC phone — a Wildfire. It was quite underpowered, even back in 2011, but it got me a contract, rather than an expensive prepaid, pay-as-yoiu-go option.
I moved onto an HTC Desire, then I got a Samsung Note 1. I loved the stylus, although I ended up using it less than I thought I would. It worked though. Then a Note 3 which seemed lightning fast in comparison. My wife and I also had Samsung Note tablets.
Meanwhile though, my wife was getting more and more frustrated with her ever-crashing Windows laptop. It wasn’t just Windows, I think the laptop was beginning to fail hardware-wise too.
Anyway, I took the plunge and bought her a MacBook Pro for Christmas 2014. She loves it. It’s in daily use, and I’m typing this on it right now.She works for a large pawnbroker chain, and they had a 16GB iPad Mini 2 going cheap, so I purchased it, just to try one out. I was impressed with the size (to be honest my Note 12.2 was just too big to be that portable). I was also impressed with the quality of the iOS apps compared to Android.
My Windows desktop gave up the ghost. As a replacement I purchased a Mac Mini. That was ideal, as I didn’t need anything else, as my keyboard, mouse, printer and monitor was working fine. I didn’t need one of the new ‘complete’ systems that High Street retailers tried to push on me when I went to look in their stores. I rapidly filled the iPad mini 2, and my Christmas present in 2015 was an iPad Mini 4 with 128GB.
Our Note 3 phones were out of contract in the fall of 2015, but we went over to a SIM only plan as we felt there was more life in them yet. However, having now partly got into the Apple ecosystem, the Note was the odd man out.
In 2016 we took the plunge and got a 256GB APple 7 plus each, on a two-year contract. Right now, there’s still a year to go on those. We’re not looking to upgrade this year in any case. We’ll see how the iPhone X pans out over the next twelve months, and look at our options in late 2018.
Taken in 2017 in Oxford 