Conclusion
Five years down the road, the iPhone 11 seems to hold quite well. The operating system is tight, there's no doubt about that. With Lockdown Mode on, adblocker in place, and music in VLC, it's almost usable for my taste. The hardware is solid, albeit the audio and the battery have deteriorated, and I've not seen the same thing with my One Zoom, for instance. But then, iOS 18 seems way smoother than how the Motorola's phone copes with modern workloads.
You can't remove some of the annoyances, like Face ID setup and Bluetooth, those will forever be in your way, and you must work around them. But, at the end of the day, you can get the job done, although the actual usability model will be different from Android. That's the baseline you must accept if you wish to use this device. So, yes, it seems the initial cost of the iPhone 11 has paid off, in terms of long-term viability. If you're willing to use the device for its entire life span, you're hitting good annual cost-value ratios, for sure. But that does not mean it's perfect or superior to everything Android, especially if you find a nice, friendly device with decent support and good hardware. Alas, if only there was a way to take the best of both worlds ...
A second question: could Dedo use this phone for good? I'm not sure. My impression of the ecosystem has improved, considerably, over the years. I now understand and respect the logic behind the iPhone and the iOS. I might even be willing to try this, if I were given a phone for free. Hello! But I think I'm still too much of a peasant to fully immerse myself in this world. Some things simply rub me off the wrong way, and I can't shake them off. The address bar being at the bottom of the interface in Safari, the gestures, little things like that. However, I really like the Lockdown Mode, I like the smooth upgrades and relatively simple privacy management. And thus, undecided, more optimistic, yet still hesitant, I must end this piece.
www.dedoimedo.com
