A couple weeks in now and am loving my 17 Pro Max overall. The pros
easily outweigh any quibbles, but here's what I've come across so far:
Pros:
- Camera - the main reason I'd changed in the first place, thanks to online photo comparisons and DXOMark's review. Testing low-light/night mode and 17PM beats the snot out of S25U. (S25U does win a couple categories, but 17PM wins more and more critical ones.) I never thought taking a photo of my computer's mainboard from 12ft away could be exciting until see the 17PM showing detail contour lines along the RAM modules' green LED row whereas the S25U showed a green blob. Who doesn't love shadow detail?!
- Battery life!! YouTube drains the battery 7% in one hour instead of (far more) on the new high-end Android I previously had
- iOS learning curve is surprisingly small
- Real-time voicemail transcription on screen when not answering a call was unexpected but is a spectacular feature
- Apps' quality - smoother and refined in experience, not anything as buggy as on Android where I had to reboot often
- Performance: Great matching of CPU and GPU power on top of battery life
- The new wallpaper that has the 3D effect thanks to gyroscope, and/or rendering the clock between foreground and background image elements is a real eye-catcher
- Liquid Glass - I love it! While I do like fan-created icons of color logo atop a clear/glass background, the OOTB experience with Glass and semi-transparent panels is nothing less than gorgeous.
- A small quibble: A couple rounded text boxes need a little more opaqueness to contrast the image under it for legibility and it's mildly irksome, but for all the major areas Apple did Liquid Glass right for 26.0 and the new 17-series. These teensy minor things just need slight tweaking and it sounds like the betas are addressing this with decent compromises with more transparency options and apparently an on/off switch for those who dislike it. Please don't get rid of it, the nuances while tapping are amazing and complement the 17 series' processing power perfectly.
- iTunes Match is positively lovely an experience as my old iTunes library was missing some bands (purchased before 2017 for the most part), but I had backups. These now are reintegrated thanks to iTunes Match and is well worth the entry fee.
- Local music library is always best
- iTunes/Apple Music is a change from Android's "lump any file into a folder" but I'm getting used to it and in most ways it's way-better. Nice to see >256MB/s AAC, too.
- Minor quibble: Haven't seen any context menu item to get artwork for the handful albums that have no artwork (including my 30 year-old Beatles 4-CD set, oddly), but the vast majority of re-integrated albums the artwork is being downloaded automatically and without issues. Looks so much nicer again. Haven't checked if it's HD-size artwork or not.
- The 2017 color line is bold and gorgeous. I have blue. Silver is a de facto standard that looks professional. Dark blue is professional while bold. Orange, a terrific bold hue, really shows off bold originality as well. A clear or transparent case can contrast and/or complement analogously the phone's color beautifully and creatively. (orange + green = harvest autumn, blue + green having an indescribable but alluring arrangement, et al.)
Quibbles:
- No way to restart phone, just pressing two keys for a shutdown option?
- Scheduler has a means to do an auto-shutdown, but not auto-restart. Would be lovely if an auto-restart feature was added. Not that I've needed to restart in all honesty, but it would be a perfect complement as another shutdown option to get around having to hold the power key...
- Two keys have to be pressed to bring up the shutdown option. Why not just the power button itself?
- Getting to App Library (the rolodex row of text in alphabetical order) requires an extra swipe. I'm used to the icons now and that's a better experience overall (so this quibble is really small), but Niagara launcher in Android just had me used to the rolodex.
- CarPlay prevents wifi internet browsing while in Park, and its handling of the music player prevents scrubbing on the timeline bar (I reverted back to the vehicle's built-in player where the timeline/scubber bar does work.)
- YouTube Music via CarPlay keeps saying "not connected" or timing out while connecting. Permissions for Siri, et al, are fully allowed so I'm at a loss as to why it keeps timing out and erroring out.
- There is no equivalent to Samsung's Adapt Sound for custom volume frequency alteration?
- Keyboard takes a lot to get used to, with no number pad or easy access to most punctuation marks (e.g. tap-hold on letter A to get the at symbol, etc) or emoticons. Using a third-party keyboard alleviates some of this, though the built-in keyboard does return from time to time. But I'm largely used to it now.
- sometimes get weird "no internet" message, which disappears after a couple retries. Connected via wifi and LTE at home, it's perplexing as it's the only device claiming there's an internet issue when there isn't so I'm sure this is a node-level problem. The next iOS update likely will fix this, if this is happening to other people.
- Bought a new transparent case, but am worried that the case might somehow rub off the coloring on the aluminum chassis if I keep swapping between clear and translucent green cases to contrast the phone's color with. (my mindset on this has got to be wrong! )
- No LDAC for iTunes? Not a big thing, the AAC standard beats MP3 by a margin and the higher bitrate is much appreciated. Especially for higher frequency noises like cymbals, but if LDAC is better then I'd hope it'll come down the pike
Again, the pros easily outweigh the quibbles, and I never knew of LDAC until a week ago.
A tangent, please correct me if the following is outdated or inaccurate: I almost splurged but held back on the watch due to minor nitpicks, the Watch Ultra 3 doesn't have BMI (Aura strap needed), direct BP measuring, or antioxidant readings (this being so new only one brand has the sensor). If Ultra 4 has antioxidant readings I'll buy on day one... I do know the 3 has hypertension detection capability, but had thought it took actual BP readings automatically. It does sound like the other health functions are accurate and might pick up the 3 if it does enough health monitoring functionality. (Note: I have no heart issues but the early detection feature could come in handy... or wristy...)
