Cheap or nah?

This is one of the most difficult challenges in my life. Those who know me can surely vouch for me when I say that I’m cheap. I just really don’t like paying more when I can pay so much less.

SOMETIMES.

Although what I said can be a good trait, it can also be very bad when you find yourself in those moments where you don’t have a choice. Here’s an example: I
went to a trampoline park where they made you pay for a cup of water. Now, its not like I didn’t have the money (it was somewhere around 50 cents), but for me the problem was that I was PAYING FOR A CUP OF WATER. How could I in my right mind pay for something that I seem to have too much of at home?! Such a thing was unthinkable. So, obviously, I just bid my time and once I got home, I downed a good 4 cups of cold water from my fridge—FOR FREE.

I had almost the same experience when I went hiking once. In order to get to the trail, you had to take a bus. At the end of the hike, you had to wait for the busses to come back so that they can take you back to your car. No joke, the line to the

Totally where I went hiking

bus was somewhere around 2 hours long. After you finish a hike, of course you’ll be thirsty, no? Well, a bottle of water was somewhere around $5—and they had no drinking fountains! Those geniuses got SO many people to pay like 10x the cost that a water bottle should be just because they knew that the people had no other choice! (I said geniuses because although it sucks to be the recipient of that injustice, they made so much money off of everyone that bought water :D)

Moral of the stories? I am VERY cheap.

But not always.

Here’s an example. I was trying to get some in-ear headphones recently that were of decent quality and still sounded nice. The obvious choice were the Apple EarPods. Look at the picture. Can you tell which one is fake if I was wearing them at school or something? No you wouldn’t be able to. Yet I would know that they were fake because I bought them AND (most importantly) because the sound quality would not even be close to the level that they should be. In this case, I would’ve bought original headphones.

Of course, I wouldn’t get them right from the Apple Store because they would be crazy expensive. I would get them somewhere else for a lot cheaper, probably Amazon :D.

Point is, sometimes you should pay more and get more out of it and be super cheap and get your money’s worth on it.

Here’s another area that is very important to me: my cell phone. I always try to upgrade to the newest phone, even if there’s not much different from its predecessor. For example, I paid about $100 more than an iPhone 6S to get the iPhone 7. Why? I knew that the iPhone 6S will go way down in price next year and when I sell my 7, I will be saving a lot more money for the amount of cash I save because of the 6S price drop. Here’s what I’m trying to say: it is better to dish out another $100 every year (along with the money you make from selling your old phone) and upgrade to the newest phone instead of having to come up with $1000+ (judging by phone rates these days) to buy a brand new phone once your super old junkie phone is worth nothing anymore.

These are just my opinions about how much money to dish out on stuff. Hope you enjoyed J

I conformed to society?!

The day has come. Two years ago I never would’ve thought it a possibility. Most of my friends are still in shock.

I GOT AN iPHONE.

In order for you to understand this, you must know the backstory of my “beef” with Apple.

You see, I’ve been at it with Apple ever since I knew about them. I’ve been an Android user since my first phone. I probably inherited this “anti-Apple” gene from my father, who hates the company as much as I do — or did.

I had many arguments against iPhones (some of which I still stand by). For example, I hate the fact that iPhones don’t have back buttons. The back button is an amazing feature that Androids have had since their day one. It basically functions as an “undo” button that is super easy to access because it is right next to the home button. The other button you see is called the menu button, which is almost as handy as the back button. Since on Android app settings are found within the apps themselves and not the settings app (which is a pain to always go to, for the record), that button will open up the settings of that app so that you can tweak whatever you need to without closing the application. Another one of my many arguments against Apple is the fact that it is less customisable — so much so that people jailbreak their iPhones just to unlock features that Android has had for a long time (i.e. home screen scrolling effects). I love the fact that Android has its own app

Photo Irish Typepad 2016 © (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

drawer where you can see every single app on your device and then has a home screen where you can put really nice widgets (iOS widgets suck) and all the apps that you want to focus on. I acually really enjoyed the fact that if you didn’t like how the widgets looked or you wanted to expand your selection, you could easily go to the Google Play Store and download more. Speaking of the Google Play Store, I still think that it is so much better than the App Store on Apple devices. There are so many paid apps on the App Store that are free on android, such as Alto’s Adventure. There are also many ways to get apps that aren’t even on the Google Play Store using the likes of .apk files. The Ringtones are also super easy to create and download–especially with some neat apps such as Zedge. The notification drawer was so much more incorporated into daily use of an android device, too. You would pull it down to find one place where you can see all of your notifications, a lot of quick settings such as WiFi and Bluetooth, and a quick button to open the settings app. Also, probably one of the greatest features out there right now is that all of android’s flagship devices have a headphone jack 🙂

The above paragraph was what I argued against iOS devices, yet my friends all around me fought against that point of view with leaning toward’s Apple’s take on cell phones. One of their arguments was the fact that androids used their resources very inefficiently. For example, watch this speed test video between the two top-tier phones of each OS. Although the iPhone 7 has half of the GB of RAM that the S7 does, some could still argue that it out-preformed the S7 in speed. Another argument that they used against me was the lack of the ultra-handy control center. As you can see from the picture on the right, there are many shortcuts native to iOS devices that androids don’t have, such as camera and calculator shortcuts. Lastly, the most prominent argument for the iPhone was the lack of bloatware. The only way to remove bloatware on an android device is to root your deveice (which voids your warranty), while you can delete just about all of it on Apple devices.

So then what is the point of arguing, you may ask? Well, much like some people have certain sports teams that they support, and I do too (a blog for another time), I also identified with android as my own “team” and my friends did the same with Apple. Personally, I wanted to get the “opposition” to convert to my team so that they could see the true features that androids have, because many people just choose iPhones because everyone else has them and they don’t take the time to see what else was out there (I call them iSheep :D). Here’s a chart about phones in the USA:

You see, in the US, my team was losing! I couldn’t let that happen! Yet I had one benefit, though. Here’s a chart about worldwide sales:

So yeah, that was the reason for arguments. I wanted my team to win EVERYWHERE!

So who won? We resolved that nobody won, it was just a matter of personal preference. Some prefer the iOS look as opposed to the Android OS feel. Some prefer the LG and Samsung and other major Android designers to Apple’s take on cell phone design–and there’s nothing wrong with any of those things. The difference between the preferences would also mean the size of your wallet (Apple  Samsung) –just throwing that out there because I’m not a 100% fan either way B)

So how did this affect me?
It got me to think. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been an android loyalist my whole life. The only experience of iOS that I got was via YouTube, friends’ phones, and old iPads. I decided that I needed to try these devices out on my own before I could make a real decision on my preference. I posted my old Samsung Galaxy S7 edge on Craigslist, found a killer deal for an iPhone 7 ($525 for the 128G model with a bunch of other accessories) online, and now I’m using it as my daily driver. I don’t want to say what my preferences are as of a week later, but if you want I’ll post a blog about it later on. let me know down in the comments and give my blog a good ole’ follow and then we’ll talk 😀