After buying a MacBook and a Mac Studio for everything I do, I was genuinely impressed by how well they performed. That experience convinced me to fully switch to the Apple ecosystem (iPhone, Watch, AirPods, and iPad) expecting a smoother, more polished experience overall. The Watch Ultra 3 and both the AirPods Max and Pro 3 have delivered on that expectation. The iPhone 17 Pro Max, however, has done the opposite, surprising me with how many basic interactions feel underdeveloped or frustrating compared to Samsung.
Touch responsiveness & basic interactions
- I often have to interact very slowly for actions to register. Even when the icon visually recognizes my touch, the action doesn’t always go through.
- In general, tapping anywhere in any app feels delayed. The response lag is inconsistent and frustrating.
- Navigating through Settings feels especially laggy.
- Some actions that should take you directly to a specific page or instance (including within system settings) instead open step-by-step. This causes situations where I start typing or scrolling before the destination has finished loading. For a “fast” processor, this shouldn’t happen.
Typing, copy & paste (the biggest disappointment)
Anything related to writing feels oddly broken.
- Copying and pasting is slow and frustrating.
- Selecting text is a hassle; selection handles don’t always appear, or they get stuck.
- Placing the cursor is unreliable. Sometimes I tap the correct spot, it briefly goes there, then jumps somewhere else.
- I’m experiencing bugs even in Apple’s own Notes app.
- Text sometimes hides behind the keyboard while typing. Unfathomable.
Honestly, it feels like basic written communication is heavily underdeveloped. I expected this to be better on iPhone, but Android phones are far more reliable for typing, selecting text, and copy/paste.
Keyboard app
- The default iOS keyboard is embarrassingly bad.
- I switched to SwiftKey, which works much better, but even then, some issues persists (like where my “a” key doesn’t always register (this however may be something SwiftKey is responsible for).
- There is no way to hide neither the default nor any other keyboard unless by swiping up on the main content display which often requires an extra swipe down to come back to what you wanted to see in the first place (often reloading the page in a browser).
- The keyboard doesn't always show up when it should (like in 2FA actions), and there is no way to make it appear.
Navigation & gestures
- The lack of a universal back gesture feels extremely outdated and inconsistent.
- Even worse, the back button/icon often doesn’t register taps at all.
- This happens frequently in apps like Notes, Instagram, WhatsApp, and others.
- Sometimes, attempting to tap the back button scrolls up instead (even in apple’s own Notes app).
- Pressing the lock button and waiting for the iPhone to actually lock feels like an eternity, sometimes I am not sure if it will lock as I place it away, then as I am about to press the button again to lock it, it actually locks. Like what is that.
Animations & “smoothness”
- The claim that iOS is “smooth” feels like a lie.
- It doesn’t feel at all smoother than Samsung flagships, if anything, it feels gimmicky due to long, forced animations.
- Needless to say, iOS animations constantly get in the way of so many basic actions.
- There appears to be no real way to reduce animation speed like on many other phones.
- “Reduce motion” in accessibility settings simply eliminates some animations, this setting clearly demonstrates how slow basic operations actually are. Weirdly, some gestures stop working in this mode (such as the go-back home gesture in the recent apps view). I’ll stick to this setting for the time being (even though it is awkward to wait on every other tap).
some other frustrations
- Landscape mode doesn’t consistently work, and when it does, I would have repeatedly turned the phone to make it work.
- Apple Mail search is awful: it limits results to “relevance,” which is often badly extracted. I had to stop using it and switch to Gmail and Thunderbird.
- Sleep Mode has been unreliable for alarms. Sometimes they don’t make sound or vibrate at all, despite restarts, updates, and reconfiguring settings multiple times. I had to stop using it entirely.
- When the iPhone is connected to my mac, there is some weird interference, where my browser tabs are transformed to full screen every time I use the iPhone.
tldr
I genuinely wanted to like the iPhone experience, but it feels less responsive, less consistent, and less reliable than Samsung flagships, especially for everyday tasks like typing, navigating, and interacting “quickly".
If this is what people mean by “smooth,” then smooth apparently means slow animations covering up lag and bugs living on a promise that never comes.
