anonymoose

This is the parent's fault.

1) There should always be parental controls enabled on all devices so children cannot cause any trouble
2) Parents shod be monitoring the child's activity
3) Each purchase triggers an email from Apple, it always works, I have monitored this feature for years and the purchase notices always go out very quickly
4) The first month that the unapproved charges showed up should have caused the parent to lock the account(s) immediately since they thought that it was fraudulently

Heretical is an understatement, LOL. Its seems like someone twisted his arm to migrate to an iOS phone, and yes, if you are writing on an Apple-centric site and aren't saturated in Apple devices then something is not right. Its just impossible to have an opinion ion something yo haven't loved with for some time, and it makes you seem more list a person that wanted a writing job but is not already an expert on the complete platform and all its devices, in fact it seems that you're not much of a mobile user. How can I tell? If your priority is skinning and finding cheap models then your heart and or mind just in not deep enough into technology for us to trust that your opinion actually matters. When you write here, you are on a stage that most of us don't have and if you don't believe in your role completely then you are just reading the script and spitting out lines, which does us no good.

In my experience, both in Silicon Valley and traveling across the country, iPhone users tend to extract a lot more functionality out of their devices than Droid users do. Droid users get excited about skins and widgets because there is little depth to their usage so making it look pretty or placing the one or two functions they actually use on the home screen pretty much satisfies all the use they want from that device.

iPhone users tend to have a lot of apps of which they use often, they perform tasks, communicate and do meaningful things which makes their lives easier or enriches their lives or helps others. Doing something like accessing the filesystem is just not exciting nor useful to us because we want the functionality of the app, not to have to fuss with maintaining order in the filesystem. We have sync and share that work so we never have to dig down into the file system, which is an Eighties way to manage your computer, something that is just not needed, thankfully, on the iPhone of the 21st Century. Yes, Apple is bowing to pressure and allowing file system access in iOS 11 but it is not for any actual need, we have not needed it for ten years, no one has suffered for a lack of it, because there is no lack. If you have productivity software, like Keynote, Numbers or Pages then you can have multiple documents and all those documents are visible from those apps, no need to rummage around in the file system to get your task done.

Low cost iPhones have often been available. I recall several times getting "free" iPhones on contact, whose contract cost exactly the same as "free" Droids, so there is no excuse there. In fact, there are ads in my area for a free iPhone 7 (the current flagship model) without a contract. There are plenty of deals out there for those that look for them (and are sometimes patient, because they do come and go) so the cost argument really doesn't hold water in the big picture.

Adding SD cards is rarely helpful in the real world, in my observer of Droid users around me, because they invariably lose those tiny cards, i they left the one they need at home or its full and they can't/don't want to erase anything, or just get tired of having to futz through the file system because they can't ever find what they want when they are on the go (its a mobile device after all, we are actively on the go most of the time we use it, so fussing with a file system is a unnecessary drudgery) so that doesn't hold water, and if you really had to, you can get third party Lightning Port plug-ins that allow you to expand your photo storage greatly and they are just big enough that they are hard to lose or leave behind.

This story sounds like a writer that wanted a job and is grudgingly using Apple devices because he has to. It appears he has no use for them other than cashing a paycheck every week, which makes me wonder if I want to continue visiting Appleinsider every day because maybe the staff really doesn't understand Apple products to the depth that I want and need them to.