My daughter's boyfriend had terrible luck with several Android phones, both hardware and software.

For all I know, you are old as I am and more computer-savvy. But speaking strictly for myself, I had my first PC in 1985 or so (Amiga), and was working in a computer store and studying CS at that time as well. I have a boatload of PC's since then. We have two laptops running Windows in the house that are borderline unusable. In fact the one with Vista IS unusable. My wife's HP is rapidly becoming unusable as the POS that is Windows bloats and clogs up and incessantly updates. Oh but we could be doing this and that and this.... gag me. The Vista on our Dell laptop is an absolute embarrassment of an OS. I get irate just thinking about it. The machine has been basically unusable for years. It won't even start up reliably- it goes into "recovery mode" about half the time on regular start ups after being shut down properly.... it flat sucks.

Contrast that with any Mac running OSX or above. Rock solid and it doesn't change. It doesn't let everyone and their brother into your OS and gradually degrade as everyone gets a piece of your computer. It just works.

I made my living for years on a G4 Mac running ProTools (very processor-intensive recording software). I'm talking 8, 10, 12 hour days. I can remember ONE ProTools crash. OSX contained the crash, stayed "alive", and in fact fixed the whole situation in a couple minutes. It was frankly astounding.

My iPhone 4 has been in my pocket for several years and still works great. It's my primary means of Internet interface. I'm typing this post on it. In that time I think it's crashed (software) once, maybe twice. To say I'm a fan is an understatement. The stability of the thing is amazing. The hardware is durable.

The wannabes can slap fancy gewgaws on their copies but they aren't Apple, not even in the same ballpark. Apple has a huge track record of providing me stable, high quality computing devices.