Yup, there's a reason I'm still rocking it. Spec wise the 7a legitimately seems like a downgrade, and that's excluding the lack of headphone jack.

Other than the palm pre, my first smartphone was the galaxy nexus. It's still probably my favorite smartphone ever -- samsung hardware and google software both going full throttle really is the ideal, but for some reason they just don't play ball like that anymore.

Check out the official Asus support forums before you buy.

I got a ZenFone8 when it came out and was very satisfied with it at the time. Then, a month later, posts started popping up with people reporting that their phones just randomly rebooting and bricking. I think there were a few hundred cases reported. To this day, there is no official response from Asus. I used to carry a backup phone with me every time I was away from home for longer than a day because I was afraid that my phone could die at any moment.

Also, every update seemed to introduce a new bug that only got fixed in a month or so with the next update. So we had broken face unlock for a month, broken Google Pay, broken notifications, among other things.

I haven't been following reports for the ZF9 or ZF10, but I think they had similar problems.

To top it all off, the official unlocker / root tool from ASUS has been disabled for over a year by now, and nobody knows when it will work again.

All in all, ASUS phones (at least the ZenFone line) do have great hardware, but official support is abysmal.

I'm clearly out of the loop... What do you mean by going full Apple?