Even if they don’t end up fully switching it doesn’t matter. Some might switch, some might try dual booting. But saying they are going to switch is free press and may convince more people to try it so that’s still a win.

Just tried it. Top result is… Sony Xperia 10VII

I have the 10vi. It’s pretty good for the money I paid (~300€). The UI is very close to plain android which is nice and doesn’t have a billion extra apps pre-installed like Samsung. The battery has been great so far. MicroSD and headphone jack are great features and I think you can also unlock the bootloader.

Having said that, some issues I’ve had that may or may not exist in other versions:

• The lock screen is buggy as hell, way too many accidental fingerprint unlocks and camera bugs that have persisted across updates.
• In Europe (different countries) it’s only ever gotten 5G once.
• Sony is doing something weird with its camera hardware. Any apps that try to use the camera outside the official app are having issues focusing and one app was actually crashing. This is not an everyday issue but would be a problem if you want to use a third party camera app.

I’d still recommend it but maybe try to find a discount cause Sony overcharges a lot.

Many companies will just buy in bulk and give the same thing to everyone. I’d rather use Linux but I understand they don’t want to deal with different environments. Also yeah, Apple has made it very difficult to emulate MacOS so it’s easier to buy that and emulate everything else.

How about getting the people who pay you to buy you over-priced hardware?

If it’s something specific like what you mentioned, just search for relevant articles with lists of recommendations. For more general themes you can go to goodreads (or similar), find some reviews you agree with on other books you liked and see what else the reviewers liked. Or do the same with people you know if you have similar tastes. You would think LLMs would be good at recommending books but every time I’ve tried with chatgpt the results were pretty bad but YMMV.