The Wide, Wide World of Apple

[Barrister]

So I have a "new to me" iPhone 5s sitting on my desk.  It was sitting on the office manager's desk for the last two days.  We're waiting for tech guys to wipe and set up the phone now. 

[Berkut]

did you put in rice to try to sap out moisture?

Yes.

You know that does nothing at all, right?

[Barrister]

What a clusterfuck this has been.  It took almost a week for me to track down the tech.  Then over the next week we discovered this phone was linked into the apple account of the daughter of the guy who used to have the phone, and they couldn't figure out how to un-link it.

So now I've been given an iPhone 5 that seems to work.  However the OS is 2 generations old.  I need to take it home to update the OS over wifi so that I can link it to my email and calendar.

[Barrister]

Although a pleasant surprise - for a gov't issue iPhone (i.e. cheap), it appears to be 32 gb memory.

[garbon]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/07/apple-airpods-launch-problems-with-wireless-headphones

Earth to Apple: wireless Airpod headphones are like a tampon without a string

Consumers are perplexed by Apple's new iPhone 7 AirPods because of one obvious oversight: that string is there so they don't get lost

Apple's new wireless AirPods, introduced today at the launch of the iPhone 7, deliver a "magical experience," the senior vice-president of marketing, Phil Schiller, promised.

They will disappear before your very eyes.

The AirPods look exactly like Apple's traditional earbuds, minus the cord. The cost of making your headphones five times more likely to fall irretrievably into a grate is a more than five times increase in price, to $159.

Apple is rolling out the AirPods alongside its new, headphone jack-free iPhone 7. In a presentation that denigrated the trusty (and conveniently universal) headphone jack as "ancient" technology, Schiller declared that the change was about something bigger than naked commercialism.

"The reason to move on, it really comes down to one word: courage," he said. "The courage to move on to do something that betters all of us."

The phones will come with wired earbuds that connect through the Lightning connector, a change that will unhelpfully preclude users from charging their phones at the same time they talk on the phone or listen to music.

(Schiller boasted that there are now more than 900m Lightning-adapted devices in the world today, which may be less a testament to the cord's popularity than its tendency to fall apart after a few month's use.)

But wired headphones are for those who lack the courage (and cash) to go wireless, right?

"It makes no sense to tether ourselves with cables to our mobile devices," Schiller said, apparently forgetting the meaning of the word mobile.

The AirPods will come with a little charging case (they only work for five hours before needing a charge), and have sensors that detect when they are in your ear. They include a microphone that beams toward your mouth so you can still talk on the phone. And they respond to touch, so you can tap on your ear to pick up or hang up the phone.

As far as style goes, the AirPods resemble the EarPods from the Season 2 episode of Doctor Who in which a megalomaniac billionaire has convinced the populace to purchase the wireless devices as a means to conduct communication and receive all their information, only to turn around and deploy them as a weapon that hacked into their brains and turned them into soulless, emotionless, homicidal metal automatons.

But the real problem with the AirPods is the obvious problem with the AirPods: they are simply asking to be lost.

The beauty of the headphone cable is not its tendency to get tangled up or its antiquated technology. It does not add anything to the primary function of the device.

The beauty of the headphone cable is just like the beauty of a tampon string: it is there to help you keep track of a very important item, and help you fish it out of whatever nook and cranny it might have fallen into.

Apple's apparent blindness to this blindingly obvious problem is perplexing. Perhaps Apple's vaunted design team would benefit from hiring a few more women.

[Liep]

Tampon or no tampon there's a queue on the Danish pre-order website.

[DontSayBanana]

I love it.  Apple has managed to go backwards in terms of its usefulness for audiophiles.  So now, not only are you compressing your music but unless your music app has shelled out the licensing to use the AptX codec (Apple may or may not have done this for the Music app in iOS, but knowing the AAC compression issue, I doubt it), you're limited to an average of 194kbps, with an absolute peak of 384kbps.  Nowhere near the 800kbps typically associated with lossless formats.

So if they want audiophiles to keep using the Music app on their iPhones for music, they need to roll out iOS 11 with the ability to copy lossless as well as AAC audio, and they need to license the AptX codec to keep lossless quality over Bluetooth bitrates.  It's not happening.

[Caliga]

Installed iOS 10 on my iPhone 6 today.  No issues so far.

[Liep]

Installed iOS 10 on my iPhone 6 today.  No issues so far.

I'm waiting to see how the internet reacts to iOS 10 on an iPhone 5.

[CountDeMoney]

Installed iOS 10 on my iPhone 6 today.  No issues so far.

Check out the emojis.  They replaced the revolver emoji with a green squirt gun with an orange safety barrel.   

[Liep]

Installed iOS 10 on my iPhone 6 today.  No issues so far.

I'm waiting to see how the internet reacts to iOS 10 on an iPhone 5.

They reacted well and I installed. A great iOS so far.

[Barrister]

iOS 10 has been fine on my iPhone 5.

Only slightly wonky thing is the 5 doesn't have the fingerprint sensor, but they've taken away "swipe to unlock".  So now you need to press the home button twice, with a pause in between, to unlock.  It's a PITA to unlearn that old muscle memory.

[MadBurgerMaker]

iOS 10 has been fine on my iPhone 5.

Only slightly wonky thing is the 5 doesn't have the fingerprint sensor, but they've taken away "swipe to unlock".  So now you need to press the home button twice, with a pause in between, to unlock.  It's a PITA to unlearn that old muscle memory.

There's no setting that can be toggled somewhere to reactivate swipe to unlock?  Ugh.

[Liep]

Got my iPhone 7 Plus, trying to use my settings from old phone required a software update to 10.02, that didn't work out well.

Trying again. It looks pretty though, perhaps too big (older phone was a 5).

[DontSayBanana]

Got my iPhone 7 Plus, trying to use my settings from old phone required a software update to 10.02, that didn't work out well.

Trying again. It looks pretty though, perhaps too big (older phone was a 5).

Just out of curiosity, if you were happier with the 5, why didn't you go for the SE, since it uses the same shell with almost the same feature set as the 6S?