iOS 13 for iPhone SE

Here’s a good reason to upgrade to iOS 13—significantly reduced ad and location tracking.

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Now you’re talking-nobody mentioned that at all., Thanks Adam.
That is the best reason (more than enough) for me to upgrade.

I upgraded my iPhone SE to IOS 13 quite a while ago and have installed several upgrades since. No show-stoppers, but I have encountered several annoyances.

Reminders still works (my Mac is still on Mojave), but it has some annoyances. One is that it seems to be doing some kind of soft match when I search for a reminder so that I get many more matches that I used to, e,g, I will search for “Pasta” and get matches on “pastry”, “paste”, “pistachios”. I don’t find this helpful.

Another problem is in Mail address auto-complete. For some reason, it no longer offers me my wife’s work email address when I start to type her name. In iOS 12, it would offer me both her home and work email addresses, now only her home address appears until I type nearly all of her work address. Strange and annoying.

I’ve also had the camera go into an odd mode a few times where it shows nothing but fuzz on the screen. I do a double-tap, and swipe it away and that fixes it. (I call that quitting the app.) I’ve seen problems with other apps, like hangs, that are resolved the same way. I guess I cannot say these are new problems with iOS 13, but I don’t recall seeing as many problems like this with iOS12.

I believe I’ve encountered some other glitches, but I don’t recall all of them. As I said, no show-stoppers, but I’m disappointed to see these problems in things that used to work smoothly.

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Thanks -glad to know

That answer is a bit misleading Adam. It’s quite possible to turn off location tracking in iOS 12. What’s changed is that users are more aware of the options available to them and keen to cut off some of this tracking. If I’m missing something about iOS 13, please let me know. I’m surprised there isn’t a TidBITS article covering such improvements in infinitely more depth than the reference you provided.

The only updates you need to do are the security updates. Most updates to Apps are not good for users, but come with shoddy coding due to changes in code structure and lack of oversight, IMHO. If you like what an app is doing for you, stick with it.

The main benefit of keeping your iPhone software fairly up-to-date is enhanced security. It’s a jungle out there, and Apple releases very few security updates for older versions of iOS and MacOS.

Yes. One should do the security updates for the OS they are using.

My iMac can’t go past High Sierra and I’m using iTunes 12.6.5.3 as it was the last to allow iOS app management. So what about USB sync (I’ve never used WiFi Sync)? If I install iOS 13 will I still be able to sync and manage my iDevice with iTunes 12.6.5.3 and MacOS High Sierra via USB?

Yes, but iOS 13 also continues to prompt periodically, so users don’t set and forget. If you’re completely on top of controlling your location manually, you can do so equally as well in previous versions of iOS as well. But most people have no idea, and even for those who do, it’s hard to remember to keep checking. I last wrote about this in

I haven’t seen any issues with USB sync and iOS 13. The “issue” ultimately appears the same for USB as for wifi. It’s not that sync won’t work, it’s that it can’t be initiated/canceled or monitored from iOS anymore. The entire menu for that in Settings > General has disappeared with iOS 13. Initially I thought that was some kind of bug until more and more people reported it gone and we realized that Apple had simply removed it on purpose without of course bothering to point it out (and none of the reviews I’ve seen noticed it either).

You have to monitor and/or manually start/stop syncing on the Mac side if you choose to do that. On the phone side nothing’s left apart from that rotating circle arrow thingy in the status bar. For USB that’s probably not an issue because you’re most likely within a few feet of your Mac anyway (Lightning-USB cable length). But for wifi sync where your phone and your Mac might be much farther apart this can be a real bummer.

Now in Apple phantasy land there’s no issue really because you can just set up wifi sync to work automatically and that’s the end of it. Fire and forget so to say. But at least in my experience that’s not the way things really work. I wouldn’t say that’s on iOS 13. It’s just as likely iTunes or Mojave, or any combination of those three. Bottom line, auto wifi syncing doesn’t always work reliably. Sometimes it needs to be “reminded” to initiate. Sometimes iTunes needs to be restarted (both issues appear to occur more frequently with iOS 13 though). And all of that becomes much more of a pain when you no longer have the ability to monitor on your iPhone what it’s doing in terms of sync after you plug it in, let alone being able to stop/start a wifi sync on your iPhone. When things appear to misbehave, I now need to wander across the house, go to my Mac, check iTunes there and restart iTunes and/or sync, only to then possibly, hopefully go back to bed and see that now my iPhone is actually properly syncing over wifi. With iOS 12 that could all be done form my iPhone.

But again, if you’re syncing over a USB cable that’s not likely to really be a bother.

Thanks. I agree removing the ability to start/stop sync from iOS was a really stupid move on Apple’s part. Sounds like Apple is trying to force iDevice users to only use iClod. Apple needs to clean their upper management and get back to pre-Cook days.

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I really hope it’s not just Apple pushing users towards iCloud. For one, having several independent backup strategies is always a good thing. But also, iCloud syncing is syncing. It’s not a versioned backup. iTunes backups are by default not versioned backups either, but they can be made to be. It’s good to have both options at our disposal. Using the existence of one as an argument to discard the other would be silly.

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iMazing does a wonderful job of providing versioned backups and keeping all backups local. I do all my file management and backup via iMazing not iTunes. If it weren’t for iMazing, I wouldn’t have tried an iPhone again (okay and a nod of the hat to @ace and his eternal, if often unwarranted, optimism about Apple). iMazing is life changing and liberating software.

I currently sync an iPod Touch running iOS 13 to a Mac running 10.12 (Sierra) using a USB cable and the latest iTunes Apple provides for Sierra. It all seems to work as expected.

just chiming in to say I’m syncing two iOS 13 devices via USB to a Mac running High Sierra, haven’t had issues.

Thank you for the replies, David & Seth, I may try iOS 13 on my old iPad Mini 4.

…with the caveat that not all devices are eligible for iOS 13. My partner has an iPhone 6s plus, and it can only go to iOS 12.

(edit: probably an iPhone 6plus)

Your partner must have an iPhone 6+, because the 6s+ (as well as the SE) can install and run iOS 13. In my observation the 6s runs 13 just fine.

That’s why I won’t be using my backup iPhone 6! The iPad Mini 4 can go to 13.