There was a time when a new Mac or a new iPhone would fill me with joy, and delightful expectation. Now, it is just a matter of dread - can I transfer everything? Will it work? How many days will I be lost in the wilderness?
This week my iPhone X lost part of its screen functionality. No icon in the rightmost column would respond, despite restarts and hard resets. Only 3 years old. I took it out of it’s case and realised a few things:
- it’s so slippery it feels almost well-greased (so either I buy a case for it and benefit Apple a bit more, or I drop it and buy a new one, benefitting Apple more still)
- that case won’t fit the new one, the cheapest, a 5SE
- I cannot turn on screen rotation (requires a gesture starting top right, where the screen doesn’t work) and enter my Apple ID password, so I can’t erase the phone.
- yes, I have learned not to go to the thieves at Bell Aliant for a new phone, but to swap the SIM card into a new one. I suppose one day they will ask me why I still pay my bills when my ancient phone - on their records - won’t access their new network! If I go to them I have to get a new contract requiring me to pay twice as much for half the service, plus the cost of the phone. Canadians pay the highest rates for cellular in the world.
Eventually, I remembered I could erase it from a Mac by going to iCloud.com. If I had the 750CDN to throw away, I wouldn’t be unhappy to have a home button, or a phone that fits in the special pocket of Lee Valley pants. But 750 is a lot to me since I retired. I was perfectly content with the old phone, but there’s nowhere close that replaces screens, and my son destroyed the last phone he tried to do that on. Anyway, I’m on house arrest after a bone marrow transplant and I’m not supposed to go out and about.
Maybe, and here’s cock-eyed optimism for you, Apple will find that the market for new customers will be saturated, and then they will have to pay attention to us old users who know more about our Macs than the developers seem to, and improve the quality of their hardware and software to where it used to be in the old days. If I’m over-optimistic I hope you’ll be kind enough not to tell me!
I do have an old MBA running Linux Mint and it’s pretty good, though I’m not wild about helping my wife make her Android workphone work. I did manage to get around Google’s latest *sshole move blocking e-mails to gmail addresses that come from smtp servers without satisfactory security clearances, by setting an SPF record on my mail server. Maybe I’ll get to teach Apple a trick or two yet!