I’m very disappointed with my iPhone. Last Spring after a run I dropped my phone while fumbling with bringing in the garbage bin from the curb. Crack, the screen on my Samsung Galaxy S4 was broken. I really liked that phone and it was my second phone with the Android operating system so I was comfortable with it. But, when I went to buy a new phone I was drawn to getting an iPhone 6. Seems like a lot of the engineers at work had them. I have had an iPad since 2011 and always marveled at what a cool thing it was. So, just on a whim I decided to go with the iPhone 6.
Tomorrow I have an appointment at the Genius bar - yes, could not even get in this evening. It keeps locking up. It started last week on Thursday and progressed very quickly to the point every time I did something it would lock up. I could tell it was clocking as some process was hogging all the resources. So I went to the Apple support site and was instructed on how to reset and restore from backup. Luckily the most recent backup was less than 24 hours previous. Fortunately this resolved the issue just before my momentously disastrous trip, see 2016-05-23 post. I was happy with the performance until I noticed a little performance block Monday night and then more noticeable blocks Tuesday morning and an unusable phone by Tuesday night. Ugh! So, rather than repeat the same steps and get the same result I’m taking it to the Genius Bar to see if they can determine if there is an app that is causing the problem.
But prior to the lock-up issue I already had some serious beefs with this phone. My Samsung had the best texting keyboard. You can swipe and the autofill predictions were amazing. You could tell as you used it it learned such as people’s names and it gives you the three most likely next words so you can be super fast and have far fewer mistakes. On the iPhone if I type Hackson instead of my son’s name Jackson it does not correct or suggest Jackson - what? With my iPhone it takes me back about 5 years in functionality. Apple needs to understand how far behind they are. There is an add-on application available on the iPhone called SwiftKeys which is the actual app used by Samsung. But on the iPhone, when I use SwiftKeys the device will sometimes get confused as to which keyboard to display and there were plenty of times I had no keyboard available. So I eventually dropped this band-aid fix as it required me to reboot to reestablish a keyboard. I miss swiping and the Apple auto-correct is a joke.
Runkeeper is my handy GPS tracking app I use to log my runs. It’s great to be able to go back and visit your runs and look at the map of where you ran and to understand if you are progressing. Since moving to iPhone I have had numerous issues with the app. I’m not sure if this is all on Apple, but the one thing I’m certain is an iPhone issue are the times the phone GPS gets messed up and it makes it look like I’m running in circles. It recently said I ran the first 5 minutes at a 3 minute pace because when you add up all the distance from those nonsense circles it thought I had run well over a mile. That’s irritating when it screws up a run. I have had this happen several times, but never with my Samsung.
Another issue is the current two device authentication Apple is using. So now if I want to do anything related to Apple on one device it sends a text to another device with six digits to input on the first device. What? This is causing my kids to have to call me to see if my iPad got a code. Not good! Even my PC when accessing the genius Bar had to have a code sent. I hate this and only see minimal security benefit. Time for a new plan Apple.
My iPad no longer stays connected to the internet so it has lost its value. This does not bode well for Apple. I no longer have any reason to use Apple for anything as soon as I replace this phone. Even iTunes is obsolete, my kids use Spotify for all their music.