Isn't the whole of Apple's money-tree founded on how they get people to upgrade all the time, instead of being virtuous people like me with three-year-old phones.
I'm not as virtuous as you yet - my phone's only 18 months old.
My phone is failing because Pokemon Go keeps freezing up whenever somebody sends me an email. And people keep sending me email.
I'm starting to think Apple is slowing down my computer because I haven't updated iTunes since 2012.
Can't believe it was 5 years ago that the reports from friends started coming in that iTunes had been ruined and we should keep the old version forever.
The claim is that they slowed down your phone to make it run better as the batteries got older- I don't know that they said they were extending battery life so much as making sure the phone kept working instead of dying completely. For example in cold weather an older battery won't have enough current to run the phone at full clock and would just shut off, this lets it stay on but run slower.
I'm just relaying my understanding of what they're arguing, I make no judgment about the truth of these statements.
I probably need to buy some Apple things soon- our iMac is ~9 years old, and I need more storage for backups (6 year old time capsule can't fully back up the desktop and our laptop.) Part of the reason the iMac is having trouble is it's running out of space, I think if the disk had been bigger it would still be usable. Apple are shits because they won't let you customize with the larger HDD (2TB vs 1TB) unless you buy the higher level processor and/or monitor size. I'm thinking of getting some kind of RAID-1 personal cloud storage instead of another time capsule because we have a google router now so I just need the storage not the wifi but not sure what the best option is.
Well, it's not about extending battery life so much as preventing random shutdowns.
What if I just want my phone to run faster on its current battery?
Don't upgrade iOS after you get your device. I'd take the battery deal, to be honest.
I definitely experienced the random shutdowns with 30-60% of my battery reporting full while jogging in cold weather, so slowing down my phone instead seems like a decent tradeoff. (Apple being Apple, of course they refused to say that that was what was going on.)
4: To make your Pokémon device more efficient, you could disable automatically fetching emails.
I upgraded my phone a few months ago, but before that I had a five-years-old one. The fall from virtue is painful. On the other hand, the camera is a lot better.
9.1: If I did that, the people I'm working with would know that I'm out catching Pokemon instead of at my desk.
Apple are shits because they won't let you customize with the larger HDD (2TB vs 1TB) unless you buy the higher level processor and/or monitor size. I'm thinking of getting some kind of RAID-1 personal cloud storage instead of another time capsule because we have a google router now so I just need the storage not the wifi but not sure what the best option is.
Just have a look at the QNAP/Synology ranges and see which one suits your budget/needs. Got a Synology 918+ and am very happy with it, but it's probably overkill for you if it's just for storage. Or if you really don't need the wifi at all, stick whatever size 3.5" drive you want into an external enclosure.
They have successfully made it impossible for me not to avoid updates. I was dedicated at avoiding updates but now you get really relentlessly driven to do so.
This cold is killing batteries for me. I can't even open my garage door by the keypad. I have to use the front door, like the assholes selling magazines.
By "if you really don't need the wifi", I mean if you don't need the storage to be networked. I realise now you were probably talking about the Time Capsule's router functionality.
5: I never thought of that. I have a computer with iTunes that I have not updated in that long. I don't use iTunes anyway. It's really slow and I blamed Windows 10.
14- Right, want it networked (ideally accessible from external as well) but don't need it to be a wireless router, Google device takes care of that. I'd hardwire to the google router, which is actually what I'm currently doing with the old time capsule.
For example, something like this, 8TB run as a 4TB RAID1, but a lot of people say the WD cloud products fail pretty often.
It's really slow and I blamed Windows 10.
Nice to see some even handedness here. Has anybody else found Windows 10 unstable since the last major upgrade?
18 Yes! It borked my sound so I tried to roll it back to the previous build only something went wrong and now almost all my apps won't launch. I've been taking my work laptop home until I can (get my reallly overworked IT support guy*) to fix it.
*There's only 2 of them and one's on leave till late January, this in an organization of +130 people with operating hots of 8 to 8 7 days a week.
I've decided I'm done buying electronics that can't be easily serviced. Replacing a battery is something one should be able to do at home.
And, if one should happen to drop one's Surface Pro 3 on the ground and crack the screen, one shouldn't have to A) mail it into Microsoft to get it repaired and B) not actually have them repair it, but rather have them send back a different, re-manufactured machine that doesn't have all the shit one already installed on one's hard drive.
20.1: I have a Galaxy Alpha, which apparently only like six people have. But I like it because I can change my own battery and because it has a solid piece of beveled metal around the rim which makes it easy to hold and has taken all the damage from the times I have dropped it.
Can't believe it was 5 years ago that the reports from friends started coming in that iTunes had been ruined and we should keep the old version forever.
Haven't people been saying that since iTunes 1.1?
Haven't people been saying that since iTunes 1.1?
Isn't it plausible that they've been right all along?
This seems like such a weird non-scandal that everyone is up in arms about. Which is not to say that Apple doesn't seem to be repeatedly screwing the pooch (in a bad way) lately.
As for networked storage, my several-years-old QNAP NAS is still going strong, and I recently swapped my old 1TB drives for 4TB drives, and it all went exactly as it was supposed to. These folks have hard drive failure rate data.
I've had iTunes running on my PC on a couple occasions, and it was such an amazing turd that I've wondered, with all the marketing effort Apple has put in to get people to switch to Mac from PC, why did they wreck this effort by having the one piece of Apple software that Windows people commonly interact with be so, so bad?
Then I remembered that I also hated Quicktime when that was a thing (is it still a thing?), and I've since concluded that Apple software is just trolling everybody.
iTunes 1.0 was a big improvement on Winamp. Let's give it that.
Winamp was awesome, though as I recall the did ruin it with some later iterations of the software. Maybe mulitimedia application developers just can't help themselves.
Ogged gets it exactly right in 24.
22, it was iTunes 11 released in 2012 that became completely unusable for so many people. It was totally redesigned for the first time in a long time, major cloud integration, constantly syncing and then having errors when it was unable to sync, hiding things in one place after syncing because they were also in another place, and a lot of reports of things actually being deleted because they didn't correspond to anything in Apple's database.
24, 28: you guys are such alien coneheads. Of course it's a scandal - it's very easy for a layperson to understand. And it feels "obvious" to any layperson that Apple chose to annoy the user into buying a new phone, because that's when most of us buy a new phone - when we're annoyed into doing so.
30: I thought Apple people buy the newest phone because of love.
Has anybody else found Windows 10 unstable since the last major upgrade?
Not unstable, but strange behavior that I need to track down (it seems to have changed what runs at startup, for example).
As a techie, what Apple did here seems plausibly well-intentioned but came out as being underhanded, especially the bit where it wasn't clear that you could opt for a battery replacement instead of a new phone. That kind of "good for the user" arrogance is usually our (Google's) department; good to see Apple catching up.
Also, YMMV, but I think replacing the battery in a modern-ish iPhone is quite doable at home. It's not made to be trivial, but iFixit will sell you the battery and necessary tools for about $25, and it was pretty straightforward the couple of times I've done it.
The underlying behaviour isn't scandalous, but the non-disclosure is. And it's part and parcel of Apple's refusal to give any meaningful diagnostic tools for iDevices.
I've had two Google Nexus phones, both of which ran ok until they stopped starting up. The first time one died, I was thinking about getting a new phone anyway, and it had been three years, so I got a new one. That phone didn't make it two years and for a while I ended up using a cheap, even older, Windows phone as a stopgap replacement.
Eventually, I bought an iPhone SE because the price dropped and it's the least expensive unlocked phone that's guaranteed to get security updates.
I just want to go at least three years without buying a phone and I'd be pretty pissed off to find out that Apple could detect that it's time to get a new battery and then use that information to make it seem like my phone was too slow for the modern internet. I'd take slow over random shutdowns, but I'd want to know why I was making that choice and whether that was the only option.
are time capsules: Someone told me that Apple was going to phase those out.
Really? Seems like a big profit center for them- let's take storage that normally costs $100, tack it to a wireless router that normally costs $50, add software we already have, and sell it for $400.
My recently-given up iPhone 5S constantly shut down with significant battery life left when under load. That's the behavior this is designed to prevent. It was exacerbated by cold weather, but, as it aged, "cold" went from sub-freezing bike ride to short walk in sub-50º weather.
Point being, old batteries fail under heavy load, so there's not really a way for them to run full speed without (sometimes) shutting down abruptly.
If your phone is slow all the time, that's a different issue. The software is designed only to slow things down under peak load, but something like checking the built-in weather app (with no other processes going on) shouldn't be slow.
On the other hand, the camera is a lot better.
So much better. I only got a refurbished 6S, so just 2 years newer, but the difference is so immediately obvious. I can hardly imagine how good the X phone is.
19.1 is horrifying.
I'm baffled by the hatred for iTunes. Every time a new version comes out, people wail and moan, and I keep waiting to experience whatever is supposed to be so awful. I've honestly no idea.
I mean, I guess it loads slowly? All I know is that Sonos infuriates me 100X more than iTunes.
a lot of reports of things actually being deleted because they didn't correspond to anything in Apple's database
Wasn't this tied to iTunes Match, which was optional and cost $$?
I will say that I'm not happy with how music is or isn't synced to my phone, since it's all available via the cloud, but this means that you can blow through data playing music you own, but not locally. There are settings to prevent that, but I don't have as much control as I'd like over what is and isn't stored on the phone. But some of that is just the problem of having way more music than phone storage.
Let's be honest here and assume Halford isn't reading this thread- a lot of people's early digital music collections were, shall we say, patched together from various files, such that metadata didn't match up to CD ripped or iTunes store standards. When they flipped iTunes over to favoring these sources, and it couldn't recognize a file that was an otherwise perfectly listenable audio track, it tended to delete or do strange things to them.
42: It screwed up my podcast collection a while ago (but I'm on Downcast now). It's not great at managing phones, which is probably its most important functionality. Too often it wants to do things its way and makes it difficult or impossible to do things in my way, so I avoid interacting with it and when I do it's always a huge hassle. (And since I try to do it so rarely, I usually have to update every time I use it.)
The main problem with iTunes for me is that it did not work well with very large collections of (usually questionably obtained) music. I have not completely converted to streamed music because I don't like to use data in the car which is the main time I listen to music.
46: Perhaps that's it: only a small fraction of my collection is of dubious provenance, and so there are probably a handful of files that, unbeknownst to me, no longer play, it's not enough to raise even a yellow flag.
I never really had any problems with 47 black when I synced via cable, and wireless syncing hasn't caused me any trouble.
*shrug*
What if I just want my phone to run faster on its current battery?
Seriously? Maybe you could repeal the law of entropy?
46 - SP, I have only three pieces of advice. First, be prepared to beat someone up on the first day. That way they'll know who you are. Even if you lose, you'll be a fighter. Second, don't join a gang. You may think its protection but they will own you. Own you. Third, tell your kids that it's a comfortable life in a low security environment. That will be a lie. But kids need an illusion.
It's interesting that this entire slowdown thing went undetected until someone ran Geekbench. Most reported iPhone slowdowns are caused by people looking at their friend's newer model. Apple should have reported the battery condition when it went into avoid-shutdown mode, but that's just when doing something like presenting a notification could lead to a shutdown.
Now that VW has been busted for rigging its pollution tests, I'll bet the car makers are putting in all sorts of crap to tighten the operating envelope to avoid getting caught out during unusual operating conditions like really hot days at high speed uphill. I suppose that will be the next scandal.
Normally I have no strong preferences between Windows 10 and OSX: My fingers expect the control key to be where it is in Windows, which makes the macbook irritating, but most things in both environments work. However, I spent an entire hour yesterday trying to get a scanner/printer to scan over the network in Windows, at one stage instructed to reboot the machine with only the scanner plugged into the USB (Who needs a keyboard or a mouse as well?) only to end up defeated. Ume flipped open her macbook and there the thing was, ready and waiting after a three minute fuss free installation of drivers. Gaaah.
So we went for a long walk to a folkie pub. Much more sensible.
A couple of years ago I had an old iPhone that was subject to the low battery problem, and it was really annoying. The battery charge indicator looked fine but if I increased the phone's workload, for example by taking a photo while the GPS antenna was on, the phone would immediately power itself off and it would not reboot until connected to a power supply. If Apple had come up with the "slow the CPU" approach sooner, I could probably have extended the life of that phone by another year or so.
Apple should, however, have been up-front about what they were doing. If they had told people, and if they had implemented a user option "don't slow the phone, I really like the way it suddenly shuts down without warning" then no-one could have complained.
(Who am I kidding, of course people would have complained.)
I'm considering getting a laptop and putting linux on it, because I don't think I can wait another year for Intel/Apple to increase the memory in the MacBook Pro, but I also feel too damn old to be fiddling with drivers.
Seeing tech people respond to this has been interesting. Outside the tech world it would be tough to find a person who would even consider that there could be a reason to intentionally slow down old phones other than "we want to force people to buy new phones".
I've been using linux on laptops for years, and it generally works okay.
I'm not going to repeat my long comment from the last laptop thread, but I got a new laptop a few months ago and it dual boots linux and windows fine. Only issue was I needed to change a clock setting for Windows to tell the right time.
Of course different models may not work as well and I decided not to get a machine with a graphics card because I didn't want to have to manage it with Linux.
I spend about 50% of every working day using Linux (on servers/containers, etc) but I still can't hack any Linux desktop OS I've tried. Maybe they've gotten better these days.
I'm considering getting a laptop and putting linux on it, because I don't think I can wait another year for Intel/Apple to increase the memory in the MacBook Pro, but I also feel too damn old to be fiddling with drivers.
Dell XPS-13 is my next purchase, or would be if I needed a laptop right now. It comes with Ubuntu, but I'd want to run Fedora on it. So yes, some fiddling with drivers, but all the hardware should be Linux-friendly.
In other computer topics: Boy, Intel sure shit the bed, eh?