Transcription

Just a few days into my iOS challenge, I started to look a little differently at the Apple users in my life. They describe Apple products with marketing slogans like, it just works, as though they actually believe them. And it made me wonder, does Apple have one version of their products for the true believers, and then a different one for the scrubs like me? Because my time with the iPhone 16 plus has been absolutely riddled with unintuitive design choices, unnecessarily limited functionality, and some of the weirdest bugs that I've encountered on a supposedly finished product in years. But Mama Sebastian didn't raise no quitters, so I've stuck it out for more than the month that I promised, and I've compiled a lot of thoughts, both from myself and from helpful members of our community who see the world through more pink lady lenses. And some of their points were extremely valid. Turns out, I really was just holding it wrong. And over time, there's a lot about iOS that I've learned to love even on my own. But there's also a lot that, well, to say how I really feel, I'd probably have to use language that might not sit well with my sponsor. G.Skill, featuring a cast latency of 36 and 6,000 megatransfers of effective speed, their Trident Z5 Neo series of DDR5 memory is a great pairing for any black or white themed AMD build. Check it out using our link today. Let's kick this off with some positive vibes. I am a big fan of the app library. I know it isn't new, but as someone who hasn't daily driven an iOS device in a while, it's new to me, and any effort to organize the pure chaos that most of us carry around in our pockets is much appreciated. Like finally, the ability to put your icons anywhere you want. I also appreciate the intuitive and slick way that iOS handles switching between picture in picture and background media playback. I mean, how cool is this? As for my other primary use of my phone, you know, phone calls, that got a big improvement too. I get so many different kinds of calls these days. Phone, Teams, WhatsApp, whatever. And iOS streamlines this experience by unifying the interface between all these different apps, which is especially nice when I'm in the car. It even consolidates my call logs, so I don't have to remember who prefers what when I mash a contact to call them back. Multi-widget stacks are super cool. I don't actually know if they're new or not, but I don't really care. Quick access and high information density always get a thumbs up from me, and I use them all the time to quickly check the weather, quickly check my calendar. Now, I've heard that these are a thing on newer Samsung devices as well, but look, this video is not a comprehensive comparison matrix of every software feature that's ever existed. It's my thoughts on coming back to iOS after an extended absence. And some of those changes really are refreshing. Screenshot management has leveled up in a big way and is full of nice-to-haves. Like, I love the ability to quickly delete rather than archive my screenshot after I've shared it with someone. And I love the little pop-up in the Dynamic Island to help manage my AirPods. If they're paired to my laptop already and I'm sitting working, but an incoming phone call comes in, it'll be like, hey, want me to grab those? And I'm like, yeah, thanks. Actually, any sort of interaction between the iPhone and other Apple devices is pretty great. Like my Apple Watch, unlocking without needing to mash in the pin if I have my phone unlocked nearby. So efficient. Speaking of efficiency, I probably plugged this thing into my nightstand to charge maybe four or five times over the entire month plus that I was using it, which probably sounds bonkers. But what I found was that just plugging in during my daily commute, plus the occasional longer trip, was enough to keep me going for literally a week at a time, unless I was binging a show all day or something. iOS then noticed this and piped up with a suggestion that I switched to 80% maximum charging in order to prolong the life of my battery. That is the kind of proactive user handholding that I can really get behind. And the same goes for how aggressive iOS gets about prompting the user to mute or block app notifications and tracking. To be clear, Android's tools for managing these things are pretty good too. Actually, very granular. But what Android doesn't do is get all up in your grill about them like iOS does, which results in an experience where if you get a notification on your iPhone, you can be pretty darn sure that it's something you wanted to see or you can easily get rid of it. Now, pretty much everything so far has been mostly to do with the software. But I've got to say, I kind of like the hardware too. The screen on the iPhone 16 family is incredible with outstanding brightness for watching videos outside, not to mention their super dim mode that supposedly gets all the way down to one nit and makes nighttime reading way more comfortable for me. Oh, here's a fun one. You know how phones are supposed to be, you know, phones? I'm getting way better call and data reception near my house and not just against my ancient Note 9, but even against my wife's Galaxy S23 Ultra. So I can finally close my garage door from the driveway. You guys think that's enough positivity to appease the Apple stans? If not, I could probably keep going for an entire video's worth, but unfortunately I could probably go multiple videos about the things that I didn't love so much. So we should probably address at least some of them. Let's start with how slow the device feels, which, okay, no, wait, hold on. Step away from the comment section. I recognize this is absolutely not a slow device, but that makes it all the more frustrating when it feels like Apple's interface decisions are holding me back. Like the animations, they're beautiful. I love the way the home screen icons come flying in the first time that it loads after you set up a new iPhone, but I don't need to see it every time I unlock my phone. Guys, I've got urgent Facebook marketplace doom scrolling to do. And yes, before you ask, I did turn on reduce motion and I even tried prefer crossfade, another gorgeous animation by the way, but none of that had the desired effect of getting the fluff out of my way so I can just use my phone. I'm just picking what I get to look at while I wait for the UI to catch up with me. While we're at it, by the way, why is this setting and so many other useful ones hidden away in accessibility options? I can't change that unnecessary slowdowns are going to bother me. Like this thing that Apple does, where it animates all the steps to get to a setting that I have searched for or clicked a shortcut to. The rationale that I've heard for this behavior is that it's trying to teach me where I should have gone, but I got there with a shortcut. Is that not an okay way to do it? Who cares if I know all the breadcrumbs? Adding insult to injury, depending on how I try to go back, I get to click through all of those screens that it zipped through on the way back to the thing I actually cared about, which brings me to a pretty big subject. Going back on iOS is objectively bad. And okay, all right, something can't be objectively bad, but what it can be is objectively inconsistent, which from a user interface and user experience standpoint is, well, objectively bad. I can't believe that Apple still hasn't mandated an official Apple way to go back. They seem to be big fans of the swipe in from the left, but they only use it just enough to trick you into thinking that it should work all the time, and then bam, an app hits you with clicking on the top left, like my old iPhone 4, or canceling in the top right, like this, and even the occasional swipe in another direction. Now, app makers absolutely share some of the blame for this, but guys, we are 17 years into this experiment, so I think it might be time for Apple to just take the darn reins, or maybe in other cases, loosen them. Overall, I found CarPlay to be pretty okay. My car doesn't have a physical button for previous track, so if I wanted to have media controls and my map on screen at the same time, I had to use split screen, which I don't prefer. I like a nice big map, but that's probably more of a me problem, and you can't blame the handset makers for all the dumb things that the car manufacturers are gonna do, so let's not worry about that. Let's worry about the bugginess that I experienced. Every once in a while, the volume would crank itself, and I ran into this issue twice. It's probably worth noting I saw this with some random Bluetooth earbuds too, though, so maybe it's not CarPlay related. Actually, now that I think about it, there were more problems with audio. Notification volume would occasionally go super loud. There's all the cabling, which is apparently an iOS 18 bug, and compared to Android, adjusting the volume level of anything you aren't actively using is super non-obvious. Andy, how do I change the volume of my system tap sounds when I'm listening to media, for example? You just mute it. No, but how do I change the volume of that? I don't know. If you've never touched Android, this is gonna blow your freaking mind. No matter what I'm doing, if I touch the volume button, I can adjust my ringtone, my notifications, my media, and my system sounds. The fact that that doesn't exist, iOS users should be riding in the streets. I know this next one is gonna get lost in translation as Android and iPhone users are coming from completely different experiences here, but oh my goodness, the iPhone keyboard is missing so many things that I completely take for granted as basic functions of an Android keyboard. For example, while the iOS keyboard does let you hold down a key in order to modify your letters with whatever diacritical mark you need, or even sneak in the occasional thorn, yog, or asset, Android lets you use the same technique to access numbers and common punctuation from the first layer of the keyboard. You can even dial in the delay so that you barely have to slow down to insert one of those secondary characters. And this is an absolute godsend for those of us who write our texts like our AP English 12 teacher might grade us on them. Now, I tried switching over to my usual alt keyboard, Swift key on iOS, but somehow all these years later, it is still trash on the iPhone. Core features are missing, like the aforementioned long press tuning, and even the ability to resize the keyboard. And in general, it just feels off with worse predictions and a more tedious process for going back and making corrections. Like maybe I wanna type RHIS. It auto-corrects to this. I go back, no, no, I meant RHIS, and I should be able to fix the accidental auto-correct in my capitalization at the same time. On the iPhone, not so much. Now, if I had to guess, I'd say that this limitation probably comes down to Apple giving keyboard apps far less access to user inputs, which is probably a good thing, but it makes for an overall significantly worse typing experience on my keyboard of choice, which also just would occasionally disappear, leaving me with the default. Weird. Now, one thing that's better about iOS is the super responsive long press keyboard shortcut to reposition the cursor. I like it, but I also don't struggle with fine motor control and it's usually faster for me to just tap the point in the middle of a word anyway. So not being able to do that on the iPhone actually kind of drove me crazy. Now, I've got a lot more things to get through, so let's rapid fire a few. I can't get to the home screen without physically swiping the screen after authenticating, and then it's animation time again. Just get out of my way and let me use my phone. I can't change the size of the app grid. I'm stuck at four wide. On the normal iPhone 16, that would be fine, but if you're giving me all these extra pixels on the Plus, I'd really like to use them. It's like they intend for their larger devices to just be for the elderly or people who have trouble with the smaller screens. And here's a weird one. I ran into this problem while rearranging apps. I think maybe the ones I place manually might behave differently than the ones that are automatically placed. Sometimes it just gets confused. In fairness, Apple's new to this whole putting things where you want them thing. And here's a funny one. When I was migrating in the first place, Apple's Move to iOS app failed twice before actually working, and even then, it basically just copied SMS, photos, and WhatsApp. I had to manually sign into everything, including my Google account, which left me wondering, what exactly was the point of this? I'm not sure, but I'd like to talk about that Google account for a minute. In the past, iOS had an account section in the settings app where you could centrally manage and sync your different accounts for email, calendar, contacts, all that kind of stuff. That seems to be gone now, but I work for a G Suite organization, so I'm gonna need my Google calendar to tell me what it is that I'm doing today. This is where past experience with iOS got in my way. The account setting was gone, and I couldn't find an obvious way to add an account in the calendar app. So I started looking for workarounds and ultimately discovered that if you open the iOS mail app, it immediately prompts you to add a Google mail account, which will also sync my Google calendar in the native calendar app. Now, I ended up getting attacked pretty hard for calling this out on the LAN show, but I'm holding firm that this is a prime example of spectacularly unintuitive design. The justification I was given for this is that app settings, including accounts, should be managed from within the settings app and the apps menu, and then the individual app. And that is Apple's aspiration. But as we've seen with back functionality, Apple's aspirations don't always match reality. So let's play a quick game called find the account management menu. In the app. Yeah, this one's in the app. Another one that's in the app. Hmm. They're pretty much all within the apps themselves. And while the first party mail app does have account management buried four layers deep within the menu, the Apple preferred way for some reason, it still prompts you to sign in that first time you open it. Meaning that if you're trying to sign into an account from within an app, that is a perfectly reasonable expectation, even if you had no prior experience with other platforms. The good news for Apple though is that the solution to this is simple. When I click calendars, add calendar, add calendar, and then I have this account thing here, that should just be a dropdown that should prompt me to add another account instead of it just doing nothing. You're welcome. Now to be clear, this isn't a deal breaker by any means. It just means the next time that an Apple fan tells me, it's just so gosh darn intuitive. I don't know if I'm gonna be able to help it. I might actually laugh in their face. Maybe a little doom scrolling will calm me down. And oh boy. If you want the long version of this rant, you can check out the WAN show from a couple of weeks ago, but the TLDR is when I flick my finger in my newsfeed or on Reddit, I expect the screen to move at the same speed that my finger moved and then decelerate from there. I do not expect it to move at whatever relaxed chill pace that some Apple focus group has determined is the most aesthetically pleasing in order to hide their 60 Hertz refresh rate. Another thing I touched on during that WAN show segment is buttons. Particularly this new camera button here. Out of the box, I kept accidentally hitting it only to have a user point out to me that I could configure it to require a double click. Huh. Well, that's super cool, I thought. I wonder what other apps I could make it long. No. Camera and camera adjacent only. Speaking of the camera, boy, was that ever an upgrade. Though as someone coming from a six year old device, I don't know what to say other than I should hope so. And besides, my main focus isn't on the particular iPhone, but rather my overall experience with iOS 18. An experience I could probably go on for hours about, but Tim Apple, a more relevant meme than ever these days, doesn't have hours to watch this video. So how about I boil it down to just one thing that I need fixed? Let's talk about rotation locks. Most iPhone users I run into don't even realize this, but for a good 10 years now, you've been able to lock an iPad in landscape orientation, but not an iPhone. Now we use iPhones as our teleprompters here at Linus Media Group. And because we can't lock them in landscape mode, we have to train all of our camera operators in a maneuver that we call the dip to reorient the screen. It's something we do so often that we don't even really think about it anymore. So why bring it up? Because when I was going through the list of apps in my account, since the migration wizard didn't actually copy my apps over like it said it would, and I had to do so manually, I came across Jetpack Joyride, and I was like, oh my goodness, I haven't played that since the last time I dailied iOS. It's been years. And I immediately fired it up. I played it for a second, then I put my phone down to make a note about something. And when I picked it back up, the game was upside down. I showed this on the LAN show as well. I gave it the old wiggle, I tried to reorient it, but no, it would only work in one of the two possible landscape orientations. What the heck, Apple? These kinds of arbitrary distinctions, like which way is the approved landscape orientation, assuming I'm allowed to be in landscape at all, do nothing for your user. They do nothing for your profits. So why? To be clear, iOS has come a long way over the last few years, and it can do so much more than it used to do. Find My is a godsend. Spotlight still rules. Airdrop is legitimately super cool, as long as everyone around me has an iPhone. But Apple still has some work to do to be willing to accept that after the iPhone leaves the factory, it's my iPhone. And if I wanna hold it like this, instead of like this, or I wanna use it as a teleprompter, that's my business. If I wanna move the dynamic island to the other side, that should be my decision too. And until Apple's willing to truly embrace that, rather than begrudgingly give us little breadcrumbs, I just don't think this is for me, which doesn't mean that it's bad. If you love your iPhone and it works for you, you are not wrong. Just don't get upset if you run around declaring that your preferred ecosystem is the best, and not everyone agrees with you, especially if you've never spent significant time on the other side of the divide. Maybe we need some kind of cultural exchange program, you know, like six months of seeing how the other half lives. That could be a really interesting experiment. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go hide from some fanboys. Oh, but not before I tell you about our sponsor, Squarespace. Make sure that your business is ready for the holiday season with a quick and easy to set up website. Squarespace's platform is designed to streamline the website building process, while still offering endless possibilities for customization. Their blueprint system lays the foundation with carefully curated layouts and styling options. Then you're free to go buck wild and customize to your heart's content with their code-free drag and drop fluid engine editor. If you're ever stuck on what to do next, their design intelligence AI tools are there to lend you a hand. Just throw in a prompt and it will tap into two decades of industry-leading design experience to help bring your vision to life. 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