I HATE APPLE

did you guys know you can make custom vibration patterns? it's a little hidden but you can tap out your own

yes tied to different incoming numbers if you want - possibly my favorite feature

just think about it folks, we are the first humans who have ever lived who regularly experience a buzzing sensation in our pants pockets that then turns out to not actually be happening

who the fuck is linc davis, how does he reply to every thread i've ever seen and why do his solutions never work? so many mysteries that haunt the apple support forums

do any of you have experience w/ using a prepaid SIM w/ an unlocked iPhone? I just got the unlock OK from AT&T and it says to wipe it and then restore it and my phone will be ~unlocked~

And then once I get to Europe, do I just buy the SIM and pop it in? Will I have to restore it again?

Once it's unlocked you can swap sims as much as you like, unless you get one of the sims that bloody lock the phone again. I think Three UK did that, not sure if they still do.

The changing numbers can also confuse iMessage a bit, need to watch for that.

yes you can just change sims. no restore/reset. takes a minute to connect to the network. sometimes imessage gets confused for a while (more common in the US ime).

change to ting in the us now you're unlocked imo

So I'll just have a new phone number for a week and a half, that's fine. Is there any way to still check my actual voicemail during this time w/o popping the sim back in?

Yes, most networks have an external number you can call so long as you've set up a pin

I think the unlocks go over the air now, but previously the way to do it was to connect to a computer and sync in iTunes, it'd download the unlock

trackpad on the retina macbook pro suddenly doesn't "click" anymore. managed to connect a bluetooth mouse and enabled "tap to click" but it's super annoying not being able to use the trackpad normally. going to cost $300 to replace since it's non-serviceable (another apple product so tightly constructed that when dust and crud gets in, no way to get it out). once i fix this i'll have dropped $1000 on out-of-applecare repairs to this thing. i wish they'd hurry up and bring out the next-gen macbook pros so i can just get a new one and stop sinking money into this one.

Is iMessage extremely hit and miss at the moment, much more than usual, or is it just me? I'm not getting "delivered" notes on about half the messages I'm sending.

Apple has the worst user forums. The answers are always wrong, and always have the same smug "It's not Apple, it's you" attitude. And the people giving these unhelpful, incorrect answers are always "level 10" or whatever, which means they must be sitting on the forums all day doing nothing but giving bureaucratic, obstructive "answers". Is this what DMV employees do for fun?

https://medium.com/@johnslegers/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d#.ktd12bfn4

interesting. was wondering if i was imagining that sort of thing

You're holding it wrong...

Why did the fbi spend so long pretending they couldn't unlock a phone ffs.

incompetence and dishonesty

my colleague and I spent hours crafting his Stack Overflow question so as not to get angry responses, we put in everything he had tried, we said what we had tried and what we thought it wasnt, and why. Then we got my other colleague over and she had some input, and we thought ok we must be safe with this, we've covered ourselves, we won't get any terse responses. And we posted it, we threw it into the bearpit, waiting for people to rush in and tear the question limb from limb, and we retreated to a nearby bar, ready to pick it up again in the morning

The next day, we waited until all 3 of us were in, and timidly opened the browser, there was our question, surely we'd worded it well enough to pass muster.....there were no responses of any kind. A year later I looked at the question again, it now has one response, 3 months later, from my colleague, with the answer

Why did the fbi spend so long pretending they couldn't unlock a phone

Consensus seems to be that they thought this would be the perfect case to establish a legal precedent (because even if they can open this one, eventually there might be one they can't), and didn't expect public opinion to be so divided.

http://i.imgur.com/r7EDtOE.png

reading that in ahnold voice

I can't think of a single thing more representative of Apples total decline in user interface than the specific fact that when searching the apple music catalog via iTunes, the entire catalog appears under the "NEW" tab. Drives me nuts.

for years i backed up my iphone and ipad to icloud with no problems, but last year (after an os upgrade iirc) my iphone backup started exploding in size. it's been hitting 5 gb for several months, even though i kept deleting sms/mms and turned off most of my app backups. i don't even use photo stream. there's no way to see what the culprit is because apple doesn't bother stating the actual discrepancy between the total backup size and the sum of everything that's backed up, i assume because apple's as shit at icloud as it is at siri, apple music etc.

this crap i wouldn't mind so much, but apple has nagged me daily to pay for extra storage, through emails and pop-ups on my phone. i'd be happy to pay a buck fifty for storage of my own volition, but i won't be bullied into it due to shit software. instead i've ditched icloud for itunes backups which are more comprehensive anyway.

it's this weirdly desperate nagging which is the least appealing part of apple now. occasionally the music app still nags me to sign up for apple music before letting me access my own music (i've since buried the music app and use ecoute by default), and last month when i was away the phone constantly hassled me to upgrade my os, with no option to turn off the nag pop-ups.

http://i.imgur.com/CeZ5AKh.jpg

iPads Pro

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/27/a-brief-guide-to-everything-thats-annoying-about-apple

i keep thinking that apple will get as irritating as microsoft was when they were at this market position, but i'm not there yet

No animated office supplies suddenly appearing on my desktop, I'll give 'em that.

only things on that list that really grind my gears are the U2 thing and wet fingers. been thinking about adding the shower-swollen version of my fingerprint to the recognition to see if it'll recognize it as a second fingerprint

like whoopy doo, they haven't gotten a half dozen things better than other companies. lord knows i buy too many apple gadgets but i sell or recycle the last one when i get a new one. not sure why this writer has a cabinet full, hoarders style

some people keep their car when getting a new car and just park em all over their driveway, i guess

You can keep an old car in your driveway, work on it on weekends, and maybe get it running again.

my dad has a coworker who inexplicably keeps the old car when he gets a new one. and it's usually his wife's car that gets replaced, so he has a bunch of fully equipped buicks of the last couple decades just sitting in a spacious garage. afaik they do not drive them.

The worst thing about apple for me is this battery size/thinness obsession. There is no one in the world outside of their campus that thinks that they would rather have a thinner phone than one that needs to be charged or plugged in 2-3 times a day.

fucking stupid that keyboard shortcut combinations are still commonly given using characters that are no longer printed on many macbook keyboards. Of the following characters, only the command cloverleaf appears on my keyboard:

Command ⌘
Shift ⇧

Option ⌥
Control ⌃

Caps Lock ⇪

I've got two external keyboards, an Apple one and a (far superior) Logitech one, and the symbols aren't printed on either of them, either.

They don't even print the Command ⌘ one anymore? That's really dumb, I thought that was Apple's special key (like the MS Windows key)

No, that's the only one they do

One thing that really bothers me with touch ID -- you still have to put in your passcode every time you restart. So what the fuck is the point of touch ID when anyone who has your passcode can just restart your phone?

You don't even have to do that, you can just enter the passcode instead of using TouchID. Right?

uh yeah, touch id is supposed to be the shortcut for a secure passcode. the passcode is the security, the fingerprints are locked to it

the point iirc is that you can have a long-ass passcode and still unlock the phone in the time it took to punch in 1-2-3-4

It just seems to me like a fingerprint is *more* secure than a passcode, no? So why require the passcode to get to the fingerprint option?

It's because the plain passcode isn't stored in the phone iirc. You put its hash into the secure enclave when the phone boots up

i realize that apple security is clever within the phone, but it's relatively easy to steal someone's passcode by looking over their shoulder or, if they are dumb enough to have written it down, to find it where they wrote it down, or by guessing it if they used a guessable code like a birthday. A fingerprint is less easy to steal.

No wait had that wrong. The secure enclave is encrypted with your passcode, so you need to supply it to unlock it after boot. Xp

The idea is to have a long and difficult passcode, which is hard to shoulder surf

the point is kind of that you will hardly ever need to enter the passphrase in public, since the fingerprint works

also if you have your phone's passphrase written down somewhere accessible you're already a lost cause

You can break into a dead man's phone if you've still got the body. Long-ass password is harder to retrieve.

I'd trust the people who do security work for their day jobs more than myself as far as qualified opinions go, though xp

actually the dead person thing is a catch-22: you have all the fingerprints, but there's no way of telling which ones they stored in the phone, and you have a limited number of chances

security-wise it's probably ideal to just scan one finger. as I learned this weekend, use at least one on each hand in case you slice your scanning finger with sharp glass