Linus Sebastian Switches to iPhone for 30 Days
Linus takes a long-overdue trip back into the iOS ecosystem. Will daily-driving a shiny new iPhone 16 Plus for an entire month convert him into Apple’s newest fan?
[…]
“I started to look a little differently at the Apple users in my life. They describe Apple products with market 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 have encountered on a supposedly finished product[…]”
Via John Gruber (Mastodon):
Sebastian is a long-time Android user, but he’s not really a phone guy at all. He doesn’t review phones, typically. His own personal Android phone is several years old. His interest and renown is entirely in the field of PCs. So his video isn’t really “Android power user reviews iOS”, but more like “PC power user who is also an Android user tries an iPhone for a month”.
[…]
He complains repeatedly about iOS’s animated transitions making everything feel slow. That’s 100 percent true. As an everyday iPhone user I’m just completely used to that. But those animations really do make iPhones feel slower than they are. In terms of tech specs iPhones are literally the fastest phones on the planet. Apple’s A-series silicon is, and always has been, years ahead of the best silicon money can buy in an Android handset. But a lot of aspects of iOS feel slower than Android because of animated transitions for which iOS offers no option to speed up. It should. And the Accessibility setting to completely turn off animations doesn’t solve the problem; what I want, and I think what Sebastian wants, is faster animations.
[…]
Again, it didn’t leave me with an iota of envy for life on the Android side of the fence, but it reminded me about a bunch of things on iOS that don’t make sense, and seemingly are the way they are only because that’s how they always have been.
When was the last time Apple used the phrase “It just works” in marketing? More than a decade ago? If anything, people used that to Mark Apple. Citing that as an apple marketing term it’s just wrong. It’s more a meme than anything else now.
I recently set up a brand new iPad for my father, and we ran into a dozen or so bugs just between plugging it in and getting the built-in apps working. (The impetus for the iPad was that he needed a backup device for travel because Mail on his iPhone was unreliable. Messages were displayed incompletely, and after trying to fix this by deleting and re-adding the account, he was unable to re-add it because the settings screen kept going blank. Webmail in Safari didn’t fully work because the screen was too small. Eventually Mail did re-add the account but would only load a few of the mailboxes, until a month later when everything suddenly worked again.)
Anyway, with the iPad, the first problem was that the proximity pairing to copy the settings from his iPhone didn’t work. The iPad offered it, but then it wouldn’t actually start the process. We finally had to cancel, and then no amount of waving the devices together would get it offer the option again.
In configuring the settings manually, a variety of buttons just didn’t respond. Some controls that were supposed to be enabled weren’t. The account setup sheet in Mail kept spontaneously closing, and then we would have to re-open it and type in everything again. App icons wouldn’t drag out of the search onto the home screen. Various iCloud services would neither sync nor show why they weren’t syncing and then spontaneously turned themselves off. It took several hours to activate the cellular service. On the plus side, Safari is really really fast compared with his Intel MacBook Air, and the AT&T plan is only $21/month for unlimited data.
The old 1Password stopped Dropbox-syncing on his iPhone and couldn’t be installed on the iPad, so this seemed like a good time to switch to Apple’s password manager. The MacBook Air can’t run Sequoia, so the Passwords app is unavailable, but we were able to update it to Sonoma, which has the password manager in Safari’s Settings. Right after updating, the Mac kept getting stuck at the login screen: it would accept the password but then sort of half-reboot and end up at the login screen again. After four cycles of this it just started working.
In order to use the latest importer, I set up temporary account on a Sequoia Mac to import from 1Password to the Passwords app. It reported lots of errors because of items that didn’t have the URL entered properly and because sometimes there were multiple accounts for the same site. There was no way to copy or export the list of errors to go back to 1Password and fix them. I wish it had just imported everything, sticking any unknown or error information into the notes, so that I could fix it up later in the Passwords app. Instead, I had to keep going to 1Password to fix things and retrying the export until all the errors were fixed. Then I realized that the 1Password CSV export doesn’t include the notes, so I copied and pasted those individually via screen sharing. We also backed up all the 1Password stuff to a giant PDF in case it turns out that something didn’t import properly.
The next problem was that Photos on the Mac wouldn’t sync with iCloud. It would just say “Syncing with iCloud paused. Mac needs to cool down.” I don’t know what that means or what I was meant to do. The MacBook Air was plugged in and did not seem to be overheated—the fan was not running, and Activity Monitor did not show high CPU use. Why would syncing cause overheating, anyway? Isn’t that primarily a network task?
Lastly, we ran into trouble seeing up a new flash drive for Time Machine. The drive came formatted for Windows. I thought macOS used to offer to use a newly attached drive for Time Machine, but it didn't. There was no option to erase it as APFS. I was able to format it as HFS+, but Disk Utility’s Convert to APFS command kept failing with an error. Eventually I remembered that you have to use View ‣ Show All Devices before you can change the partition scheme from Master Boot Record to GUID Partition Map. Then I was able to Erase it as APFS.
The final part of the story is that, some days later, his iPhone updated to the latest version of iOS. Mail auto-enabled the new categories feature, and he was completely confused as to why the number of messages shown in each mailbox was suddenly different and couldn’t figure out how to get it to show all the messages. I was able to explain how to swipe sideways to show the hidden All Messages button. But I was confused myself because I thought this was an Apple Intelligence feature and so it was only available on iPhone 15 Pro and later, not on an iPhone SE.
Previously:
- Premium Hardware, Subpar Software
- Show Network QR Code
- Apple Intelligence in macOS 15.2 and iOS 18.2
12 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
"It just works" has really meant "It (only) just works" for a looooong time now. Since about 2013.
Apple is really terrible about its software not giving customers any information about what isn't working, nor providing any ways for customers to fix those issues. And with filing a bug report via Feedback Assistant going into a black hole, there really is no recourse. You have to hope that maybe the problem will be fixed with the newest major OS release... but it often isn't. Basic bugs encountered while doing super common tasks are the norm now. I felt like at least 10-15 years ago, when I filed a bug report I'd get some kind of response, and often if I was persistent enough it would get fixed.
But I gave up 5 years ago when I realized bugs weren't getting fixed anymore, and I couldn't get a response. For one major Siri bug (I forget what it was) I even did some sleuthing and reached out to an engineer on the Siri team as well as Alex Acero who I think was the VP of Siri or something back then. They replied, acknowledged the b..ug, and then it never got fixed.
The quality of their software is just trash now. I installed Apple Music on my Windows PC recently and it's HORRIBLE. It takes several seconds to load, like it has to fetch my playlists and other info every time I start it up instead of caching it. And if you're in a Playlist in "Playlist" view, you can't even click the header above the track names to sort the track names alphabetically (nor Artist, nor Album). You have to switch to this other "Song View" to do that, or you have to click on this weird hamburger type menu, then go to Sort By then select Title. That's way more unintuitive and complicated than just making the headers clickable, especially since everything on the Windows version is hidden behind UI because there's no File Edit View etc menus.
The Mac version sucks too. So buggy. And you can't even increase the text size! The text in the sidebar is several points larger than the text in the main UI where you view artists, tracks, etc. Super tiny. (There's a setting for List Size, but changing it from Small to Large doesn't change any of the text in the UI. I don't know what it does.)
Sometimes I can't believe we're in 2025, we have amazing hardware, yet MacOS, iOS, and iPadOS feel like they're getting worse with every revision. In many ways, so much stuff is bloated and slow compared to 20 years ago even though the hardware is 1000 times faster. Too much bad programming, too much convoluted UI, too many things hidden, too many animations, too many limitations. I have the same complaints about Windows -- it's mind blowing that Windows 11 has been around for so many years now, and significant parts of it still look like it's from 1998. And too many apps look like crap (tiny text, tiny UI) at 4K. Like would it really be so hard to just display those apps (or system elements) at 2X so they're usable?
Oh and I'll add another example. I pay $20/mo for ChatGPT, and I integrated my account with Siri. But if I ask Siri "Ask ChatGPT [query]" it's like 5x slower than just opening the ChatGPT app and typing my query directly. And it's worse because there's no log, so I can't really do anything further with it or come back to it later.
And it's kind of unbelievable that Apple Music doesn't have any smart AI features in it, such as the ability to use ChatGPT to create playlists, or use AI to extend playlists (similar to Plexamp's "DJ" features). You can't even really create your own radio stations, you can only go to an Artist, Album, or Song and listen to the predefined radio that's attached to it. No thumbs up or thumbs down to adjust the radio in real time (Rdio and Pandora had this like 15 years ago). No ability to block artists or songs that you hate from appearing on a radio station... I could go on. It's like the Apple Music team thinks that having any song or album at our fingertips is all that anyone wants. It has a terrible UI on iPhone too. Nothing imaginative, nothing fun, nothing unique about it.
Using eM Client solved my problems with iOS / iPadOS Mail - so far. It‘s reliable working an doing what I expected from iOS Mail.
These "I switched sides for 30 days - here's the TRUTH" stunts are a waste of time.
Usage patterns that have been insane over many years won't be rerouted in a month.
These stunts are equally pointless no matter which way people switch.
I ran into a similar issue with disk utility: In the default view, it doesn't really check the disk! It "checks" the disk and instantly reports everything as fine. I thought it was suspicious so I turned on the show all devices view and checked each "device" separately. One of those devices *did* have an error that needed to be fixed
No average user would know this is possible or think to do that. Why can't it just check the disk/devices properly from the standard view?
Also, I think people are overlooking a way to get more attention for the issues they're having: customer service. I've started initiating a chat whenever I have some issue with my Mac. It takes longer than filing a bug, but eventually they'll get you in contact with the "engineering" team.
I imagine this costs Apple money so I think it makes it more likely that they'll fix these bugs. Fingers crossed.
The only sticking point is they always ask you to restart your computer first and of course that fixes it much of the time. But obviously, that doesn't *really* fix anything because restarting your computer whenever there's a bug means that bug still exists somewhere.
@Manx I have spent many hours with Apple customer service, and despite working with people in engineering I don’t think it ever led to any solutions for software issues.
My mother in law uses an iPhone 8 that I gave her, my daughter an SE. Both of them are stuck on iOS 9 or something, and both of them have recently (past few months actually, don't know exactly because they both "forgot to tell me") started displaying a notification in settings that they need to accept new terms if they want to keep using iCloud.
Tapping the notification opens a modal sheet with a loading spinner which just sits there forever, then times out with a numeric error and no explanation whatsoever. The only text displayed reads something along the line of "try again later".
No amount of logging in and out of iCloud or rebooting the phones fixed it. I just gave it up. So relieved is not my phone, the red dot on the settings app would have driven me up the wall right away...
I have no idea if there is something else that's not working because of that. At least for now, iCloud backups and family sharing seems to work, fingers crossed...
In December 2020, I wrote on my blog (emphasis on the second paragraph):
"After spending five months using beta after beta after official releases of Big Sur on a 13-inch retina MacBook Pro, Big Sur’s interface feels exactly like that — easy on the eyes, but punctuated by arbitrary design decisions that make it clunkier, less usable and less friendly in different areas. It shows that the system has been rethought with the how-it-looks before the how-it-works. The Mac today feels powerful like never before. Mac OS feels at its most dumbed-down.
"So, what about the M1 Macs? They’re unbelievably good machines, and everything that is genuinely good about them and future Apple Silicon-based Macs — sheer performance, astounding power-efficiency, and great backward compatibility with Intel software thanks to Rosetta 2 — will also allow Apple to get away with a lot of things with regard to platform control, design decisions, software quality, and so forth."
@Kristoffer: I disagree. Sure, someone isn't going to adapt their entire workflow to a new system in a month, but getting the perspective from someone who isn't deep in the system can be valuable from time to time. For instance, I'm more or less completely inured to the pain of signing out of iCloud, rebooting the phone, and signing back in as a troubleshooting step before Apple support will address a problem. I've had iCloud completely blow up multiple times and I'm not pushing the limits as far as I can tell. I just have four people in my family and use family sharing.
I don't agree with Linus about everything, but he pointed out a ton of legitimate problems with iOS (and a ton of stylistic nitpicks that explains why he prefers Android).
He is currently in the process of doing 30 days on macOS and just his list of initial impressions is quite fair in my opinion. I've been using macOS, Windows, and Linux for years and years at this point and largely choose macOS for my personal machines, but I don't think it is arguable that macOS, and to some extent, iOS has slipped in quality. Apple keeps piling on new features and "security" while not fixing fundamental problems or taking low hanging quality of life changes.
"He is currently in the process of doing 30 days on macOS and just his list of initial impressions is quite fair in my opinion"
Yeah, some of his complaints are a result of years of experience on Windows (e.g. his strong preference of the Windows Explorer over the Finder - both suck in different ways, it's nonsensical to claim that one is clearly better than the other).
But he does point out a bunch of issues that Mac users just got used to that really shouldn't exist. Like, why do I just install SteerMouse on every Mac when Windows has adequate support for devices with more buttons out of the box? This stuff should just work.
