{"id":46946,"date":"2025-03-04T15:19:26","date_gmt":"2025-03-04T20:19:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=46946"},"modified":"2025-03-10T20:13:44","modified_gmt":"2025-03-11T00:13:44","slug":"linus-sebastian-switches-to-iphone-for-30-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/04\/linus-sebastian-switches-to-iphone-for-30-days\/","title":{"rendered":"Linus Sebastian Switches to iPhone for 30 Days"},"content":{"rendered":"

Linus Tech Tips<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

“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[…]”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Via John Gruber<\/a> (Mastodon<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

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<\/em>”, but more like “PC power user who is also an Android user tries an iPhone for a month<\/em>”.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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<\/em> animations.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Kirk McElhearn<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

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.)<\/p>\n\n

Anyway, with the iPad, the first problem was that the proximity pairing<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n

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<\/a>.” 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?<\/p>\n\n

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<\/strong> command kept failing with an error. Eventually I remembered that you have to use View ‣ Show All Devices<\/strong> before you can change the partition scheme from Master Boot Record<\/strong> to GUID Partition Map<\/strong>. Then I was able to Erase<\/strong> it as APFS.<\/p>\n\n

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<\/a> to show the hidden All Messages<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n