I really tried, Apple - iPhone 30-Day Challenge

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 have 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 Mega transfers 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 and 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 all 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 popup 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 switch 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 knit and makes nighttime reading way more comfortable for me uh 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 all right you guys think that's enough positivity to appease the Apple stands 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 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 unne necessary 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 cancelling 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 RS or maybe in other cas is loosen them

overall I found carplay to be pretty okay uh 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 Mii problem and you can't blame the handset makers for all the dumb things that the car manufacturers are going to 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 shank 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 nonobvious like Andy how do I change the volume of my like system tap sounds when I'm listening to Media for ex

for example you just m it no but like how do I change the volume of that I don't know if you've never touched Android this is going to blow your freaking mind no matter what I'm doing if I touch the volume button I can adjust my ring tone my notifications my media and my system sounds the fact that that doesn't exist iOS users should be rioting in the streets I know this next one is going to 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 esset Android lets you use the same Tech 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 my greatest 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 want to type rhis it autoc corrects to

this I go back when no no I meant rhis and I should be able to fix the accidental auto correct and 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 uh 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 got 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 I don't know 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 mov 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 to 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 going to need my Google Calendar to tell me what it is that I am 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 WAN 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 hm 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 drop down 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 just so gosh darn intuitive I don't know if I'm

going to 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 W show from a couple of weeks ago but the tldr is when I flick my finger in my news feed 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 HZ refresh rate another thing I touched on during that wow 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 LO no camera and Camera adjacent only speaking of the camera boy was that 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 lus 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 joy ride and I was like oh my goodness I haven't played that since the last time I daed 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 W 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 as a godsend Spotlight still rules TOS 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 want to hold it like this instead of like this or I want to use it as a teleprompter that's my business if I want to 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 6 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

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