Upgraded to iPhone 8 Plus, NOT iPhone X

The iPhone X is now the rave (though not in stock anywhere).  But it didn't take too much time to see the flaw for me.

It is smaller than the 8 Plus.

Now, you could say "but it fits more screen into a smaller phone."  Well yes and no...considering the cutouts.  But that's not actually the issue for me.

Back when I had a Samsung Galaxy 4 I struggled to pull it out of my pocket, or putting it back in, without pressing the side buttons, which could do things I didn't want done.

So I didn't want another phone with a side mounted on/off button.  I almost decided upon getting a iPhone 4 which still had the top button.  But I didn't like the sharp beveled edges either.  They felt dangerous to my hands.

But after much handling in the store, I found that the 6S Plus was so much larger than the other phones, I could wrap my hand around the bottom end of the phone (which is on top, inside my pocket) and pull the phone out of my pocket without accidentally pressing any of the side buttons.  I was sold on the 6S Plus from that moment onwards.

I had to read a lot of rave reviews of the iPhone X without discovering this issue that it's smaller and likely a full hand grip would actually press buttons by accident.

After having the Galaxy phone, I also wasn't necessarily convinced OLED made for a better phone screen either.  In bright daylight, the Galaxy S4 screen was totally washed out.  My iPhone 3 was better in bright sun, and it was more than 3 years older.  Now, it could be this isn't a problem with the newest OLEDs.

I'm also suspicious of the "feature" of having to look at your phone to turn it on.  I like having a dedicated button.

Actually I wish I could disable the finger authentication and have the bottom button just turn the phone on and off without any "security" (because the finger authentication still only works about 60% of the time...quite often I have to press it several times to get it to work).  But...if you disable all security, the bottom button won't turn the phone on or off at all anymore.  Funny, the bottom button does work without security--very nice--until you finish the "setup" process (which is only the beginning of your troubles, but a nice milestone anyway).  Then you're back to the bottom button which only works with one finger and doesn't always work.

I especially hate "swipes" to turn the phone on.  With the Samsung, it never turned on with the first swipe.  I had to swipe again and again to get the swipe just right.  What is this, some kind of "test"?  It was almost easier to enter the numbers, at least that's fairly predictable.

iCloud stinks

I like the old days, where I could easily back up my phone to my computer.  And that was that.

I don't want no stinking iCloud anything.  I'm sorry I ever said yes to that somewhere when starting my iPhone 6s Plus the first time.  I knew from the start this would be a come-on, that soon enough it would be endlessly telling me I need to upgrade to the paid service, which has in fact been the case for almost the entire time until today (I hope).

I know from having storage services that it's a ripoff.  You pay and pay and in the end you find you never used anything you paid for.  That happened 20 years ago when I moved and had to quickly find a way of discarding everything in my storage unit.  Hardly anything was kept.  Most of what I had paid 10 years of storage fees for was simply tossed in the trash.  The rest I could have kept in a corner of a closet.  I didn't have time for recycling, resale, whatever, it all had to go fast so I could make my plane.  In fact it was hard to get it all tossed into the trash fast enough.  And if I left even the smallest thing behind, I would have to pay another months rent, cleanup fees, and never get my deposit back.

Anyway, when I was starting my iPhone for the first time, I think it told me that if I didn't use iCloud, I wouldn't be able to backup my notes, etc.  Well that seemed like tyranny, but I thought notes would be OK, I'd never use up 5G of notes, which I barely use much anyway, but I hate to lose anything I've written, because I might need it later.

But soon enough it was clear that it was also recording photos, videos, everything.

And that's a problem because (1) the photos are so uselessly large, IMO 2mp is sufficient for virtually everything, but these seem to be like 10 or 30 times larger.  And (2) by accident, constantly, because all the buttons are so small, and the photo/movie option slider moves when I'm trying to hold the phone with one hand, I kept accidentally taking videos, when I had no intention to.  And these videos might record for minutes before I even noticed that video was being recorded.  (Only a few weeks ago I discovered that videos I had not intended to take were taking up most of the 64Gb on my phone, and I figured out how to go through and delete them all, though I had to do this in multiple sessions because it would only show me the largest few at any one time) and (3) mostly when I'm trying to take a photo, I'm paying attention to the subject, not the slider and buttons and so on.  So many many photos I've taken are simply garbage, until I managed to get the slider back to the correct position to take a plain old photo, which almost always what I intended to do.  In retrospect, I never had these problems with my iPhone 3, taking pictures on that was always a breeze, and despite having far less storage, it never filled up the device itself.  Simpler and smaller worked out better for me.

As I feared, iCloud has been an incredible nuisance since day one, and on 2 years later.  Many months ago I finally got so tired of the warnings telling me I needed to upgrade to paid storage, I finally figured out how to shut it off, or so I thought.  But off doesn't mean off, there are so many different things which separately have to be turned off.

Despite turning off iCloud, or so I thought, recently it's been putting a warning on my screen all the time about my iCloud storage being full.  So I figured out how to actually delete photos from the iCloud itself.  It seems with a recent update Apple may have made this better.  It now seems that simply turning on the phone does the required authentication.  I think previously it demanded I log into iCloud to make any changes.  And that's a problem because I can hardly keep track of the passwords I use for the things I use often, let alone the things I very rarely use, like iCloud, which in fact I've never retrieved anything from.  But this time, thankfully, I was able to delete all my photos from iCloud, and the storage there fell back to almost nothing, just my notes.

But now it seems more fully "on", but all my oldest notes have disappeared.  I think that was the warning that kept me from doing this all along.

Now, all the notes I've ever taken would only have filled up maybe 1mb or so, but when I turned off the iCloud, I immediately lost about half of my notes (probably going back to some earlier day when I first turned iCloud notes off, I have everything since then, maybe).

This is the basic Apple tyranny of "Sync."  Files never exist as independent copies anywhere in iCloud syncing.  You are either sync'd to the iCloud, or they don't exist at all.  They may be "on" your phone when you have iCloud, but when iCloud is sufficiently disabled they are wiped from your phone.  You don't "own" anything.  Apple owns you.

Fortunately it doesn't seem to have deleted all my photos in the way it did with my notes.  I still seem to have all my photos back to the beginning.  Whew.

Now the way this should work, as I think it did with my iPhone 3, is that whenever I plug it into my computer it just backs up everything new.  And since there isn't much new stuff, this should take maybe 5 minutes, which was the way it had been for the first few months.

Though, that had been a problem because after awhile, even though I wasn't adding much new stuff, it might take 24 hours or so to index all the stuff which was already on my computer so it could tell what was new.  So by the time I finally stopped using my iPhone 3, backups had become almost impossible, as I'd need to leave my phone connected to my Mac for 24 hours or more, just to figure out which new stuff needed to be backed up.

As fast as computer are, and have been for the last 20 years, I wouldn't have thought this would have been a problem, but it was.

As always, this happens because their priorities are different than mine.  Their priority is to always find some way that I'll need to buy more stuff, as if buying a $1000 phone wasn't enough.  And my priority is generally to figure out some way I can keep from buying more stuff.