More Apple crap

In my imagination, there would be a simple smartphone interface that would not get in your way.

In reality, what we have is endless diversions and crap somehow intended to sell more stuff.

I did finally so far resolve my multiple Apple ID problem, a story too long to recount here.  Now that I am logged into the same Apple ID on my mac's iTunes, and on my phone, stuff generally works rather than generally not working.

But because I had "changed" the ID on my phone, it would no longer update.  Finally, it bricked.  It took hours of work to get it all going again, with endless (and thankfully with the number always changing) "uknown error" messages.   And nobody tells you that as long as the error number keeps changing you should keep on trying to update or restore, except in exhausing online searches.

I've seen this phenomenon on Microsoft also.  Not just one attempt to update is required if you haven't been keeping up.  Often it requires hours of updates.  Except on Microsoft it could be many days of updates.   I think I counted Eleven updates before I had a working iphone again.  All except the last ending in an unhelpful "unknown error" number that suggests it's all over--get a new phone.  You can't just start from some new update level, it seems, but go through many of the intervening updates.  Or perhaps you can't pile all the ice cream on the cone at once.

You might think with all the crap they put into these smart phones, they could spend the extra 10 cents for actual helpful error messages.  But of course, that is not the plan.  The plan is to sell more stuff, including new phones.

One key thing it seems I always had to turn off was "Find My iPhone."  I could not update or restore my phone without doing that.  But since my phone wouldn't boot, I couldn't do it, and when I tried to do it in iTunes it didn't stick, at first.

I've turned off "Find My iPhone" dozens of times, but when it counts it seems Apple somehow turns it back on again.  Now the first thing I do, as soon as I am able, is turn off "Find My iPhone" before it can cause some failure or another.

Another thing to immediately turn off is Screen Time, which gives nanny notifications every so often about how much time the screen has been on.  Shit!  Who makes up the "requirements" for these things, and decides a reasonable idea is to default it in the ON position?

Before my update, restore, and correction I was endless getting notification bells.  I don't want any notifications except for texts from my best friend.  I turned off notifications in Every Single App (which took over an hour).  There seemed to be no way to do this for everything, of course.  Now because I have an all new system, created from scratch With No "Backup" file, I will have to do that all over again.

Quite often those notification bells would show nothing on the screen, or in the notifications center either (which doesn't seem to have all notifications, but a lot of crap which isn't notifications).

Oh, yes, and turn off all "Holidays."  I don't want bells ringing because today is some sort of holiday or another.  I already know if it's a "Holiday" important to me.

At least for now, the fingerprint sensor is finally working ok.  Last time I just completely disabled "security" so I didn't have to punch in my number every time I picked up the phone because the finger print sensing program was not working very well.  Disabling security possibly itself probably caused other problems like failures to update.  I'd be fine with no "security" at all except for credit operations, but that's not the assumption.  The assumption is that you're deeply paranoid, like a spy or crook or something.  And our information warring society drums it into everyone that we must be.  I'm sure it's because utterly criminal corporations and government don't want us to know what they're doing.