Friday, September 21, 2018

iOS 12 on my iPhone 8 now

I am generally the voice of caution.  I have had too many experiences when incompatibilities hurt my productivity when doing operating system upgrades/updates.

Why would I jump to iOS 12 so soon?  It seemed that it was truly past the beta test stage, unlike previous releases.  Also, Apple plays a guessing game with device security.  You can never tell how dangerous your situation is.  I have upgraded to the latest major release in the past because there were so many security fixes.

I felt that way today and certain articles I've read recently suggest that iOS 12 is more likely to protect me, broken or not.

1.35 GB seems a crazy load for a handheld device but it has become more common to exceed 1 GB with updates and upgrades.  Games are especially heavy on storage.  2018's operating systems are hardly the machine language monitors that needed to fit into 8 KB of RAM in the late 1970s.  What could fit into a well-ventilated room now fits into your hand, except for the keyboard and keypunch.

First off, shutting down and starting are very, very quick to happen.

Usually, there is the wheel, barely visible, churning until the system shuts down.  I didn't even see it--the system was just finished.  I held the power button and it was ready for my PIN very soon after that.

Backing up the updated phone is taking quite a long time.

Everything seems a bit more responsive and some things are extremely responsive.  I'm not sure if they changed the game interfaces' performance but games feel more fluid now.  Text scrolling seems smoother than warm butter.

Obviously, an iPhone 8 shouldn't have any issues because it was new only 1 year ago.  Still, the operating system's latency made the experience seem to lag.  I hope that this is not a temporary speed-up that will be crushed by bug fixes.  Mac OS X was really awful from Public Beta and got better with each release.  At 10.4.11, it seemed the best it could be, and Leopard was uncomfortably buggy and slow.  Things never seemed to improve, which may be why I'm on Windows 10 now.

iOS 12 gives me hope, as does WatchOS 5.

Update 2018.09.26: Certain apps seem unresponsive at times and have to be ended and re-launched.  Overall performance is good but occasionally choppy.  There have been around 5-10 app updates each day.  I suspect many more will come as they actually test their development efforts (or lack of same) with actual users on iOS 12.

Update 2018.10.07: Nothing more interesting has happened, thankfully.  Hopefully, the next update will improve stability.  I'm happy for those on older phones who are getting a big performance boost.

Update 2018.11.04: Woke up and the time was not reset to Pacific Standard Time today, even though Daylight Saving Time had ended for this year.  Version 12.1 doesn't seem to be completely better, but 12.1.1 is in the beta test period now.  There were some nasty security issues squashed with 12.1 though, so it was well worth the risk.  I hope that Apple are looking at security 24/7/365.

Update 2018.12.08: I've been on 12.1.1 for a couple of days.  It corrected a few bugs, including the time zone issue.  I'm not sure how stable it is but it seems to be okay at the moment.  There are loads of app updates, as companies realize the problems their apps contain.

It's likely that there will not be any update until February, unless they find something significantly broken.

Update 2019.01.27: 12.1.3 is on my phone now.  There were several bug fixes, but I'm not seeing any useful performance change.  It's certainly less slow than iOS 11, but it's more laggy than expected.  Since 12.2 is in beta test now, we might see positive changes through April.

It's interesting to see that Apple are having trouble selling phones, and with Qualcomm being dorks and digging it for the double-dipping harvest (they want licensing fees from Apple as well as those supplying products where licensing fees are already being paid), some phones are not available in various locations.

Apple currently make phones that I don't want.  They can't offer me an iPhone 8 replacement because they don't have one.  They also don't have an iPhone SE replacement.  Considering how easy it is for someone to look at the phone, FaceID is not a true security measure, in my opinion.  They have said that TouchID is less secure but show me how someone can force me to use the correct finger first time.

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