2020 iPhone SE on Sprint is here for zero monthly

As I'm in the USA and T-Mobile and Sprint have merged, I got their earliest combined offer--an iPhone SE for zero each month.

This comes as a result of monthly credits, and some accounting magic.  I paid the additional $150 one time for the 256 GB model, so I can have the same capacity as my iPhone 8.  They also waived the activation/upgrade fee, which is okay but I'm not taking it to a store, unless there is some problem.  Since I didn't pay the $27.01 for the iPhone 8 for two months, I'm okay with the extra $150.

Thankfully, my iPhone 7 case will fit just fine, although it has been through four years and two phones.

This was a surprising deal, but the phone is a few hundred less than the next phone and I don't want something huge or something that uses Face ID.  Surprisingly, I'm getting exactly what I want for a price that I really like.  Something must be very wrong.

It's here!  UPS actually left it without a signature--probably something Covid-19 related.  I waited as long as possible before walking to the bus stop and when I was there, I saw the UPS truck leave my street.  I didn't expect the phone to be there.  It's slightly scary that it was.  Someone could have taken it.

Sprint had good instructions on how to activate the phone.  That's just odd that any U.S. carrier has good instructions.  They usually mis-type technical terms.  In any case, I went to their website, signed into their system.  It brought up the old and new phones and I clicked to transfer the activation.  It complained that I hadn't turned off "Find My...", so I went into the phone and took care of that.  Once that was finished, the new phone was activated.

Apparently, the iPhone SE was not on iOS 13.5, so my current backup did not work with a previous operating system.  I updated the operating system slowly.  I figured a fast, new phone wouldn't take quite so long with 13.5.  I was mistaken.

Once that was handled, it allowed me to restore my latest backup onto the phone and began to download every app and install them--in order of most used.  Since I have way too many--222--and 256 GB, it took too long, even with a fast internet connection through Comcast/xFinity.

Restoring movies didn't take too long.  With 256 GB, I can fit my 11 or so digital downloads from when I had the iPhone 5c and could only load one at a time.

The phone doesn't seem all that fast, probably because the iPhone 8 was very fast already.  The display looks better--sharper, with deeper blacks.  There may also be a psychological effect from this "white" version having a black fascia, unlike the iPhone 8.

The logo has slipped further down, so my iPhone 7 case, no longer shows the logo.  There is no "iPhone" on the back, to go along with the logo change.

Since this phone supports many more LTE bands, I'm hoping to see if performance is enhanced because of T-Mobile LTE.  I'm sure T-Mobile users' LTE is enhanced, as Sprint has the best LTE in town.

Considering that this isn't costing me any monthly money, I'm extra pleased to have it--just for the new battery.  I just need to make sure I get the phone back to Sprint as soon as possible, so that there won't be any charges.

Sprint kept bugging me to take their newest protection plan and it does more than just protect, but the price was a bit much.  I went to the Apple Support app and bought AppleCare + for $3.99/month, which is cheaper than what I was paying for the iPhone 8 support at $7.99/month.

Digging up my Mac past

I've been on Windows since spring 2018 and it hasn't been all that great.  It smoothed out until update 1809 and 1909 was even more rocky.  The most recent updates managed to eat my drive data.  Even after a visit to a repair service, I ended up with a reset all the way back to factory.  At this moment, I can't really use the machine and it's a shame with all those games.

For two years, I haven't had my music or a recent backup of my music, which has led me to some frustration.  I also left some projects undone and I just wanted to get an inexpensive Mac that would allow me to revive things.  I've been searching a very long time.

On OfferUp, I wasn't sure whether the machines were stolen or not but the prices weren't all that good for the damged look of some of the machines and the distance I'd have to travel.  Apple, of course, has only machines three years old or newer, which would be too much money for minimum wage me.  Newegg has had machines, but they often have third parties with poor ratings, and I'm not very trusting.

A couple of weeks ago, I came across a mid-2012 quad core i7 with a GeForce 650M, almost like mine--one step down.  The price was acceptable, but the 4 GB of RAM left me unsure as to whether it would be able to restore my final backup, although the 500 GB 5400 rpm disk drive was sufficient.

I ordered it on a Sunday night.  By Tuesday, they had finished packaging and its status was "Label created".  It stayed that way, even after it arrived several days later.

The machine looked almost new.  The display hinges are a little weak, but since I've got my (dead) machine, I can probably have those switched.  The machine has only 512 MB of VRAM, in contrast to my machine having 1 GB.  It probably doesn't matter a lot because how many games are available for an 8 year old machine?  GOG has some, though.  What's more important is using that GPU to speed up photo and video processing.

Getting the machine up and running was a struggle.  It complained about the backup being from a newer version of the operating system.  Sadly, the Mac App Store pointed me to the current, rather broken, Catalina/10.15.4.  I didn't realize that it was completely 64-bit, so nothing 32-bit would run.  I complained about Apple not doing this in the past, so it's amusing that it was such a kick in the pants.

Loading Catalina wasn't awful.  The 500 GB hard drive had to be converted from HFS+ to APFS.  It didn't take long to be downloaded.  The installation wasn't horrible, either.  Trying to boot it with a hard drive from 2012 and only 4 GB of RAM was difficult, at best.

Once it was running, I was tossing out software and hoping that upgrades would be simple.  Several upgrades were extremely expensive and I'm considering them still.  Those things purchased through the Mac App Store didn't come with upgrade fees.  However, getting things to run was almost impossible.  Firefox would initially run and would fail, apparently because of the 4 GB of RAM restriction.  It displayed some sort of dialog box, but I couldn't manipulate it to see the contents.

There were some system functions that were running constantly, possibly because the hard drive was converted from HFS+.  It disabled the machine for all intents and purposes, especially with a file system that wasn't happy on a hard drive and a system with a shortage of RAM.

Enhancements Matter

I bought a 1 TB Western Digital SSD (2.5 inch) and 16 GB of RAM.  Considering that eight years have passed, the total for the enhancements was negligible.  I remember that the Other World Computing 6G Extreme SSD was something around US$500 for 480 GB and the RAM might have been about the same price in early 2013.

Just inserting the RAM made a huge difference in performance with macOS Catalina.  I wanted to get an external enclosure in order to clone the drive and the enclosure had not arrived at that time.  I ended up finding a compatible enclosure and macOS did all the cloning, once I could get the SSD partitioned and formatted properly.  There was some error at first, which isn't a surprise with 10.15.4.

Making sure the SSD was set to be APFS made a positive difference.  When I booted from the drive, the previous system tasks from when the hard drive was present were not taking over the system any longer.  The system seemed about as fast as my Windows 10 system with the 7th generation quad-core i7 and 32 GB rather than the Mac from 2012 with a 3rd generation quad-core i7 and 16 GB of RAM, just as my other machine had been.  Obviously the GeForce 1050 GTX versus the GT 650M difference is really displayed in applications which use hardware acceleration.

It's taken some time to update applications to current versions, but everything runs quite well.  Most games are not possible because time has left the 650M with 512 MB in the past, and those games that could run need to be converted to work under 64-bit operation.  I tried to get The Witness to work, but it got just past the graphics settings and died.  The Epic Games Launcher seems flaky.  Steam won't run even though it's the 64-bit version and ran once.  GOG Galaxy 2.0 runs occasionally.  MacGameStore can run.  Obduction runs, if a bit glitchy!  Things are running somewhat better and I've found more games.

Thankfully, the Affinity suite by Serif seems fine, along with Capture One Pro 12, Luminar 2018, Swift Publisher 5 and more.  I was concerned with being able to retrieve projects, photos, and music.  My music is up to date on my phone, but it's been tedious getting Finder (not iTunes) to sync things.  My TV and movie downloads are currently not on the phone because Finder had them removed.

I didn't think that a machine from 2012 would be so useful in 2020, but for graphics work, it seems quite capable.

Update 2020.05.01: Is it sad that a mid-2012 MacBook Pro with flaky 10.5.4 is more stable than a late-2017 Omen by HP laptop computer with the latest Windows 10?