iPhone 8 Apple 2017

This week’s connected was funny with the whole Schroedinger’s “is it a review, or isn’t it?” discussion. Vitticci sure does take it personally if you don’t call it a review.

I also have my quibbles with calling it a review. But, I’m pretty damn technical and I still need to watch a few of his videos to see how that stuff works.

iOS 11 feels faster to me. It seems more responsive. Not that I had performance issues before, but my first thought upon upgrading was that it felt zippy.

watchOS 4 seems a bit rough. It’s not slower, in fact “hey Siri” is faster to answer, but the way it acts is annoying. Like now when playing music or a podcast on the phone, the watch face shows the music player seemingly permanently. Even after you stopped the music. I looked at my watch 30 minutes after I stopped the music, and it was still showing the music interface. The Siri face is kind of pointless. It needs to allow other apps access or come up with more cards. It just showed me a reminder I had set for this evening all day. The stand up reminder seems to have stopped working. And the watch just shut down during use today. Not thrilled with it so far.

Give it a few days. Spotlight is re-indexing files.

There’s no way to control how long the watch face shows the active audio app player. I’ve noticed it’s still showing Overcast (podcast app) a couple minutes after I’ve gotten out of the car and the playing stopped. Definitely haven’t seen that persist for 30 minutes though.

You can disable the feature entirely too. Turn off Auto-launch Audio Apps from the Wake Screen settings in the Watch app and it will no longer automatically wake to the current audio player.

Glad you mentioned this because I’ve got this bug too, but I wondered if I just wasn’t paying attention and somehow missed a couple notifications while distracted. Tested it out though and can confirm I’m no longer getting stand notifications either. They’d better fix this quick, I’ve got a 149 day perfect streak of all Activity rings going!

Ah ok thanks. I haven’t touched settings in awhile because everything was working the way I wanted it to. Looks like I need to go exploring.

Back to the standing reminder bug: A slow motion support conversation via twitter with Apple hasn’t gotten me far, their next recommendation is that I unpair and re-pair the watch. I may try that tonight.

Elsewhere (macrumors forums) somebody said they read somewhere else that if you open up the Health app on the phone, edit your profile (top right corner), and change “Wheelchair” from the default of “not set” to “no”, and then restart your watch, that fixed it for them. Allegedly. I can’t test this now since I already hit my 12 hours for the day, but maybe I’ll give that a shot tomorrow if I don’t have time to re-pair the watch tonight.

Tried the wheelchair thing, thanks. Doubt I will have a chance to see if it works tonight though. New watch tomorrow, so might not be an issue anyway.

Edit: it worked, it literally went off right after I hit post. Thanks again.

Sweet! Out of curiosity, had you launched the Health app at all since the upgrade? I realized I hadn’t, because it still prompted me with a little “what’s new” screen on launch.

So I’m curious now if just launching it for the first time is the trick, maybe the wheelchair thing isn’t even necessary. There might just be some initialization that doesn’t take place until you’ve run the Health app at least once post-upgrade.

I had launched it yesterday to see what had changed.

My Stand Reminders are back! I just toggled the Wheelchair setting from the default of “Not set” to on and then back to “Not set”, so you don’t even specifically have to have it turned off.

So did nobody here actually even get an iPhone 8/8 Plus?

You mean that ancient phone? Isn’t that from like two years ago?

No. I might get an X. Not sure yet, I’m not happy that it has the same width as the non-plus regular iPhone. I wish they followed Samsung’s lead and made an X+ too.

I might just sit this one out, my 6S+ is still perfectly fast. The 2GB RAM was an enormous upgrade, but it feels like the X’s narrow-ass screen could be a downgrade. I need to feel it in my hand to tell.

I guess i can beg/plead AT&T to take back my just-purchased iPhone 7… /sigh.

Did you not know it was coming? Always hit the rumor sites before buying a phone! :)

AT&T will take them back for 15 days after purchase. If it’s longer than that, sometimes you can negotiate.

I got my 8 Plus today!

But to answer your question, I’m going to try to get an X. I’m not sure what my threshold will be though for how long I’m willing to wait if I can’t snag one of the very earliest pre-orders. I’d really like to move on from my iPhone 6, so if the delivery projections are truly ridiculous by the time I get my order through, maybe I’ll fall back on an 8 Plus at that point.

Not yet. Could be next week, could be November. (This is straight from my carrier’s customer service rep.) (Am reasonably sure what he really meant was ‘I’m not even looking at anything’).

My wife’s 8 arrived today. Going to set it up soon.

Just got my new V3 non-LTE watch. No real impressions yet, since it still seems to be loading stuff from the phone. Didn’t realize how much my V1 had aged between the crown not turning as easily and the rubber band getting much harder.

I wanted a stainless steel model, but since Apple decided to make all versions LTE except the Sport, I bought a grey sport. Bought a brown leather band to go with it, but it doesn’t really go well with the grey aluminum so it’s most likely going back. I just can’t justify $10 a month for something I would barely use for LTE. Maybe $5 a month would have been ok?

Anyway, Seattle Area store there was a line of about a dozen people at 4pm when I was there. All kids. I was surprised there was any line that late in the day for what was a pretty minor update.

Edit: Ok, it amazingly quicker than the V1. My speed test is adding items to my grocery list with “hey Siri”. This morning I was trying to add something, and it took about 3 times before Siri even acknowledged I was talking to it. Then I get the “I’ll tap you when I am ready” message and it takes somewhere between 5-10 seconds. V3, it has heard me right away every time so far, and then there is no delay. I get a message that the item is added immediately.

Loading apps isn’t lightning quick, but it’s the first time opening many of them, so I need more time to tell.