It is 4:02 PM on Wednesday afternoon. We’re about to get one of our first rain storms of the winter: the sky is a dark gray, the wind is blowing heavily which makes the eucalyptus trees sway and there is a chill in the air.
I love this type of weather and miss the heavy rainstorms of the Midwest. And so here I sit in my clubhouse writing a post while appreciating the oncoming storm. I am being lazy however as my son and I are skipping karate class. I’m just not in the mood to drive through rain. The traffic is never great and Californians are terrible drivers. I’m sure there will be plenty of one-car wrecks and I just don’t want to deal with it.
I also just finished setting up my wife’s iPhone X which took much longer than expected and was frustrating. The first annoyance came when the “tab” to transfer data from the old phone to the new didn’t appear at all. The iPhone said to set them side by side but nothing happened. You need to have iOS 11 and I checked the old phone and it was running a version of iOS 11. So I then checked software update and there was an update which takes about 25 minutes. After that the tab appeared and data was transferred. The next annoyance came when the new iPhone needed to have a software update. That should have come with the new phone pre-installed and so I’m guessing there might have been a problem that needed patching, thus the new update.
Finally, not all settings for e-mail transfer so you get a lot of pop-ups asking to enter the password. This is especially frustrating when you have two-step authentication and the Google Authenticator app isn’t set up yet either. At that time it was still downloading apps from the cloud so I had to wait until the Google Authenticator app finished installing and then get it working on the new phone by going to my wife’s account on a computer, finding the authenticator bar code and scanning it with the phone. After that the e-mail worked.
I’d like her to try Apple Pay so put the Amex on there with no problem. The only other card she would use it for is Costco and I learned that Citi Costco cards do not work with Apple Pay. Slight frustration but nothing too severe.
Finally, I thought T-Mobile would do something cool like have the sim already to go. There is a T-Mobile sim in the phone already but it isn’t connected to the account. So I spoke with a rep and he let me know that the easiest thing to do is simply swap the sim cards which I did.
So now the wife has the new phone. The last thing I have to do is wipe the data from her old phone and follow the instructions to send in and get a credit. All in all, there are a few great features, but it isn’t ‘light years’ above her old iPhone 6. I’m hoping we discover some cool new things but I wouldn’t say it is worth $700 to upgrade when the old phone worked just fine.
Since we’re shelling out for this phone I’ll keep my old Samsung S6 for a while longer. It looks like the newest Samsung, the bendable one, will be something to really be excited about so I’ll be waiting at least until then to even consider a new phone. Mine still works perfectly and I really see no reason to upgrade at this time. It is kind of funny that the wife (and my parents) all have the latest phones while I’m the most tech savvy yet stuck with the oldest phone!
The sky has grown darker and the rain will soon start falling. I am glad we’re not going to karate today. Funny how living in California so long has turned me into a wuss when it comes to rain. My old Ohio self would surely laugh…. a bit of rain keeping me home. It’s not like it is black ice, snow storm or anything! But again, there is the traffic and I’m sure this rain will cause problems. It will be nice to be sitting the house eating dinner by our fake fireplace instead of getting home late, fighting traffic and rain.
