Most of our Apple gear is either for sale, recently upgraded, or in a holding pattern while we wait for new releases.
And we're all STILL waiting for HomeKit to "arrive".
iPhone
I've been holding on to my iPhone 6 since its launch date -- waiting for a phone like the X, frankly.I'm not sure I agree with Woz when he said that the 8 is basically the same as the 7, which was basically the same as the 6... but I'll admit that there are some strong similarities.
But MAN, the iPhone 6 is starting to show its age.
It occasionally takes 5-10 seconds to launch core apps like Messages or Phone. (Phone!) Occasionally, those apps fail to launch entirely.
And the camera... which I once loved so dearly... looks a bit behind the times, too.
We recently went to "The Upside Down", which was a Stranger Things-styled pop-up bar here in Chicago.
The place was somewhat dark - as you'd expect, given that it was 1) a bar, and 2) themed to a horror-TV show.
It was also the kind of place where EVERYONE was taking selfies. The bar was elaborately themed, and would only exist for another week or so.
Our friends were taking photos with an iPhone 7, which looked great.... and made my iPhone 6 photos look ridiculously blurry and bad.
Suffice it to say, the iPhone 7 made a giant leap forward w/r/t photography in low-light conditions.
I can't wait to upgrade.
When we do, we'll likely be switching to T-Mobile, to save some $ each month, move to an unlimited plan, and gain some international data capability.
Apple Watch
I sold my original Apple Watch, because I'm upgrading to a Series 3 with 4G.When I sold my wife's watch, we had no problems. This sale has been difficult - and I could have avoided the problems with some additional research.
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| If you're selling an old Apple Watch - make sure to remove it from your AppleID too! |
I thought I had checked every box -- I made sure to do a factory restore on the Watch, and I un-paired it from my iPhone.
However, I had also included the Watch as a "device" under my Apple ID, for "Find My iPhone" purposes.
And that has been INCREDIBLY difficult to undo.
The buyer contacted me, noting that the Watch had an Activation Lock tied to my AppleID.
I apologized, removed the Watch from my AppleID devices, and assumed we were good to go.
Nope.
Even after multiple calls with Apple Support, we have an intractable problem.
My AppleID has no trace of the Watch among its connected devices.
HOWEVER, when Apple looks up the Watch by its serial number, it still has my AppleID listed.
Two databases, which are not talking to each other. We need to re-set the Watch itself. (And the buyer hasn't been able to do that yet - it involves some tricky Force Touches.)
She set up a Genius Bar appointment for this morning - hopefully we can get this resolved.
Home Server
I just bought a QNAP 4-drive NAS to act as our primary home server - it arrives on Wednesday, and while I'll initially fill it up with 1TB drives that I've got around the house, we'll be expanding that to 24 TB with 4 6TB drives.(It will be RAID, so we'll only have 12 usable TB, but we'll be safe if and when any drive fails.)
It's going to be connected to our network via Ethernet, and will serve a couple of main functions.
First and foremost, it will be the Time Machine drive for our (ancient, late-2009) iMac.
We currently use an external drive sitting on the iMac desk as the backup drive.... I've been a bit concerned that if we WERE to be robbed, a thief would certainly steal that drive as well - and we'd lose a ton of photos.
(Yes, it's backed up to iCloud as well, but I'm not sure if that's everything.)
The QNAP will be the actual repository of our Photo Library - that will free up quite a bit of space on the iMac, too.
It will also act as a Plex server, which means we can start transferring our Blu-Rays, and have immediate no-disc access to our movies that DON'T have Movies Everywhere codes.
BOTTOM LINE
While I wish there were more movement in the HomeKit space, we're pretty happy with our all-Apple TV-based system right now, and getting Plex up and running will be another avenue for using those Apple TVs.
Here's hoping the Watch situation works itself out today - I'm looking forward to adding that Series 3!
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