new iPhone

October 2017.

Got the iPhone 8 here tend days ago or something.

Key reason I did the upgrade is inductive charging. I don't have that charger yet, but that's why.

This is is glass front AND BACK. Turns out that's not as good an idea as it sounds, although the reason is to allow for the inductive charger.

The issue is that now the back is slippery. The old one was not. This is slippery in the near-perfect sense that if you set it down on a sloped surface, it slides off. Onto whatever next surface is lower down, which might not be what you want AT ALL.

And it doesn't seem to matter what that slope angle is. I have set it down on what seem like near-zero angles and it does slowly slide down/off. For nearly flat, it may take a few minutes to actually do it, but I've watched it happen.

It's not completely frictionless, of course, or the slide would be instantaneous per physical inertia.

At first I was wondering if there was some kinda of internal vibration causing this, but I can't feel anything. It just happens.

That all said…

It's a much more responsive device. But not completely error-free--I've still had some web-pages reset during loading because there's some javascript error.

I'm not convinced I like the new "home" button…well, NON-button. The I-6 had a mechanical button--it felt solid when you really clicked it. This is a touch-click, which takes getting used to, and it's a LOT faster about fingerprint-to-unlock, faster than I'm comfortable with.

The last problem I had with it is that it requires a newer ITunes than I am working with. You have to have 12.7, which comes with a newer OSX than I am running right now. I am slowly going through upgrades to get there, while I try to figure out just what all applications are going to stay back with the older machine I may have to keep alive.

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December 2017.

I've had to reboot the phone twice in the last week/ten days. I forget why the first time, something was wacky.

Yesterday morning, email stopped grabbing messages. 9am was the last one pulled down. I was continuing to get the notifications, which means that the gmail server is working, but the phone would not grab messages, or download messages. Apparently there is a 3-stage process here.

1) contact email server (imap.gmail.com) and do a login to fetch headers. I don't know how much headers, but whatever you see on-screen, which looks like from, subject, first 10 words of body, make alert notification.

2) read full headers and insert into InBox. does NOT download entire message.

3) download full message and render. This happens when you get a new message actually on-screen. Or does it? Does the whole thing download in the background somehow?

So what was not working? #2 and #3. In finder-grain detail: #1 continued to work. 9am was the last time #3 had worked, shortly after that #2 quit working. I had a few messages that were in InBox but had no body. At the bottom of the screen there's a message in really tiny print about some error implying I have done something wrong…thing is, I wasn't even out of bed when the trouble started, so *I* haven't done anything. And Apple Mail is working just fine on my Mac Pro.


I had to reboot the phone to recover. All was good after that. Why?