Apple Operating Systems (macOS, iOS, watchOS, & tvOS) Catch-All

I gather that what they're calling Apple Watch Series 2 now supports podcast playback.

Mr GT Chris wrote:

I gather that what they're calling Apple Watch Series 2 now supports podcast playback.

Do you have a link? The Ars Technica review said that it didn't and the author was disappointed by it.

Damn, on rereading some links it looks like they were just referring to the same workaround as with the original watch. Sorry!

I just noticed that iOS 10 now converts Youtube links to a rich thumbnail in iMessage. Nice.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/ukp7zmE.jpg)

Bonus: The video I sent my son is pretty funny.

Why did my iPad home screen icons just start bouncing up and down by themselves? It wasn't like the wiggle motion when you press an icon to move it. They just started bouncing up and down when I picked up my iPad. After a few seconds, they stopped. At first I thought my eyes were going batty, but nothing else was bouncing, just the icons.

Googling an answer for this has got me nowhere.

Anyone surprised that they've abandoned the iPad 2, iPad Mini, iPhone 4S, and iPod Touch 5G with this version? It seemed like with the slimmed down iOS 9 they were committed to providing up to date OS versions for platforms that were still commonly in use. I believe the market share of all the above is still around 10%, not insignificant.

I have 3 iOS 9 compatible devices and only 1 iOS 10 compatible device. I'm a bit worried about upgrading to iOS 10 for fear of some (eventual) incompatibility between them.

If someone still has an iPhone 4S all I have to ask is "whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy"

Quite a few sold in countries like India when Apple was trying to break into the budget market. Also some people hand down devices to kids etc. to use as iPods.

And it was the best iPhone

Mr GT Chris wrote:

Quite a few sold in countries like India when Apple was trying to break into the budget market. Also some people hand down devices to kids etc. to use as iPods.

But in these usecases, where the iPhone 4S is used in budget/third-world markets or as a hand-me-down device, is it reasonable for Apple to continue supporting it with the latest operating system? And for these markets, do they really need the latest operating system (security patches aside)?

Admittedly I'm a little biased because of my customer/developer support tickets; just last week I had a user with an iPhone 3GS running iOS 5 asking why videos aren't playing on the device. Of course then, she got upset because if videos aren't playing on her 5+ year old device, obviously they're not going to play on a new iPhone 7 or Galaxy Fire 7.

If you're going to hold onto your devices, especially mobile phones, for more than ~3 years, I think you should have the expectation that it's not going to last forever and it will not always run the latest and greatest software.

Security patches is the point. In fact, that's the only issue concerning me. Having all these insecure systems in the wild is bad for everyone because it allows viruses, exploits etc. to propagate. That's why Microsoft was so forceful in trying to get governments and corporations to finally move on from XP.

Just repeating myself above, but Apple made such a big deal about slimming down iOS 9 so that it would work well across older devices that it seems like a step bakc to, only a year later, cut out those same older devices.

Edit: if Apple had the same commitment to patching iOS 9 that Microsoft did for XP then it would be a non issue. (OK, hopefully iCloud would still be compatible across 9 and 10 too)

Mr GT Chris wrote:

Security patches is the point. In fact, that's the only issue concerning me. Having all these insecure systems in the wild is bad for everyone because it allows viruses, exploits etc. to propagate. That's why Microsoft was so forceful in trying to get governments and corporations to finally move on from XP.

I'm more inclined to think it was getting too painful devoting resources to maintaining security on the older platform without breaking anything else. It's supposition either way. We don't know that there won't be a 9.3.6 if something bad is found in 9.3.5.

By mostly starting from scratch with iOS 9, you would hope that would be baked in, especially now being only one major release later. But, yes, fingers crossed they keep security fixes coming. It would only benefit all iOS users.

It's zero benefit to those who have hardware that can and should be running iOS 10.

While the 'silly purchases' thread seemed most appropriate, after posting there I found this thread so I'll ask here too:

I haven't purchased it yet but we're thinking about getting some Apple Watches for our employees as a gift / bonus. I figured people in this thread might have thought about them.

Anyone have one? Anyone have thoughts?

It would probably only make sense if they had iPhones since they are tied to that ecosystem.

Rahmen wrote:

While the 'silly purchases' thread seemed most appropriate, after posting there I found this thread so I'll ask here too:

I haven't purchased it yet but we're thinking about getting some Apple Watches for our employees as a gift / bonus. I figured people in this thread might have thought about them.

Anyone have one? Anyone have thoughts?

I've had one since day one and I wear it every day.. love it.. I use it for the fitness app as well as reminders to do all sorts of things.. it's handy to check notifications on as well during meetings.

EvilDead wrote:

It would probably only make sense if they had iPhones since they are tied to that ecosystem.

But yeah this. it's useless if you have anything but an iPhone.

Almost everyone has an iPhone so we'll have a plan for the one or two that don't but thanks for highlighting that too.

Just a quick little heads up for anyone who's been playing around with iMessage sticker apps lately and wondering where all your storage space silently disappeared to on your 16 GB device.

While iMessage apps appear on the iTunes store with fairly small file sizes (500KB - 10 MB), they're actually quite big once they unpack, or at least the ones I've been using lately are (Mario Run, the two Pokemon ones, the PvZ one, etc.). I was down to 100 MB this morning and tried turning off a handful of them and I reclaimed about 400-500 MB of space even though the combined app size in iTunes was probably 1/10th of that.

Worst part is that these apps don't appear in the list of apps when you look in Settings -> General -> Storage -> Manage Storage. This in particular made it harder for me to figure out why I had lost several 100 MB of storage space when I had only installed a couple of apps that were less than 10 MB each. Thanks Apple!

Finally went from El Capitan to Sierra. Disappointing how buggy El Capitan got towards the end, pretty much forced my hand. At the same time, I upgraded my 5S from iOS 9 to 10. Already regretting it a bit. Battery life seems to have gone to sh*t, touch ID no longer works at all, and the location information on my calendar entries is empty. Still intact on my Mac and other devices thankfully. Damn... and this is a 10.2.1 release. Yikes.

As a counterpoint, my 5S survived a belated update to iOS10 just fine.

I had no problem with my 5S upgrade to iOS 10 last year.

I have yet to upgrade my MacBook Pro to Sierra though.

I'm downloading Sierra 10.12.3 right now. iOS 10 has been fine on my 5S, though 9 seemed to affect the battery life. I'm looking forward to iOS 10.3 and APFS and seeing if that makes any noticeable difference with performance.

Sierra has been good so far. It's fixed at least 2 El Capitan issues, not counting the one that they did eventually patch in El Capitan. It does take a while to reindex your photos etc.

Mr GT Chris wrote:

It does take a while to reindex your photos etc.

It was 2 solid days (48 hours) of it reindexing photos on my new iMac. Something about regenerating the faces index. Pretty crazy how hard it pegged the CPU's and RAM - the iMac was basically unusable for anything other than web surfing until it was finished.

Mine wasn't so bad and that was with my Photos library being stored on a NAS so I really can't complain. Maybe I have a much smaller library :).

Damn, iOS 10 continues to annoy. I plugged my iPhone into my Mac to charge. Came back this morning to see iTunes asking me to unlock my phone so it can sync. No big deal, I was just charging it anyway, oh wait, not only hasn't my phone charged, it's now off, battery dead. I tried just replugging it into my Mac to restart the charging process, no good. Currently charging it successfully off an external battery, thankfully.

PSA for updating to iOS 10.3: It went smoothly on my three devices, but the first one took a looooong time to update iCloud settings (about 45 minutes) after rebooting. The other two were faster because iCloud had already been updated.

What was strange was while the white "updating settings" screen is modal with no way to minimize or cancel, my email notifications kept pinging the whole time in the background.

Always back up first anyway! It's the only thing iTunes is good for.

PaladinTom wrote:

Always back up first anyway! It's the only thing iTunes is good for.

It has other uses, but yes, updating through iTunes so that it does a full backup (which you should encrypt so that passwords etc. are backed up as well) is the safest way to do this one.

PaladinTom wrote:

PSA for updating to iOS 10.3: It went smoothly on my three devices, but the first one took a looooong time to update iCloud settings (about 45 minutes) after rebooting. The other two were faster because iCloud had already been updated.

The new iOS uses a new filesystem, and transitioning all your data can take a long time in some cases. It seems snappier for me than 10.2 though, which is nice.

50+ known and unpatched security vulnerabilities in A5-chipset generation iOS devices

Devices running the Apple A5 chipset were all abandoned last year when Apple released iOS 10. Since then, there are 51 disclosed security vulnerabilities in iOS 9.3.5 — the last version available to devices with A5 chipset. Including a lock screen bypass vulnerability and 20 issues that are remotely exploitable through Safari (and any other web browser allowed on the device).
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If you still use an iPad 3, iPad 2, 5th generation iPod Touch, or an iPhone 4S then it may be time to wipe off all your data and turn it in for recycling.

And Microsoft got a hard time about about XP support (most recent update published 5/15/2017). iOS 9.3.5 was Aug 25, 2016. According to Apple, iOS 9 is still at 11% as of July 5.

Our iPad 2 and 2 iPod Touch 5Gs still get regular usage.