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

My wife upgraded from a S1 to a S3 a few months ago. The S1 was still perfectly usable, but yes she did charge it each night. The main benefits of the upgrade are the new one is lighter, faster, and the battery lasts longer. I think if you want to try it out to see if it is for you long term, buying a S1 for <$150 is a very valid way to do that.

T-Prime wrote:

I'm considering an Apple Watch, more-or-less for the novelty factor (my parents have long abandoned trying to figure out a birthday/holiday gift and just give me money on the classic condition "get something you wouldn't normally buy with your own money")

Since it's more for the novelty and less for the utility, I'm considering a used first generation Apple Watch, which run at or below $150 on various sites. Those are a few generations old now, does anyone still use a first-gen Apple Watch? Is watchOS still somewhat quick, or is it worth spending a bit more to get a used Series 1 or Series 2?

Also, are there any must-have killer apps or whatever for the device? One big point for me is that I'd like to wear it to sleep and use it as a personal alarm that doesn't wake up my wife or son.

Edit: "is there" -> "are there". Grammar!

Get a Nokia Steel instead.. its lighter has better battery life and can do the Alarm as well as track fitness and sleep.

I have purchased and sold several devices on Swappa. If an issue comes up the swappa staff will intervene. So lets say you purchase something and don't hear from the seller for a few days. You can simply check the box for help from swappa staff and someone will review things and contact the seller. I've done about a dozen purchases/sales and have had swappa staff involved in two of them. One was an issue with the person not having their address verified and the swappa staff talked us both through what to do. Everything from refunding the money to redoing the sale. Comparing them to ebay is like comparing buying a phone from a company in China called smertphene vs buying an iPhone at the Apple store.

Also, are you talking series 1 or OG Apple watch. The series 1 watches are going for about 165 on swappa and I'd recommend spending the extra $20 or so. I have a series 1 and still get pretty good battery life. I get 1-2 days out of it.

As for killer apps, I'd say the following:

Apple Health - There are things I like better about the Samsung Gear fitness but apple health is the simplest most easy to use out there. Everything connects with it and it works well. There are lots of fitness apps for the watch and most work well and integrate with Apple Health. The three rings take a little time to get used to but are very intuitive once you do.

Music Controls - Any time you are playing something with audio from your phone you have music controls on the watch. It tells you what is playing. You can adjust the volume, skip tracks, pause.

Pandora - the pandora app lets you start playing music on the phone, skip tracks, and like/dislike tracks. I love being able to like tracks. Very handy.

Camera - lets you start your camera and take a photo with the watch. You can see the preview on the watch.

Weather - shows the weather on the watch

Timers and stop watches.

Lastpass - You can get passwords and view notes on the watch without authenticating on your phone. You can set it to require the watch PIN

Onenote - View notes on the watch - It may not be for everyone but when I coach soccer I can create a list of what I want to do and go through it on the watch rather than take the phone out all the time. Keeps the phone safely in my pocket or bag and away from errant soccer balls.

To add to that list:

Overcast (audio podcasts) - watch app has the usual custom skip forward/back playback controls, but also lets you browse your subscriptions and existing playlists to start phone playback of other episodes.

Authy - TOTP 2 factor app (like Google Authenticator) but native to the watch. Shares accounts with the phone app, which can then back them up to iCloud or sync them across devices for you.

And OneNote also lets you dictate a note to yourself from the watch.

This is all awesome information, thanks everyone!

As of Sunday afternoon (after 6pm GMT+1), my series 2 Apple Watch is no longer syncing activity with my iPhone 8. Anyone else having this issue?
I tried restarting both the iPhone and the watch, having the watch go into Airplane mode, all to no avail. The only idea I have left is unpairing and repairing the watch but I’d hate to lose two days worth of activity (yes, I do chase those achievements).

Édit: I fixed it!! Left the Bluetooth off for over half an hour and boom! There it was. I knew the Watch was still sending info since my friend could see the progress in the sharing component of Activity. Go figure.
So nothing to see here.

Nothing to see where?

Can you use the Apple Watch LTE with the phone turned off? I'm thinking it would be cool to still get notifications, but be able to come home from work and throw my phone in a drawer.

Yes, but you'll have to get the Watch added to your data plan as its own device. It usually costs ~$10 a month.

Kurrelgyre wrote:

Yes, but you'll have to get the Watch added to your data plan as its own device. It usually costs ~$10 a month.

That's fine. Can you turn your phone off with that setup? Or does it still have to be on and nearby?

DSGamer wrote:
Kurrelgyre wrote:

Yes, but you'll have to get the Watch added to your data plan as its own device. It usually costs ~$10 a month.

That's fine. Can you turn your phone off with that setup? Or does it still have to be on and nearby?

Yes, the phone can be off or out of range if the Watch has LTE set up.

Since Friday, my iPhone 8 keeps asking me to enter the password for my Google account. It happens every time I lock it, when I just unlocked it and sometimes just after again. I tried the following:

- Turn it off and on again (the phone)
- Delete the Google account and then add it again
- Turn off contact synching

Weirdly enough, my Gmails keep coming in. I should probably test if contacts are still being synced as well.

I'm hoping anyone has encountered something similar, as a quick google search reveals mostly just the solutions above.

My Mac has been occasionally prompting me to re-enter my password over the last 2 days (I reckon). I ignore it and it seems fine after that. Well until the next time.

That happened to me a few months ago; it stopped by itself after a few days. I think it may be a side effect of Google's hair-trigger suspicious activity detection.

Yup, the notifications disappeared today. Thanks!

edit: and they're back with a vengeance, thrice the intensity!

dejanzie wrote:

Yup, the notifications disappeared today. Thanks!

edit: and they're back with a vengeance, thrice the intensity!

I know it's not a solution to your problem, but are you married to the default mail app? Gmail and Inbox are standalone and are quite nice. I recommend Inbox but it takes a bit to used to it.

PaladinTom wrote:
dejanzie wrote:

Yup, the notifications disappeared today. Thanks!

edit: and they're back with a vengeance, thrice the intensity!

I know it's not a solution to your problem, but are you married to the default mail app? Gmail and Inbox are standalone and are quite nice. I recommend Inbox but it takes a bit to used to it.

I have now, it's good to have my work and private email separated. And the search function of the standard app is not very good.

But you're right, the issue persists

Still here too on my Mac. I use Outlook on my phone so maybe that's why I haven't had the problem there.

Mr GT Chris wrote:

Still here too on my Mac. I use Outlook on my phone so maybe that's why I haven't had the problem there.

Same. The native app is good if you want to keep everything together, share contacts, etc., but I don't want to mix work and personal that much anyway, and the Outlook app is superior.

And the issue still isn't gone, that's not normal is it? Do you guys use an app password on your iPhone, or the 'normal' way of password + Google Authenticator?

dejanzie wrote:

And the issue still isn't gone, that's not normal is it? Do you guys use an app password on your iPhone, or the 'normal' way of password + Google Authenticator?

I use the latter. Although I don't have email issues like you, I always always always get logged out of YouTube on Safari on my iPad. It's really frustrating.

It seems like whatever the problem is it's on Google's end. Have you considered changing your password?

PaladinTom wrote:
dejanzie wrote:

And the issue still isn't gone, that's not normal is it? Do you guys use an app password on your iPhone, or the 'normal' way of password + Google Authenticator?

I use the latter. Although I don't have email issues like you, I always always always get logged out of YouTube on Safari on my iPad. It's really frustrating.

It seems like whatever the problem is it's on Google's end. Have you considered changing your password?

I did, two days ago. For the record: every Google app works just dandy, from Gmail to Youtube to Photos to Maps to Chrome. I had to log in again into Youtube, but that didn't help either. I guess I'll use an app password, and give up some security for less nuisance...

edit: first of all, if you're all getting tired of me going on about this, do let me know. I find reading a room really difficult online...

Update: even with an app password for Google, the password requests keep on coming. Even though every Google app works perfectly! It's slowly driving me bonkers, and I'm all out of ideas honestly. Weirdly enough, it didn't happen all through my work day until I edited a contact. The only differentiator is that I'm on 4G at work, not wifi, but that's it really. And I'm often enough on the road without wifi, without any popup relief.

So apparently it was my Apple ID all along. Which is tied to my gmail address, which caused the confusion as the popup never indicated anything about the Apple ID specifically. That the popup remained in Dutch, even when I set the iPhone language to English didn't help either. Installing new apps, or backup to iCloud kept working as well.

I resolved it by logging out of my Apple account and logging back in with a new password.

This is SO iOS: when everything works, it works well. When an issue occurs, good luck finding the cause. I'm not expecting a complete step-by-step guide for any possible bug, but at least on Android or in Windows an error message or query gives you a clue what it's about.

After 6 months on the company-provided iPhone (not complaining about that), I understand even less why someone would pay the €200 Apple premium (as compared to similar quality on Android). I have found absolutely nothing to justify it so far.

I went back to Apple because they take privacy semi-seriously and they seem to care (a little) about their customers. I saw that there was a new comment here and I assumed people were talking about WWDC and the fact that Apple is adding functionality to help you limit time spent on apps. That's the kind of stuff that's going to keep me with Apple, to be honest.

I was underwhelmed by all the announcements. Merging Siri with the Workflow app Apple acquired looks nice. Also, as a heavy iOS user, I'm very interested in being able to run iOS apps on macOS. However, all of these features need third party buy-in by developers so it's still a crapshoot as to which apps will do the thing you want/need it to.

And what is and is not allowed will always be by the grace of the almighty Apple. We've already seen what they did to Steam. Do you think Amazon will be able use Siri to run Alexa commands?

So... if I have a 2006 Mac Pro that a friend hacked into running *checks under the hood* Yosemite, and I have a hand-me-down 128 GB solid state drive that I'd like to put the OS on, where's a good place to look for help and info?

I have the parts I need to make it physically fit in the case and plug into the motherboard.

That’s my favorite case on any computer.

muraii wrote:

That’s my favorite case on any computer.

Old system drive in alongside new one, mash cmd-r as it boots up, read what the screens says. Sounds good. Thank you!

I should probably make sure I have that script that makes it so Apple's OS updates don't bork my old EFI.

Have fun. I had thought about trying to grab one o' those for a Hackintosh project but then read/watched that it required some hacking of the case to get an ATX/mATX/ITX/whatever motherboard in there and then it became No Thank You. Dropping a faster Xeon into it and maxing out the RAM, and getting it working with Apple hardware, though, sounds pretty dope. Maybe someday....

I'm just going to go to the SSD for now. Any processor and video card upgrades will come if/when I find myself disappointed in Apple's next Mac Pro revision.

The HD that's in there now is a cheap slow one that I had to buy on short notice when the original failed, so the machine is currently running slower than it did when I bought it.