Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Partial iPhone 7 experience

I have upgraded from an iPhone 6 to iPhone 7 with 256GB of storage.  It has all of the amazing feature upgrades (remember I'm mentioning 6-7 NOT 6s to 7):


  • Better screen that some have called the best screen ever
    • Wide color gamut
    • 625 nits - brightest ever on an iPhone (only the new Apple Watch is brighter at 1000 nits) for better performance while in bright light.
  • Double max storage at 256GB
  • An A10 fusion CPU that is reputedly 2x the speed, 3x faster on graphics, but also more efficient with an additional 2 slower cores with an even better motion M10 co-processor.
  • Double the RAM at 2GB
  • So much better camera:
    • 12MP main/iSight camera instead of 8MP
    • Wider color range
    • Image stabilization (previously only on the 6S plus)
    • 4k video
    • f/1.8 - better low light performance
    • also from 6S level - live photos, slow motion support (120fps video)
  • Better facetime/front camera at 7MP up from 1.2MP
  • Bigger battery - 1960mAH instead of 1810mAH, with a reputed 1-2 hour boost in life (have not tested this yet myself)
  • Faster LTE with carrier aggregation - 2-3x faster depending on carrier
  • Siri is improved, and able, like on the 6S, to listen at all times (if you enable this feature)
  • 3D touch (like 6S)
  • waterproof (only for shallow dunks. Called water resistant.  DO NOT TAKE IT IN THE POOL!)
  • lift to wake screen
  • No more headphone jack
  • Replaced home button with taptic response non-button (works great for me!)
  • Taptic Engine - slowly learning how to enjoy using it!
My experience so far has had some unexpected twists and turns
1) I had to upgrade iOS from who knows what to 10.0.1 as soon as I received it.  This interrupted my iCloud recovery.  So I upgraded, reset many settings, and then had to erase all data and settings to recover from iCloud.  Very weird, and I felt lucky in knowing how to do this.  I wished I had not made any settings.
2) Siri:
  • always on is spotty.  So far this has worked better from the headphone adapter and headphones than from lightning headphones
  • Things that always used to work - hey Siri play album Exit (Exit by Tangerine Dream) left me playing all music shuffled.  On screen it showed that Siri heard me, it was just that Siri no longer seemed to understand what these words mean.  That is sad.  Also Siri turn music down was interpreted to try to play some song called Down.  I have also had this work, so it is hit and miss.
3) No headphone jack
4) Big text stops me from seeing some device data
  • This is not a new issue for iPhone 7, but if you have text set via Accessibility features, it is not possible to see your whole hardware wireless address (MAC addr).  Some people need this to set up secure wireless connections.  Turning this off did not work for me - I had to adjust the size to a smaller size to see the whole address.  This was just a minor one-time hiccup. 
5) Problems others have reported that I thankfully have not experienced
6) iTunes server - if at all out-of-date, will not work with iOS 10.
  • If you have a somewhat aged machine acting as your iTunes server, it will not even try to let you sync your media.  I was aware that this was likely going to be the case, but I am waiting to upgrade (probably to a new Mac mini once they are/are not announced in October).  So bear this in mind if you are upgrading

I was originally told my iphone 7 would arrive at the end of September, but it arrived more than 1 week earlier!  That was great!

I'm enjoying using all of the features that are new to me like live photos, 3D touch...

I'll update this post at the top as I use it more in the next few days.
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