Category: Apple

stepping up to ios 16 with a side of watch os 9

whbeebe1 Comment
My Daytona Beach with life guard lock screen and the new ugly bold time font

Tuesday evening I updated my iPhone 11 Pro Max to iOS 16 and my Apple Watch 7 to Watch OS 9. I spent about an hour after the update looking around and enabling certain new functionalities that I was looking forward to. I also tried some new functionalities that didn’t work the way I expected; Apple once again violating the principle of least astonishment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment ).

I’d read about Apple heavily revamping the lock screen, allowing among other features the ability to add widgets to it. That’s a feature that Android has had for years. I tried that, only to discover that

  1. The types of widgets you can add are very limited, and
  2. You can’t add widgets to your existing lock screen.

I was also unpleasantly surprised by the change of the time font on the lock screen. In earlier versions it was regular text. Starting with iOS 16 it’s now bold, which looks bad. And there’s no way to change it back. Furthermore, if I wanted to add new widgets to my lock screen, I can’t do that with my existing lock screen. I have to chose a new lock screen, then edit that one. I’ve decided to leave well enough alone. It’s a good thing I like what I currently have and feel no need to change it.

As for the new medical features, here’s a public service announcement. If you want to discover them and work with them, then open up the Apple Health app and touch the Browse button at the bottom right of the screen. The opened Browse screen lists everything you can enable and change, including Medications and Sleep.

I set up Medications with the three medications I currently take. You can either use the built-in camera to read your prescription on the bottle, or if it can’t read it, then you can type it in by hand. Medications was able to read two out of three of my prescriptions. I thought that Options | Dose Reminders would pop up an alarm, but it didn’t this morning. As far as logging if and when I take my meds, I have to open the app and press a button saying I’ve taken all of them. Unfortunately I’ve now got to actions to remember; to take my meds, and then to remember to open the app and log I took them.

I then set up Sleep. All I had to do was tell it how many hours I needed, then when I went to sleep and when I needed to wake up. For me that’s seven hours between 10pm and 6am. So far it seems to work. After a full nights sleep I can see how long I was in Deep, Core, and REM sleep. There are four spikes during the night when I woke up. I can believe that as my bed is also where my cats sleep next to me. If they get too close, or if Luke decides to sleep right on top of me, I’ll wake up briefly to shift around to a more comfortable position, then fall right back to sleep.

Finally, before I went to bed, I tried to find a way to share this information automatically with my local medical group, Orlando Medical. Apple’s software is far too limited to find a match for anything in this area.

So far all the prior iOS functionality I depend on is still in iOS 16, with the notable exception of how wallpapers are selected. All the critical functionality I depend on is still working, and that’s all I really care about.

I’m not all that thrilled with iOS 16. If I were grading this, I’d give it an overall B grade at best. New iOS 16 functionality, especially the lock screen changes and selecting new wallpapers, I’d give a grade of F.

and about those new apple watches

whbeebe1 Comment

Apple released both a Series 8 and an Ultra version, ranging in prices starting around $300 for the lowest-end Series 8 on up to $800 for the lowest-end Ultra. I know that many brands of watches can be quite expensive, heading in to the thousands to tens of thousands for special models. Apple has released Watch versions  in the past that also treaded into the thousands. My biggest problem with such expense is the lack of adequate battery life, especially for the Ultra. A battery life of 36 hours to 60 hours depending on operational mode is totally unacceptable for a Watch that starts at $800, especially one aimed at the outdoor extreme sport techbro. What minimum battery life between charges would I find acceptable?

At a minimum, I want at least 8 consecutive days, or 192 hours, with the same level of functionality I currently enjoy with my Series 7.

That would allow me to charge my watch once/week every Saturday or Sunday, or any other weekday that fit my schedule. It would allow me to wear my watch uninterrupted for a full seven days, 24 hours per day, to pick up my sleep patterns. These days I wear my Apple Watch Series 7 because I’m tracking as much of my health as possible, sharing that with my doctors. As it is I now have a schedule where I charge my Series 7 twice/day, once in the morning at breakfast for about 30 minutes, and once in the evening after supper, again for 30 minutes, before I head off to bed. That works out here at home, but that’s an untenable schedule while on a camping trip. Fortunately for me I have a ten-year-old Citizen Eco watch that’s solar charged and has been running continuously since the day I took it out of its box and put it on my wrist. In an ideal world I’d have a Citizen watch that had the same sensor suite as the Apple Watch, and that communicated via Bluetooth with my iPhone in place of my Apple Watch.

Before you say anything I’m aware of Citizen’s CZ Smartwatch for $400. The problem with the watch is two-fold: it was released running on the old and busted Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100 processor instead of the 4000 and with Google Wear. If you want long battery life up to a week between charges, then the only function you can have active on the watch is the time, which makes it pointless to own. You might was well actually save a little money and purchase a low-end Apple Watch.

It’s been two months since I replaced my aging Apple Watch Series 3 with an Apple Watch Series 7 on sale from Amazon, and so far I have no regrets. Even on sale what I paid for the Series 7 was still more than I would have liked to pay; it still requires a recharge every other day (and I’ve outlined my charging regimen above) so it certainly can’t meet my ideal charging requirement. The Series 7 is a compromise between high functionality and battery life. While I’m certainly using it around my home, it’s not a device I’d use outside on long travel. I have ways to keep my iPhone recharged away from home, but that’s all I’m willing to support in that way.

Who knows. By the time I’m ready to replace the Series 7, perhaps Apple will produce my watch with my ideal battery life, but at a price much closer to my Series 7 than the Ultra.