Taking control
Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 2:59AM I had a good old moan last week about my iMac and my iPhone 4S and the problems I have encountered with both. Lion has lots of memory problems and of course the 4S has a battery that has never worked properly for me.
I then realised that moaning won’t help me. Apple changed my iPhone 4S a few weeks ago for an iPhone 4S with exactly the same problems. This was not the first time and so I conclude that the iPhone 4S is a complete lemon for the way I use my phone. Something about my usage, and that of others, causes poor battery performance and I don’t see a solution coming any time soon. The time had come to spend more money and buy a decent FM Transmitter for the car that could also charge the iPhone properly. By the time I get to work I am on 100% and when I get back in the car I am on roughly 20%. I charge it on the way home and then when I am home back to 100%. This regime seems to work and means I am not continually stressing about the battery.
For the iMac, I spent £41 on 8GB of RAM and this, so far, has enabled me to work as I need to. The overall speed has increased, but most crucial of all I haven’t suffered the freezes and spinning beach balls that would drive me to distraction every single day.
Some would say that I should not need to spend money to make products work properly, but what else could I do? Most people have decent battery life on their iPhone 4S’ (I say most, but most people I know who own one say it is the worst part of the phone) and I can only presume that most are not affected by the Lion memory problems.
I have, to a point, sorted my mobile and desktop problems without spending a fortune and sort of wonder if it is unrealistic to expect a trouble-free experience all of the time. Unfortunately, Apple does market some of its products in a way that makes us not expect these problems, and to be fair so does every other company I can think of, so maybe I need to take myself back a few years and get my hands dirty now and again to make things work for me.
For a while there things got a little too easy, and maybe I became complacent. Silly me.
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Reader Comments (6)
It depends if you charge a large premium over your competitors based on it's ability to "just work" or not. :P
Needing more RAM after an OS upgrade isn't entirely unexpected but considering how little the last update offered it does seem a bit wrong.
The iPhone battery issue is a bit more worrying as there clearly is an issue somewhere as it doesn't effect everybody but you can reproduce it across several devices. That is a fault Apple should be investigating.
Something went wrong with memory management in Lion. And it seems more so with the last update 10.7.3. I bumped my MacBook Pro up to 8GB but it's just more memory to grab without reason.
While Snow Leopard was a great upgrade, Lion has been very mixed for me. If apps weren't starting to be Lion only, I'd strongly consider going back.
Yes, something was wrong. And when a single company designs a OS just for one type of machine, that actually is built exclusively by the same company, then these kind of errors are - to me - very serious. They have all the means to test everything perfectly before sending to public.
I understand Microsoft on this one, because the OS must run on multiple machines totally different, and yet I believe Windows 7 has come out better than this Lion thing... is the lion sick? ;-)
And... BTW... they mess things up, and people need to spend extra $$$ to make things right? In my opinion it's clear they have the duty to release a proper update. But I guess they are counting on Apple-buying-products-people to pay that extra for improvements.
Haven't used an iPhone for months myself, find it far too slow compared to the newer Android phones plus screen is too small and the home button is possibly the most irritating UI control thing of the last few years. Never had any slowdown issues on any of my macs though and many have managed on 4gb or less of RAM - what are you doing on yours? Trying to run the National Grid?
I can be running multiple apps at once and jumping between them; Bean, ImageWell, iTunes, iPhoto (for Photo Stream), ToDo, Notefile, LibreOffice and more when doing freelance projects. It should still cope though.
It's the length of time to resume from standby which bugs me - it used to be a second or so, now it can be upward of 10 seconds...