I’ve long been an Apple fan as wasn’t too deterred by the recent bad press regarding the signal strength. As it happens my new iPhone’s signal seems to be fine, so far. Although in our office we have a better signal strength on the 3’s network that that of O2, vodafone or Orange (but that’s a network issue).
After charging my new iPhone I plugged it into my Mac Mini to activate. I wasn’t surprised to see a message telling me to upgrade to a more recent version of iTunes. However, I was extremely surprised to find that after upgrading iTunes I was further halted from activation due to my operating system being too old!
My Mac Mini is just over 3 years old and is running Mac OS version 10.4.8. Apparetly I needed to be running version 10.5.8 or later (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204023). So this would effectively mean I would have to spend another £xxx on upgrading my Mac’s OS in order to make a phone call?
After buying a phone, surely I should be able to use the device to make phone calls without using this unfriendly approach. In my opinion this goes against what I believe Apple stand for: great design, innovation and usability.
Surely there must be another method to activate your iPhone, other than locking users into iTunes? If not, then put iTunes in the cloud and remove the hardware requirement?
Slightly disgruntled, I installed iTunes on my 4 year old laptop in order to activate the phone. Now I’m going to have to move my entire iTunes library over to my laptop – no small task.
Sorry Apple, as one who is normally a Mac evangelist, my recent experience has put a slight kink in my advocacy.
I have yet to get my hands on the iPhone 4 but settling for the 3GS I too have had a bad experience with Apple. Having been an Apple nut since the launch of the Performa Macs back in the early 90’s I love everything Apple. Last month I set up a trial version of Mobile Me to Sync my phone and Mac allowing me to share my files online. Emails and any uploaded files were shared on the web. After a week of using the service all my documents had disappeared. I tried to call Mobile Me but there is no number just an online help desk that when I tried submitting a question was told I had to wait 17 minutes for a reply because it was busy. Tried again the following day same situation. I decided on this basis that the product was too unreliable and cancelled my subscription. It was only when I tried to make a call an hour later I noticed all 256 contacts that I had accumulated over the years had been wiped off! I would not recommend Mobile Me to anyone unless they want to clean up their phone. Lesson learnt I guess, lesson 1 write your numbers down the old fashioned way, lesson two don’t always believe the hype of Apple.