Apple Frettings

This is a little off the beaten path from our usual subject matter but it was an annoying problem for me that I resolved and thought I would share. After upgrading my iPhone 4s to the latest operating system iOS6 I noticed the battery was draining pretty rapidly. Searching around the inter tubes had the usual amount of recommendations of reloading the OS from scratch, hard resets, soft resets, bring it to the Apple store etc etc. They are like mall rats at the Apple forums. They lurk around waiting for questions on any subject and spring into action with their three pearls of wisdom. Begone to your basement forum rats or go tend your imaginary corn on Farmville.

I was used to a dead battery if I left Skype up and running on it by accident but this was the equivalent of having two copies of Skype running. 3 to 4 hours of the phone just sitting there and the battery was dead. Something was running and screwing it up and I needed to know.
I suspected the cloud services or similar from dealing with my iPad slowdown when I upgraded that to iOS 5. I shut of all cloud related services and lo and behold my phone was still running the following morning. After switching cloud services back on piece by piece I discovered the true culprit. iCloudy Syncing bookmarks was the issue for me. I don't think it's a corruption of data. I think it's an incompatibility between bookmarks going from iOS5 to iOS 6 and it just keeps trying to sync those bookmarks endlessly.  

A friend had a similar battery problem but he already had shut off all iCloud stuff as he was afraid of going over his data limit. After dumping some golfing game app from his phone all was well. It looks like Apple and their App store vendors better check their respective code and start sending out some updates.


Onto the iPad. I have had one for a couple of years (1st Gen 64GB) and it used to be a pleasure to use for general surfing, reading stuff while Wifey deviously tried to drive me insane with Cupcake Wars, the Khardashians or some other drivel.  Last year I updated to iOS 5.0 and the thing turned to junk. It was like using a Pocket PC circa 1999. Unresponsive junk. Check the forums. The usual brilliant advice from people who should stick to commenting on WOW or politics. Downgrade it, bring it to the store, wipe it clean, do a restore. 

Alright turn off all the new iCloudy goodness. Nope, it's got to be the apps. All those freebie talking cat apps my 5 year loves are riddled with ad pushes.  "click here to upgrade and make the Cat dance" features are constantly running in the background even when you turn them off under the general settings of iOS. Turn them off or dump the apps. Alternatively you can spend days screwing around restoring and restting this and that and getting useless advice on forums.

Anyway, here is some other Apple related stuff. A pretty chart that looks like Apple is quite happy heading to their announcement of an iPad mini later this month. Should be worth a few more Dollars in the Apple war chest.



A word from our sponsors at NBC

And just for Jeanne some French culture (I just wanted an excuse to post this)



3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is exactly how I dance. Et alors?

I think my views on your technological problems can be summed up by this link.

GM Jenkins said...

You know, I just can't get into the iPad. I have a smartphone, I have a laptop. Very little middle ground between them for the iPad to do its thing. Whatever its thing is. And my hand falls asleep if i try to read in bed with it. I prefer the kindle.

GM Jenkins said...

Wow the new iMac is just sick. I gotta get one. Already have 2 iMacs, I wish you lease this crap.