Grombles

So my iPhone 4S fell on the floor. The screen crazed and my old faithful finally joined every other iPhone in the house. Tricky to read and not worth stealing. But it was only a couple of weeks away from the release of the much vaunted 6 and my network contract had expired long ago. These days I buy SIM only contracts with EE. Vastly better coverage than the loathsome Vodafone and O2, and cheaper to boot. So what I needed was an unlocked 6. No problem. Ordered it on Apple's website and within a few days it arrived. Hurrah. Although Apple did send me an SMS text to my old iPhone with a link to a website that an iPhone can't read! iTwats. Now the most important thing not to do to an iPhone, as I had already discovered, is drop it. The fancy box it arrives in has a tight fitting lid that you have to pull off as the increasing vacuum inside tries to stop you. Finally the lid popped off, releasing my precious and precariously balanced, as I now discovered, £700 iPhone. In slow ...

Every time I plug it in, my iJobs insists I upgrade its operating system. It requires about 1GB of download to install. After weeks of nagging pop-ups I finally decided to let it run - despite the fact my iJobs has been performing 'normally' up to this point. How easily we forget the countless times in the past when we've 'upgraded' only to discover that we've unleashed system clash hell on our increasingly confused hardware, only to bitterly regret the decision, again and again. But we always hope that this upgrade will solve all our problems - like my iJobs not picking up a mobile or wifi signal perhaps - and delight us with something new and amazing. Make it a better telephone would be top of my wishlist Mr JobsV2.0 if you're reading this. So I finally give in and click 'OK'. I need to leave it running overnight since our internet bandwidth into the house only permits the occasional lonely passing byte to squeeze down the phone line every now a...

This morning, as usual, I plugged my iPhone into my PC. It needs iTunes running to 'sync'. Or in other words, to remain stuck in the iJobs max security prison. Unless, mysteriously during the night, my PC has become 'de-authorised'. Just let me use the damn thing!! If it's on my bloody computer, it IS authorised. So I click 'Authorise'. "You are only allowed 5 computers to be authorised. You've reached your limit. This computer cannot be authorised unless you de-authorise one of the others." In the meantime another message tells me my iPhone will have 130 apps deleted if I proceed with the sync and don't authorise the PC. I can't, you bastards, because when I've long ago had to authorise this same bloody computer 5 times, and when I de-authorise ALL of them, I'll lose my bloody apps. Then I'll have to load every single one of them using my < 1MB internet connection - if it allows me to do so at all and I don't have ...

If you've got an iJobs, you've got to use iTunes. He's a genius, and we're all twats for buying his stuff and ensuring we're stuck with his software bollocks that now controls our lives. In particular iTunes (and all the IOS crap his ghost infects our 'soon-to-be-bricks' with). Now iTunes does a couple of things fairly well (although there are no doubt vast numbers of examples out there that do all of these infinitely better, but I'm too busy writing stuff no-one reads to waste my life investigating them). iTunes enables you get stuff you know exists. And it automatically updates stuff you want to be kept updated, like podcasts (we used to call them recordings) and app releases. What it is truly shit at doing is helping you find an app that does something you need. It could be so much better if it took a leaf or two out of Amazon or Ebay's books. But in iTunes there's virtually no index. The closest you can get down to is this: and then...