and am soooo pleased to be rid of the other ISPs I've been stuck with in the past.

And of course *the moment* Google rolled out in this area, a bunch of other ISPs magically offered a competitive 1Gbps fiber plan as well.

Too late—you had me. And you pissed me off. And now I'm gone.

This is a pretty transparent proposal to immediately cap speeds, then approach platforms for extortion money based on user demand.

In short, it's exactly the same thing. The words have changed, but the idea about what to do with the cables is the same.

Maybe I'm dating myself here, but multiplayer games are still newfangled and weird to me, and I don't know if that will ever change.

When I used to play games, I played to get away from social interaction and enjoy myself in isolation. It was a kind of recuperation. A world of gaming in which you have to face social interaction once again as part of gameplay was unattractive enough to me that I stopped playing games altogether. These days I mainly do crossword puzzles and read e-books for the respite that I used to get from gaming.

Is lethal force justified when cops start going around causing permanent blindness and life-long disability? Because my 357 thinks it probably is a reasonable level of self defense.

I had an idea that might not be so dangerous and pulled out my fone. âoeComputer,â I said, âoewhat's the best way to knock that bitch out?â
        The fone said âoeParse error, there are no female dogs on board and âknockâ(TM) is not in context. Please rephrase.â
        Who programs these God damned stupid things, anyway? Back when computers were new, science fiction movies had computers that could think. These stupid computers sure can't. God damn it, I was going to have to talk like I went to college... only I ain't went to college, damn it.

We're trying to catch the terrorists, not dress like them.

You can't backup everything that's on the phone.

Your process sounds great to a technology-enabled person. But for mere humans?

They don't remember their Apple ID password.
They put in random answers to security questions for password recovery.
Their email address has changed, their computer has changed, etc.
They installed all that music, all those videos, and all those apps, like, a *year* ago or more. Who remembers how?

"Can't you just copy everything from my old phone over to my new phone?"

As you say, the process ends up being:

Initialize the phone as new, to their current computer.
Create a new Apple ID and sign them in.
Install and position all the apps one by one by looking at their old phone as you hold it.
Get ahold of all the music that they already bought in some other format so that they don't have to pay for it again.
Give them the bad news about what can't be tracked down/reinstalled (apps no longer in app store, music that can't be found elsewhere without re-buying, etc.)

I could have sworn that in a recent case, we lost all of SMS and she was upset about that, but may I'm remembering incorrectly. Still, the process is onerous.

It pisses people off—"You mean I can't just move all of *my* stuff from my old phone to my new phone? Why do they call it an *upgrade?*"

I'm not saying they're right. Sure, they should remember their passwords, take care of their online identities, etc.

But the fact is that you cannot simply do this:

1. Connect old iPhone to computer
2. Back up full contents
3. Connect new iPhone to computer
4. Restore full contents

I've been on to Apple a couple of times with people standing next to me while I try to act as an intermediary, and the people on the other end of the line end up just throwing their hands up, apologizing, and saying they can't help.

To be fair, this isn't exactly easy on Android either. But it's slightly easier. And both platforms need to seriously work on it.

if the computer + iTunes is newer than the phone. Try this:

-> Plug a full, everyday-used iPhone that was backed up or set up on an old computer
-> Into a new computer where it has never been backed up before

What you will get is an option to erase the phone and start over. You will not get the option to back up the phone, and Apple says that's by design—the licensed content on the phone is tied to the iTunes installation where it was set up, and the license can't be associated with a new iTunes.

Problem is that people that ask me for help have almost invariably either bought a new computer or reinstalled Windows since the time they set up their phone. So there is no way to create a backup—when you plug the phone in, you only get the option to erase the phone and set it up new.

seamlessly? I have family members asking me to help with their iPhones routinely, and this is always a nightmare.

Is it just a matter of your having one stable iTunes installation over the entire period? Because the problem that I run into over and over again is that iCloud is either partial in its backing up and/or doesn't have enough space and thus doesn't back everything up, and they have invariably got a computer that's newer than their iPhone. As a result, their iPhone has never been backed up to iTunes, and when they ask me to help with a transition, I can't help them—iTunes simply offers to erase the phone when you plug it in since the phone predates the iTunes installation.

So we end up having to do a phone side-by-side—check each item installed on the old phone, then install and position it again on the new phone, one-by-one. Takes hours, and some things (SMS messages) are just plain lost. I'd love to find a way to just migrate one iPhone to the next with a click, but so far I haven't found it—the only way to do this appears to be to have an iTunes installation that predates your original phone and to which the phone has been synchronized since it was new. Then you can restore the backup to the new phone. But if the iTunes installation is newer than old phone, as far as I can tell users are SOL for easy transitions.

And most everyone I've helped to upgrade simply doesn't have this. Most of them don't even use iTunes at all.

This is I think the thing that so many people miss about the Apple Watch announcement. The problem with existing smart watches hasn't been that the features aren't useful, it's that the promised features simply don't work. I owned two different smart watches and had the same experience:

- Extremely limited app selection
- Very, very slow and oversimple apps that did exist
- With input that was just plain cumbersome and unreliable
- And bluetooth connectivity that had to be constantly restarted/reconnected (like, every time you tried to use it, bluetooth was down)

As I've said in previous posts, I'm one of those that does still wear a watch every single day, so I could be an obvious target for a smart watch, at least moreso than people that don't wear a watch at all and haven't done so in years, if ever.

But for a smart watch to make sense, it can't be a worse experience than pulling out the phone. Watches will always lose on the screen size front, so it's got to be compelling in other areas. The phone experience does have some problems (you have to pull it out, it's risky to pull out and manipulate in some contexts—walking in the city, for example, where a drop can kill it and jostles from pedestrians can come easily, it's bulky and conspicuous, you have to put it back, and so on), so it's not inconceivable that a smart watch could make sense.

But smart watches thus far have been lessons in user friction—you had to really, really, really want to do a given task *on your smart watch*. One that I tried for a few days (the Sony watch) only recognized about 10% of the taps that you made (Want to tap that button once? Then tap manically on the screen over the button 15 times in rapid succession and hope one of them takes.) and was so slow and oversimple (presumably due to lower processing power) that even aside from UI horribleness, it just plain didn't do anything very well in practical terms.

If the Apple Watch has:

- Processing power analagous to that of smartphones
- A high-resolution display
- Input surfaces and controls that are as reliable as those of smartphones
- Battery life long enough to get through a day with certainty
- Reasonable ruggedness
- Stable bluetooth connectivity without hassles

Then it could well be a winner, not because it claims to do anything new, but because it actually managed to do what smart watches claim to do. So far, my experience with smart watches was that they claim a lot, then do absolutely none of it in practice. It's not that the feature list sucks, it's that the features themselves haven't actually been implemented in such a way that you can use them without sitting down for ten minutes to have a "smart watch session" and eke out a tap or two.