One giant leap

Over the weekend I finally got around to getting a new phone, upgrading from my iPhone 4 that I purchased back in 2010 and replaced it with the latest iPhone 7.  Yep, that means I had my previous phone for 7 years!  Welp, can say without a doubt that I got my money's worth out of that phone.

And boy, did I have a lot of catching up to do, feature wise.  But before all that, I had a heck of a time transferring my data to the new phone.  I guess 7 years was too big of a leap because of incompatibilitys of what is expected of backups.  With my iPhone 4, it was syncing with iTunes from my old MacBook with Snow Leopard.  This meant my iTunes was a version from, I think 2014, so it wouldn't have been compatible with my new iPhone.  This meant I needed to buy a new Mac, so a few months ago I bought a Mac Mini in anticipation for the new phone.

While going from an iPhone 3G to an iPhone 4 was a piece of cake, where I was able to transfer everything without an issue.  Going from 4 to 7 was a pain as it was only able to transfer my music and nothing else.  My contacts and photos did not transfer, and going to iCloud didn't work because the OS on my 4 was too old.  So through trivial methods, I was able to copy my photos to my Mac Mini and then utilize iCloud to make sure this doesn't happen again.  As for my contacts, I decided to just manually enter them into my new phone, and then again, utilize iCloud so this doesn't happen again.  This was both a blessing and a curse because while it was a pain reentering contacts, it gave me an opportunity to purge a lot of phone numbers of people who I haven't talked to in over a decade.  Now my contacts list is slim and trim to where I'm even considering making full use of it by actually including photos with my contacts, but we'll see.

But yeah, this new phone is great.  I got the 256GB version so I wouldn't have to worry about juggling space on my phone as I was doing with my 32GB iPhone 4.  Podcasts made it a pain to manage because space was so low, but now I'm utilizing only 1/8 of free space, so it'll be a long while before I have to worry about that again.  On top of that, it's great to use apps again that require logins because the apps on my old phone were severely out of date and were not allowed to log into systems without a more up-to-date version.

Pictures look incredible on this new phone!  Compared to my old one where pics looked grainy and yellow, this one looks so crystal and great!  Now I no longer fear the humiliation of texting sending pics to others where the resolution is off and the pics are low quality.

Then there's the snappiness of how everything works like how fast apps launch or how fast the maps app can pull data over the cell network.  It makes commuting with directions much easier, and when streaming music, much more pleasant as I'm not waiting for buffering or for the app to load in data.  Finally, I'm able to see this new thing called emojis rather than an alien face in a box.  Such wonders!

Yep, I'm back in the saddle again with modern tech.  Weird as it is to say, but I feel like I'm back with society again rather than being an outsider.  But then again, I was able to get by ok without the latest and greatest for many years, proving that you don't necessarily need the latest phone year after year.

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