15 days with iphone 15

I have used iphone 15 for couple of weeks now. I have taken a bunch of calls, gone on a trip with the iphone, shot about a thousand photos and about a hundred videos, ran out of battery while doing all this a few times, had the phone heat up well enough, but did not cause any issue, I have used it for few whatsapp calls of 1 hour plus time, connected few bluetooth devices and overall used the iphone quite well.

And I have found so many annoying things. It feels like a bunch of features are crazy well thought out and slickly done. At the same time there are some things which are quite annoying. Some things failed unexpectedly, and getting data out of the iphone was a pain. So I'll touch upon the good and bad things below. Maybe in future I'll edit the lists and update this article.

Bad things(because people love failures... no, they like pointing out failures):

* ITunes would not work for me to transfer local music to the iphone.

* I ended up getting some third party software that helped me transfer some music to the iphone.

* Copying the photos from iphone to laptop was also PITA. Many times when you wanted to move the files, they were copied instead. And then you end up guessing if you got all of those or not.

* Bluetooth is as effy with ios as it was with android. So I think in general bluetooth itself is shitty.

* Battery life with heavy load or even lots of photos is quite bad. For general calling etc it's decent.

* The phone gets hot while charging - bit bad with the cover, and since the phone itself is slippery, can't charge it without cover.

* I have not yet figured out how to put the phone on vibration only. The silent button seems to silent it completely.

* The volume buttons don't have enough depth, so feel stiff with the cover on. And without the cover, the phone would crash to ground ASAP.

* The camera glass is weird in that it feels like it's got a ridge or something. But it's a black ridge that is raised above outer edge. This is crazy and quite stupid IMO.

* Apple logo is not well visible. Maybe a glow-up apple logo would be good. Maybe some animation would be even better, although not the RGB gamer shit.

* No fingerprint. Since I don't trust face-id, I'm stuck with a PIN.

* Some photos look artificial. Some photos that you expected bad, still come up looking great although the photo content is garbage.

* The hole in screen spoils the content watching so using the screen is spoiled.

* The software tricks they have done with the hole are neat but why would the bloody hole should be even there?

* Maps app is pretty weak as compared to google maps.

* Payment via Paytm does not take you back to original app. Google has done this very nicely.

The good:

* The screen is overall good. But the big hole at top!!

* The UI is good, quite fast, but has hiccups here and there. Weather widget has crashed once for me already.

* Smaller dimension screen is more handy.

* tap-to-wake is great.

* Cameras are overall good.

* Battery life is overall good. Charging speed is good. USB-C port is welcome.

* Sound is good.

So what next?

I think I'll update this article in 3-4 months time to add any new observations. Overall I think iphone is not value for money. It does some things much better than comparable androids. But then it has so many compromises. I think this is where Jobs would have done things differently like he would have put a screen in the apple logo at the back to show you your photo so you can take a selfie with the rear camera. Or he would have slapped another screen at the back for video conferencing. The app switching is a pain. Workflow for payment via other app is a pain. The screens... Argh. I like minimalist home screen and still I'm stuck with 4-homescreens. Now I have given up on it.

I think iphone started as a much simpler device and then as apple went on adding more and more functionality it started to become crowded and then somewhere midway they lost the motivation to keep it sorted. And now it has become a mess, that's just not the vision steve jobs had for apple. Anyway rant over. Cya next time.