No one wants iOS 8 because it's for NERDS - dev The world doesn't seem to want to download the latest version of iOS because it's a "nerd release", an Apple developer has claimed. For all of those who think a nerd's release generally involves five hours on World of Warcraft followed by 30 seconds on Pornhub, think again. Developer Andrew Clark claimed that only super- …
It also makes your iPad or iPhone (especially, but not only, the only models) almost unusably slow and breaks copy/paste between apps (even Apple apps.)
For some people. By no means all. For me speed has not been an issue. It is just as fast. I have had some problems with copy and paste in Web pages where it seems there have been changes such that other DOM elements on the web-page get in the way of the text you want to copy more frequently than before. That used to happen on iOS7 as well but it seems there have been changes to the layout engine where it happens much more frequently now.
The main reason upgrade has stalled is simply because the download is so big many devices have enough room, and very few users bothered to the degree such that they can be bothered to either back-up photo/videos, delete content to make enough space, or to plug their device into iTunes to do the update.
oh and for me, the other thing that has been a more annoying issue than it should be, also related to copy and paste, is that sometimes, when scrolling in a web page, you can accidentally select some text, and the highlight won't go away by tapping elsewhere, you have to select some "other" text but then you have the other text selected instead. It's probably more annoying than it should be because it becomes a kind of frustrating game to try and unhighlight the highlighted text. Why I can't just ignore it is beyond me.
>The main reason upgrade has stalled is simply because the download is so big
? The iOS 8/8.0.2 download is approximately 800MB, smaller than the previous downloads. However the reason why the automatically downloaded iOS 8 update is simply taking up space on my partners iPad is that it requires at least 4.5GB of free memory to install; something that requires some serious housekeeping on a well used 16GB iPad. So I would agree that few users will be rushing to make space for it.
@roland6
That's interesting, I should have read the details more closely. Not sure why you've been down-voted for simply making a relevant clarification. Perhaps it's because you didn't declare war on Apple and revealed yourself to be an iThing owner.
and breaks copy/paste between apps (even Apple apps.)
Having gone from an Apple phone to using Android for the last 3 years I know all about copy and paste not working correctly. Maybe Apple did it on purpose to emulate Android to make the transition smoother now they have the bigger screens people were after
I have had the the damned thing crash so many times in the last 2 weeks I immediately thought of Windows ME. Watching videos, using itunesU, and reading books(ibooks) looking at my the usage/crash data I have nearly a dozen Latest-xxxx.crash" where xxxx is the name of the app - video, safari, newstand, books, weather, maps, store and a couple of apps that have all been updated since 8.0.2 was released
And then there are the videos & music that lock up itunes while transferring (and refuse to transfer one day, and happily transfer the next) and the continual update of everything in my itunesU libarary every time I copy a video or song - despite me telling the stupid thing (itunes/ipad) not to update or synch the itunesu courses.
"all Apple users think they are nerds"
No, they THINK DIFFERENT. Don't you see??? All those people lining up to buy the latest iPhone aren't all being suckered into the hype. No, they're creative artistic independent types who just happen to all want to buy and use the same device.
Not really. Android obtained its market share by offering a better product - as defined by hardware specs and usable life and software capabilities - at one end of the market and lower costs at the other end. Choosing a product based on those factors doesn't make one a sheep, even if most people come to the same conclusion you do.
Granted, there are iWhatsit users who choose Apple for what they feel is a better user experience (more power to them), but there's also a huge contingent of Apple users who have iPhones because that's what the cool kids have.
The real problem is OTA upgrades take 5GB of space temporarily on the devices. Many don't have that, partly because of the 'yellow bar' issue. Plug any iPhone/iPad into iTunes and it'll tell you GBs of space is being used by 'other'. Reset the device, restore from back up and presto GBs are back. I think Appleneeds to address this somehow.
On the other hand 50% of users have upgraded in a few days... What other platform enjoys such rapid take up?
" Either that or he just can't be bothered to sit through an interminable 6GB download for the sake of a teeny-tiny change to his phone."
It's a little over a gig if and only if you can free up the required amount of space on the iPhone or iPad for an in situ upgrade.
If freeing up that space is too much of a pain you are faced with the whopping download to go the iTunes route.
When will Apple, Microsoft et al realise that not all of us have super fast uncapped broadband?
It's the pain of the downloads, and for those with low bandwidth caps cost too.
This is one reason for the slow take up, yes the download is 1GB but as the installation process encrypts your device it needs 6GB of free space to complete the install and encrypt your device, as a lot of users don't have 6GB free and can't be bothered removing stuff, installing then copying it back they're staying with 7. TBH though as 8 has been a bit buggy I think the take up will be slow until 8.1 appears and resolves these issues.
Almost all the features in this are things that Android had in 2012. What a totally uncool reason to upgrade. I'll just sit here eating my gluten free free range anti-allergenic peanuts till Steve's spirit touches my 5th chakra.
I'm gonna say your uncle beat Steve to touching your 5th chakra. As for gluten free peanuts that would be any old bag of KP then?
People complaining about performance issues should do as some of the others have mentioned. Spend an hour backing up your phone to a PC. Then delete the entire device to factory defaults. Then reinstall the entire OS. The pray your backup actually worked since it doesn't always.
It's an Apple product. It's not supposed to be reliable, dependable or fast. It's supposed to be fashionable. If your data is that important, then you aren't cool enough to use Apple.
Presuming there are quite a number of people around with iPhone 4 and 4S - iOS 7 became pretty much mandatory because they borked facetime, any kind of SSL security (and something to do with roaming that I never quite worked out). Of course rather than issuing a fix to iOS6, the only fix was to upgrade to iOS7. That must have driven takeup somewhat, forced people to free up the space required etc.
Anyone can sign up as a developer on Apple. It means nothing claiming to be a developer to attack Apple like this.
iOS 8 is excellent. And a developer claiming that it's useless to end users clearly has no clue what he is talking about.
Like others, it works fine here, no battery change, not a huge download. Not sure if I believe that 50% adoption of something within a month or so is small, but not that bothered either.
I can't think of any nerdy reasons to upgrade, but one reason I have found really compelling, the system actually honours the text size in all Apple applications, so text that was previously too small for my old tired eyes is now clear and legible.
Don't really care about the rest of the features, but that is the reason I prefer it to other releases.
Somehow I can't imagine any card-carrying nerd worth their energy drinks and pizza downloading an upgrade which has as its main claim to fame improved fitness features.
And for the record, we are telling our users to hold off on the upgrade on older devices, as we have many angry users who now have to charge their 4 and 4s devices several times a day after the upgrade. Fortunately since most of our devices are only 16GB, and the users have managed to fill them up with crap, the upgrade doesn't seem to have enough breathing room to install for most anyway.
But which doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere (ok, so I found it on the device before finding it on the web...). Is the ability to set complex repeats on calendar entries (eg: every 2 weeks).
Previous versions would correctly read complex repeats set elsewhere, but you couldn't change them, or create a new appointment with them. I found this really frustrating so it seems like a big thing to me...
Perhaps there are other hidden non-nerd features that weren't promoted? Anyone else want to chip in with their finds?
Strange beast, iOS8.
They must be paving the way for something else, because the main difference from iOS7 is stuff you can't yet use and a lot of new bugs.
iOS8 works fine (except from the new bugs in stuff that used to work) on the iPhone 6, but crippled my iPhone 5 battery life no matter how I updated or reset the darn thing. Even with all the bells and whistles off and no apps running, the 5 got hot and I could follow the percentage countdown while the phone just kept itself alive. Luckily I managed to downgrade to 7.1.2 before Apple closed that exit, and the 5 is back to normal.
They're losing the grip. I want iOS6 back, please.
I have a theory that the second law of thermodynamics applies to software too, with the addendum that the maximum entropy in the case of software could be infinite. iOS8 does nothing to shoot that theory down. My next phone just might be a mobile telephone ... you know, to make calls to people instead of voicechats.
I would agree and think the clarity of the iOS 4.3 UI style and experience has a lot to commend itself, particularly in the hands of someone with poorer eyesight. Every release since, like many other UI's released in recent years, has seemed like a step backwards; how many users use (or even remember) the default parallax motion effects in iOS 7?
I was just thinking - poor design choice is one thing, and one man's sweet dream is of course another man's nightmare, but maybe they rebuilt a lot of the OS with Swift, so what appears to be crappy programming with weird breaks of basic features that used to work is really the effects of an immature compiler.
Scaaaary thought, that ...
Well I'm a nerd so I upgraded on my iPad Air almost as soon as I could. Fortunately I experienced no problems, although it did seem that very little had changed either. Maybe when I Yosemite comes out I'll enjoy some of the new iCloud features but until then it's a real non-event.
However, I was really shocked and disappointed the other day to discover that iPhoto no longer works. I was even more surprised to find this is isn't a temporary technical issue but a deliberate decision by Apple to discontinue it. In my opinion, the Photos app in iOS is one of the most clunky and incomprehensible features of the otherwise generally excellent iOS 7. iPhoto, which came as standard on the iPad Air, was much capable, as well as being less confusing, so to be forced back to using the Photos app, or third party alternatives, is a real shame.
What astounds me about this release (even with the 8.0.2 patch) just the number of rough edges. Both on my iPad 3 and iPhone 5S, I've found many areas where the UI can be easily glitched (over lapping menus, vanishing titlebars, popups that appear behind the keyboard with no way of scrolling). This is both on the physical devices and in the XTools iOS simulator. It smacks of rush, or at the very least very poor QA.
A great example of ball-dropping is the complete UX f'up that is changing your Apple ID primary email address, where in you enter a world of cyclic demands for passwords for renamed accounts, broken dialog and inexplicable deletion of data - right across iCloud and all devices. Apple are losing their way. It's the polish that made them stand out from other platforms, but recently that's begun evaporating.
Maybe I am a little on the geeky side, but this has been the most useful iOS update I've ever installed, and the reasons aren't geeky at all...
1) Family-tied Apple ID support. !!! !!! !!! We had previously shared all our communal apps and music by having the "two devices - one apple id" method, but that meant that all cloudy things needed to be carefully disabled lest our mail and texts start leaking between devices. Now we all have separate apple IDs tied to the same account and content, and EVERYTHING WORKS. It was worth installing iOS 8 (three times!) for this feature alone.
2) Better app integration. I'm already noticing this in several places, particularly photo-manglers being more easily accessible to and from the camera and LastPass working more closely with Safari. Sure trying to explain what they did for developers sounds ridiculously geeky, but the effect is that activities that seemed awkward now just work, which any user can appreciate.
3) Messaging typeahead changes. I actually like the new "suggestion" UI and have found it loads easier for both shortcutting typing when it guesses correctly and for cancelling an upcoming "correction" that I don't want. Since my wife seems to communicate almost exclusively through SMS these days, this is a godsend.
As a developer and an end user I think Apple has a number of things fundamentally wrong in its development and release methodology:
1. Releasing sub-alpha quality versions of iOS to developers and calling them beta.
2. Releasing sub-beta versions to end users and pretending they're finished and polished.
3. Having scant regard for binary or source backwards compatibility.
4. Pushing full updates to devices disregarding whether users want them or their data costs.
5. Assuming everybody has a superfast broadband or 4G wireless connection.
6. Being pre-occupied with silly new features nobody is interested in and calling them awesome.
Presumably 1 and 2 are their idea of agile development. 3 causes many developers to have to waste 2 or 3 months every year fiddling with the internals of their apps just to stand still. 4 and 5 shows how out of touch they are with people in the real world with < 4Mbps broadband and 2G telephony only outside their house or office and only under particular weather conditions.
Maybe they need a new head of software engineering, with experience of the world outside of Cupertino.
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