What a mistake that was! But how could I have known in advance? I always upgrade my iPhone right away, hoping that it will do more and funner things.

More and funner I’m up for, but slower I was not expecting!

Now when the phone rings (if it rings at all), and I go to slide the green button on the screen to answer the call, it’s rare that the button even responds to my touch, let alone react fast enough to actually answer the call. The phone has turned into one little spinning beachball of death^[1] with this software upgrade. [The suggested  fix is in the last paragraphs of this article, in case you want to jump ahead.]

This video was so close to my own experience I howled with laughter:

[youtube Pdk2cJpSXLg]

Making products obsolete used to be a matter of adding new features to new physical products until you just felt you had to upgrade to the newest phone or computer, but now……but now all it takes is to add enough software features to a device that it slows down and becomes unusable. Makes your customer want to buy another one. Huh?

I have been told that mobile handset makers want their customers buy a new phone every 18 months. And this is driven by new design and new features. I’ve had my iPhone two years now, and don’t really want to want to buy a new phone because of the expense (and poor connectivity), but with the OS slowing down like this I have two feelings. First, I am really steamed at Apple about releasing an OS that slows my phone to the point of being unusable. And second, I would rather go get a Motorola DroidX at this point because it seems like a good match for my needs, but the Droid isn’t offered as a 3G/GSM phone—otherwise I would have switched last weekend.

I went to see the Apple genius at the store. I walked there from home, which takes an hour. The whole time I was trying to open the maps app and have it plot the walking route, so I could estimate my arrival time, and I never did get that estimate because I reached the store before I could open the app and get through all of the steps in the maps app. I reached the genius bar on time, and I explained the slowness of the 3G iPhone to the genius, and his answer was

“you need to restore your phone to factory conditions and reload all of your apps and passwords.”

That was all he would say. He wouldn’t look at the phone, and wouldn’t discuss it further. Just told me to go take care of it myself. Boy did that piss me off!

For me this wasn’t an option because I really didn’t want to lose my passwords and settings, and didn’t want to spend all of the time it takes to go through the restore, the reset and then look up and restore all the passwords and setting (a couple of hours, minimum). It’s like the old canard about Windows machines that get cranky, and you call customer support and they say “just reinstall Windows.” Has Apple really come to this as the first step in fixing a product? And they won’t even discuss other options with you?

A company that insults or ignores its long-term customers is killing off its brand.

The fix, maybe: Here’s a page describing what looks like a real and much faster fix than a full restore—disabling the Spotlight indexing and search on the phone. Indexing is, of course, performed in the background, and does affect and computer’s performance to a degree. It happens on my fast MacBook Pro, and even there it affects performance at times—so it must really be killing the iPhone. Some people feel this has fixed the problem for them, and others don’t.

Cult of Mac also reports that two “hard resets” in a row will cure the slowness. Without a factory restore. And again, some people report that this worked beautifully and some said it didn’t make any difference.

Followup #1—July 30 2010: So I disabled Spotlight indexing, and did several hard resets, combined with a full Restore (factory reset and restore contents from backup). It took me nearly 3 hours (16GB 3G iPhone with 12GB of data in it) and I now have to put most of my passwords in again. I felt that the phone was somewhat faster after the restart, but I can’t really swear that these steps solved the problem. Probably I’d say “it’s not a dog anymore.”

Followup #2—July 31, 2010: It didn’t help much. Still almost impossible to slide the green button to open the phone when it’s ringing. I dumped these apps as a test: Google Earth, Google Mobile, IMDb, AIM (Free), AP Mobile, The Extraordinaries, Facebook, LinkedIn, NYTimes, Yelp!, TweetDeck, Brightkite, WebEx. Let’s see how it goes—I’ll be hiking to day and will try out everything.

So, if you’re experiencing this slowness, you might try one of both of those processes to see if it helps you. My phone was almost useless, so I had to try something.

[1] On Mac OSX, when the system is waiting for software to catch up with the user, it displays a rainbow-colored spinning pinwheel that we refer to as “the beachball” — kinda like Twitter’s fail whale.

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I already use a touch screen iPhone all day long, so I’m used to swiping and tapping a lot.

And the touchpad “gestures” on the Macbook Pro^[2] allow me to work essentially the same way I work on the iPhone (tap instead of click; and two-finger tap instead of “right click”; and two-finger drag to scroll things in a window; and so forth). In fact, I have almost entirely stopped using the mouse (with scrollwheel) that I used to use on my previous computer in favor of gestures on the touchpad of the Macbook.

I couldn’t believe how intuitive they were. Each gesture totally makes sense in terms of what it does, finger positions, and direction of swipe. Kudos to Apple on this. It almost makes it worth the entire price of the upgrade just to get this one feature.

Punchline: But when I run my greasy fingers across the glossy Macbook screen it sure smudges things up.  LOL  Can’t wait for a full-size “tablet Macintosh” to come along!

[2] And the other thing I like about the new Macbook Pro is the unibody aluminum construction. My old Powerbook flexes considerably when I carry it in one hand, and this new single-piece-of-aluminum construction does not flex at all, making it very much more solid! This is different from any other laptop computer I’ve ever owned.

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Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. — Doug Bowman, Goodbye Google

I love this farewell post by Google’s visual design lead because it confirms a theory I’ve long held: that Google is a company where engineers are the ruling class, while at Apple it’s designers. – Buzz Andersen, Sci-fi Hi-fi

This just blew me away because of my experiences with people from both Apple and Google.

After I recovered from rolling on the floor laughing about Buzz Andersen’s comparison, I thought just how true it is. My experience with Apple goes back to trying to convince Steve Jobs that the Apple II could be used for distance education (in 1978) – interesting that I drove Steve to a meeting where we looked at Plato-IV and shortly thereafter he visited Xerox PARC and well, that became history when the Lisa and the Macintosh were invented. But, I digress, my experience with Steve is that he understands technology really, really deeply, but he is at heart an artist and his reputation as being extremely demanding is well deserved, and stems from his artistic temperament. Then there are the Googlers, especially those I’ve met recently, who do indeed want to subject every web site to a Google Analytics interrogation to determine by a percentage point which size and color of button works best – but even before they develop any traffic to the site! (Good grief, let’s get some traffic first and then let’s see what is working with visitors.) But this business about testing a half dozen different buttons is beyond me. And I’m an engineer!

Deep breath.

Why did I say different approaches to life? (In the first paragraph.) Well, it’s because I run across both of these types in life. There are people who do a great design right up front and move straight to product (even though it may take a long time). And there are people who design something and then twiddle the bits to death before finally starting to build product. In my case, I design quickly and then jump into implementation as soon as possible. I always change the design after I see the first prototype of a product.  “Release early and release often” is certainly a motto I understand. I have very little tolerance for situations where everything has to be meticulously planned up front.

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