I’m an early adopter of Apple’s latest and greatest. That means I’m a glutton for punishment when Apple goes to great effort to break the internet with new versions of almost everything important and distributes them to tens of millions of users. All at the same time.
In one very long afternoon I downloaded iTunes 10.5, Mac OS X 10.7.2, some kind of Lion Recover Update file of equal size, a new version of iPhoto, and iOS 5 for my iPhone 4 and iPad 2. It was an exercise in easier said than done.
I came back from lunch to find that new versions of iOS and Mac OS X were ready for download. My mistake was thinking I could do all of the updates at the same time on all my iDevices.
I set up my iMac to be ground zero and connected the iPad. My iPhone 4 was connected to my MacBook. Let the Download Games™ begin.
Uh, maybe later. iOS 5 crapped out twice on the iPad download and had to restart. The whole iPad episode took three hours. The iPhone 4 fared much better. It took two hours to download and install, but didn’t require any restarts.
Once the iDevices were updated I had a toy to use while I updated the Macs to the latest version of Lion. Uh oh. Halfway through the download, Apple decided to stop sending data, and both MacBook and iMac gave me a few incomprehensible errors. The interest, it seemed, was broken. At least, that part of the internet connected to Apple.
I checked both MacBook and iMac every 15 minutes for two hours and finally the downloads began again; one blisteringly fast, the other snail mail slow.
By dinnertime I’d had a couple of hours to play around with iOS 5 on both iPhone and iPad (love the split keyboard in the iPad) and the Macs finally restarted and updated to the latest Lion.
Other than babysitting iDevices and Macs, the entire process, though it took almost five hours, and the only event was the series of restarts, worked out well in the end. On the Mac, Safari’s nasty tabs behavior seems to have abated. Love the tabs in Safari iPad.
What can I say about notifications? Two words: Holy. Cow.
First, I like the notifications. Apple gives you more granular control over the onscreen notifications and their accompanying alerts. That’s the good. Second, the bad comes in battery life. With all those notifications and alerts running in the background, I’ve noticed that battery life on the iPhone 4S is not what it was the day before.
Not to worry.
This weekend I’ll stand in line and cough up additional dough for an iPhone 4S, just like millions of brothers and sisters the world over. After all, we’re an Apple family.
It’s what we do.