This is a serious risk. I know they’re comparatively pricey, but maybe a satphone with GPS? Outside some very rare occasions, that would give you emergency communication ability just about anywhere. Or, for a bit less, something like these sat enabled text options with big red SOS button.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DYC1PGR?ref=emc_p_m_5_i_atc&th=1
I’m looking into this, thanks.
Please do! Doesn’t have to be that particular option, I just picked one of the first Amazon hits that were reasonably priced, I’m sure Garmin and other better known outfits make similar devices. And always check pricing on the various monthly / yearly plans so you don’t get a big pocketbook hit for the many months (years ideally) before you ever need it.
Moderating:
This is IMHO, not the pit.
To a large degree that is available. You don’t sound like someone who uses the App Store, News app, or Stocks app regularly and those are pretty much the only apps Apple tracks you to serve you ads. But either way, since the only real alternative is Android, know that Android is unquestionably more permissive than iOS when it comes to tracking your every move and recording it to sell you something.
If cost is a consideration in any of this, an iPhone 14 (the 2nd latest model) has most of the functionality of the Spot X (the lifesaving bits, at least) and over 2 years of service would only be about $180 more than the Spot X.
My advice is that, since there seems to be a lot about the iPhone that you don’t understand (and I don’t mean that in a judgey way, not everybody understands everything about their phone), if there is an Apple Store near you, make an appointment with them, bring a list of all the stuff you want to do or have a problem with and they will help you out.
What model is your current iPhone?
Go look at Garmin again. You absolutely do not need a phone to be anywhere near the watch for recording & you can see some metrics of your activity on the watch. What you need a phone or PC for is to upload it to their site. Either on the phone or website you can see much more than you can on just your watch. However, your activity is saved on your watch until you go home & upload it; that can be days/weeks later.
Garmin watches are GPS devices first & lite-smart watches second. Almost all of them go at least a week, & the longest life of up to two months . An apple watch wouldn’t make it thru the day if you’re doing a long bike ride with GPS on.
Garmin works with both Android & apple; the only thing that you can do with android that you can’t do with apple is respond to texts on your watch, but that is apple preventing that not Garmin not being able to do it, & I’ve heard that apple might be opening that up; a gate in their walled garden.
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Garmin also bought out InReach a couple of years ago & now has satellite communicators; they work as long as you have clear view of the sky.
I just turn it off, or leave it at home.
Agreed. I should have just flagged their posts.
You’re both Apple’s customer AND Google’s product…
As a result, there’s always been something that didn’t quite make sense. Apple makes a lot of money from Google in exchange for making the search giant the default option on the iPhone. For a couple of rivals, that’s quite the partnership.
In fact, it has been estimated in the past that Google pays Apple more than $10 billion a year for the privilege. It makes sense that Google would want to fiercely protect its position on the world’s most important mobile browser, Safari. The company also knows what every tech company does, that almost no one ever changes the default option for anything.
I suppose you could argue that most iPhone users are going to use Google anyway, so I guess it makes sense for Apple to get a kickback.
Ain’t no such thing as some noble, privacy-concerned tech giant. You’re nothing but $$$ to all of them.
Well yeah, crappy and hamstrung isn’t what sells. You can always force your phone into that sort of situation, but few people are buying phones because they’re “simple”. Not even Apple users, although that was largely the rallying cry for the iMac some two decades ago.
I suspect you and I are quite similar - both in our limited desire to use our phones, and our dislike/confusion related to updates/clutter/monitoring/etc.
I quoted the above, mainly b/c if you are not comfortable going into Settings, you should develop at least a minimal awareness of doing so. For the longest time, I would just be frustrated when my phone would seem to change in some way I never wanted or told it to. At some point, I became more comfortable going into Settings and seeing if there was something I could do to eliminate the change. It still mildly pisses me off when my phone just starts performing differently. And the categories in Settings are not set up in a way that I consider intuitive. But I’ve been able to make a number of tweaks when the brightness or other things change.
Each update they want you to go to facial recognition, but I’m happy to stick w/ my 4 digits. Maybe should go to facial, but there is something about that I don’t care for. I initially hesitated about fingerprint access to my MacBook Air, but now it impresses me as very useful.
My iPhone has 3 screens for apps. 1 of them has 15 “basic” ones I use periodically: Notes, Settings, Maps, Clock, Calculator… Another has the whopping 3 apps I have intentionally downloaded for my use. The final screen has 24 BS preloaded apps that I’ve never opened and don’t even know what they do, but - for whatever reason - never decided to go thru the effort to delete. So I do not perceive my phone as too cluttered. I just scroll past the cluttered page.
I’m pretty readily able to airdrop photos from my iPhone to my MacBook. But I’m periodically stumped, such as recently when I wished to airdrop photos from a text someone sent me. Yeah, I probably coulda figured it out eventually, but as with so much tech, I decided it really wasn’t important enough to me to make the effort.
I went Apple because everyone else in my family did. I’m regularly amazed that Apple is supposed to be intuitive, because PC commands and setup make far more sense to me. (And don’t get me started as to the blankety-blank AppleTV remote!)
I keep my location off unless I want to turn it on in a specific situation. Probably a useless effort to protect my nonexistent privacy, but it is my preference. And with my very limited phone use, I get very little (none?) advertising. I don’t use my phone for anything other than phone calls, texts, photos, and the very occasional search when out and about. Otherwise, I do everything from my MacBook at home. I just prefer the size of the keyboard and screen, and when out, there are very few times that I care to be messing w/ my phone.
Given your posts - here and elsewhere - I’d wager that your issue is more with tech in general, rather than Apple specifically. With a little effort to rearrange icons and a little training on ignoring things, I bet you could lessen your Apple frustration.
I completely agree. It is not at all intuitive to know to swipe up from the bottom of the phone to turn off rotation lock, for an example I experienced with an iphone user moments ago.
Yeah many gestures are going to be arbitrary and require learning. Getting used to the lack of a home button still flummoxes my wife when she has my phone (a 15).
For me, though, rotation lock is in the menu swiping down from the top right. Unless there’s some sort of other shortcut I don’t know. (Which would not surprise me, as I seem to trip upon a feature every so often I never knew existed.) Now that I think of it, I think on home button phones it was from the bottom. So, yeah, that’s a gesture to relearn with a new phone.
It depends a little what you are used to. Having started with palm os, then webos, and then Android, the first time i tried using an iPad it drive me nuts. How do i go back to what I was just doing? How can i move the icons on the screen? How do i fucking get out of “jiggle mode”? I already had ideas of how to interact with a touch screen, any it violated all of them.
Coming from nothing, i dunno, maybe it’s intuitive?
Yep, I could do a rant on tech but there’s no point, particularly here. Suffice it to say, if I were empress, most of it would be swept away into the outer darkness.
I am starting to delve into the Systems thing – but find that unless I google it, I can’t ever find what I’m looking for, as whoever thought up the names of the functions was either drunk or malicious.
No tech is intuitive for me. Doesn’t matter what platform, it’s just a series of artificial cues you have to learn. Many things are intuitive for me that are not for most people. Tech isn’t one of them.
Without trying to oversell my opinion, I have both an Android phone (been a user for 13+ years) and an iPhone (user for 2 years) and definitely prefer the Android. I don’t think the iPhone is unusable but I was surprised at how often I’d get stuck for a few moment trying to figure out how to do something, especially given the “iOS is so easy” vibe you get from users. I’d like to think that two years has put me past the learning curve but still find the Android more intuitive.
My main use for both phones is email, texting and, with the Android, light web use, maps and Spotify so I’m not a power user and maybe the issue is more with the iPhone’s native email application than iOS as a whole.
I had the same reaction the first time I saw a Mac. No tech is intuitive to everyone, my complaint about Apple is that they sell theirs as if it was. Then again, command line is more intuitive to me than most of this stuff.
Anyone else ever get the experience where they are using their iPhone, and something happens during the call such that when you want to end the call you can’t figure how to hang up? 
We recently had over at our house someone who works for Apple, and they understood what we were saying and demonstrated how to address it, but for the life of me, a few weeks later I have no recollection of what they said.
Oh yeah. I don’t know why it happens, either. Which is absolutely normal. I usually end up having to shut off my phone.