You’re perhaps familiar with the various guides and tutorials for “switchers” who know Windows like the back of their hands but are for the first time dipping their toes into Mac waters, or perhaps vice versa?
I’m looking for something of that ilk. I lost the hand-me-down Samsung android phone last weekend, and I broke down and bought an iPhone.
I’m a cell phone luddite, or have been so far. Not because I disapprove of them on principle, I just misjudged the technology (I thought “any year now” they’d ditch these half-way-there computers and come out with handheld machines that would run full-blown MacOS, and would also dock to 3 external monitors, a keyboard, mouse, printer, scanner, label printer, graphics tablet, Zoom headphones, etc when you sat down in your office chair, but you’d take it with you when you went to lunch. That didn’t happen, at least not as soon as I thought it would).
So I know MacOS and have my preferred ways of working, but I’m utterly clueless on a cell. I could of course make an appointment with the Apple Store folks and bring a list of questions, but is there a good “switcher” book I should buy or check out?
I should clarify: I did not, at any time, gain even the tiniest amount of competency with the android phone. It was chock-full of apps installed by its previous owner and I just barely got to the point I understood how to dismiss the screen saver and use the barest most fundamental functions. It never left its charging cord. I used it to authenticate my identity for those two-step verification security thingies and nothing else, essentially. So I don’t need a switcher for Android → iOS, I need a switcher guide for MacOS → iOS
You can search online for guides for specific tasks. Most of the settings are, unsurprisingly, under iPhone Settings. Now if you want to use a Bluetooth keyboard (or mouse I guess), “airprint”, “airplay”, or other peripherals it’s completely straightforward (e.g. how to print something out). If you want to do something not officially supported, you can do what I always do which is “jailbreak” it and hack the hell out of it, but that is not compatible with remaining a “cell phone luddite”, so you have to decide for yourself whether or not the normal approved apps and user interface are good enough.
It’s actually going the other way; MacOS is resembling iOS more and more every update.
I suppose what we mostly need here to help you is a list of specific questions you have and what you expect to be able to do with the thing, and then we can tell you if and how you can do them.
Can I connect it to my Mac and gain telephony as a function within MacOS, for example highlighting a phone number in a database or spreadsheet or web page and hitting (let’s say) shift-f11 and the cell phone makes the telephone connection?
My regular phone# is a SIP account / softphone on the Mac; I’d like to be able to forward calls from either one to the other (when I’m away from the office that calls to the SIP go to the cell; when I’m at the computer, calls to the cell forward to the SIP account. Where do I set that up?
I see there’s an icon for “Files”. Does this imply that I can manage individual files AS files, and transfer them to and from environments outside the cellphone environment on a one by one basis? I know the phone is great for photography and video footage. Rather than “synchronize” with the Mac, can I exchange these at the file level, the way I’m using to managing such matters between one drive or one computer and another?
Granular phone behavior: Can I set it up so that inbound calls from {list of tel numbers} rings, or goes to a voicemail with THIS specific voicemail greeting and records the voicemail; whereas calls from this OTHER list will never ring, but will go directly to voidemail with this OTHER voicemail greeting, and records the voicemail, and if neither one it won’t answer and goves to this THIRD voicemail greeting but does NOT record the voicemail? Etc? Can it do voice recognition and save voicemails as text, perhaps emailing them to me? Can it download them as mp3 files and transfer them to the computer?
Can I edit and maintain the list of iPhone contacts from within MacOS? I have a database – be nice to not have to rekey everything
Is there an app (or hack) to let me out of the “only one app visible on screen at a time” modality? So that if I want to read from info in one app while working in another, I’m not trapped in a monotasking environmnent?
How about copying and pasting between apps? Does it just natively do that? How do you select and copy? How do you paste?
I’ve seen that there do exist remote control apps for remoting into the Mac. Haven’t seen them in action. Is this only going to be useful for remoting in to Macs running the latest and greatest or is there some degree of backwards compatibility? (Be nice to remote in to my MacOS 10.11.x box in particular). How about going the other direction, can the Mac remote in and remotely control the phone?
I’ve heard about bluetooth keyboards. Is there an adapter that will let me use my vintage 1988 ADB Extended Keyboard II (“Saratoga”), the way I can use the iMate to connect it to a modern Mac’s USB port? * How about USB peripherals in general? Can I connect a mouse to an iPhone? Thunderbolt external storage?
External monitors?
Is there an equivalent to Parallels or VMWare for iOS that would let me run computer operating systems in emulation?
I really need the basics as well. I seem to have discovered how to get the foreground application that’s onscreen to disappear itself so I can go use something else: swipe diagonally up from lower lefthand corner? It keeps making sounds; I keep thinking i"ve muted it.
(the answer to the admittedly silly ADB keyboard thing is of course included in whether USB peripherals can be connected. I can use the ADB keyboard anywhere USB keyboards could be connectec)
I don’t have iCloud and have been resistant to deploying it. I could get over that.
The iPhone is a new SE. Hmm, I don’t know where to bring up the tech specs on it. It just updated the OS (without my interaction) last night. Should be latest iOS.
That’s exactly what I expected. It isn’t there though.
I’m familiar with the grey gearwheel / Settings from MacOS. In the absense of an Apple Menu I figured the “about” stuff would be somewhere in settings. Doesn’t appear to be.
I’ll answer some of this, but I don’t use an iPhone or MacOS, so the details will be sparse, but I can at least try to send you down the right path.
I don’t know about the SIP stuff. You can do the call thing if all of your devices are signed into the same iCloud account. You can make calls or send text messages from your computer. I know that isn’t exactly what you want.
There might be an iPhone app from your SIP provider, so SIP calls can ring directly on your iPhone.
The iOS files thing will be very frustrating to anybody used to working directly with files on a computer. It is good for moving things between the phone and iCloud. Each app on iOS has it’s own file space, and some will be available in Files, some won’t. You really have to think of each application as it’s own little fiefdom.
Moving Files between apps often involves the “sharing” function. The sharing icon seems to be a box with an up arrow coming out of it. Tap that and you can “share” a file with a printer, or the PDF reader you actually want to use…
procmail for incoming calls is still not a thing. You can setup unique ring tones (including silent) for different contacts, but I’m not sure if you can bounce some contacts immediately to voice mail.
Yes, this is one of the features of iCloud that will make it worth using. Put your contact list into iCloud, and then it will sync automatically between the phone and computer. How you get an existing contact list into iCloud is an exercise for a search. If your contacts already exist in Google, Outlook, or such, then that contact list will be available from adding Gmail, Outlook, etc. to the phone. If your contact list is in a home spun database, then yeah, time to move to iCloud.
Long click on text, and then slide the handles around to highlight the text you want to copy. Then tap the copy button. Navigate to the text field where you want to put the text, and long press in the text field, and then hit the paste button. There also might be some copy paste icons on the keyboard to do that.
Yes, when your only interaction with the device is touch, then your finger just has to learn what is a long-touch, short-touch, touch-and-drag, tap, scroll, etc.
Maybe, I don’t fully understand it. There are lightning (the connector on the bottom of the phone) to USB adapters. They may or may not support anything from keyboards, thumb drives, SD Cards, cameras, etc. Don’t believe the copy on the Amazon ads about what the thing supports. It’s an interaction between the Apple device, the adapter, and the peripheral.
Stick with a Bluetooth keyboard if for some reason you want to type that much on a phone.
Apple does not allow apps which can run other programs, so no.
Yeah, swipe up from the bottom, swipe up and hold, and other things. Like I said above, your fingers just need to learn the right actions. It’s all completely intuitive, as long as you already know how to do it.
If you want to use SIP, you can use a generic SIP app like Acrobits or Bria.
They work fine if you jailbreak the phone first, in order to do which you shouldn’t have updated the OS…
you can try https://getutm.app/, maybe they haven’t blocked it
Hmm… might be reason enough to jailbreak. I don’t suppose I’d do it just on general principles but I don’t like being restricted in what I can install.
Look into AltStore and some of the apps that can be installed with that. It’s kind of a very soft jailbreak in that you install apps from outside the App Store as a “developer” for a limited period of time. AltStore uses an app on the phone and on your computer to automate the developer signing stuff so your phone will run the app without jail breaking. This does require an iCloud account, and maybe registering as a developer, but you do not need to pay any developer fee.
I’ve played with that a little bit, and looked at some of the benefits of jail breaking, but really there just wasn’t much that it offered to me, but I just want an iPad that lets me be a good little consumer and absorb content from Netflix or HBO. Either that, or I burned out on the whole phone hacking game with Android years ago.
Mods: This is not a way to do anything illegal, just to do things that Apple doesn’t want you to do, like install an emulator. Now, if you violate copyright to acquire ROMs for the emulator, that is a different story.
I figured the “about” stuff would be somewhere in settings. Doesn’t appear to be.