I bought my first iPhone in a Verizon store about 3 years ago, and I’m considering replacing it with another one tomorrow. Do you prefer doing so in an Apple store or a phone company store? Or are you a big fan of mail order, and what’s it like getting everything moved over on your own? If it matters I also have a Mac and an iPad and I use iCloud to sync it all together.
Thanks!
I don’t think it makes much difference.
I have AT&T, but I suspect all the carriers are pretty much the same. When I went down to the Apple store to get a 6, they were out of AT&T versions, so they suggested I buy it on-line. I ordered it from the Apple webpage, and then watched as it made it way to me from China.
Doing the swap was pretty simple - I first “carrier unlocked” my old phone, so I could sell it on ebay, and then connected the new one to iTunes, and it was all finished after a few minutes.
I do it from the AT&T website, because I have a grandfathered unlimited data plan that would be eliminated if I did it anywhere else (other than a brick&mortar AT&T store).
You can upgrade an iPhone directly from Apple and still keep the unlimited data plan. Or at least, you should be able to. Did AT&T people tell you that you had to do that, or is there something else about your plan (besides the grandfathered unlimited data) that makes it unusual?
I have the same plan, and I ordered my phone from Apple, and had no issues.
It really should not make a difference.
However from what I hear and read on the various forums there seems to be among many ATT customers a fear that the default settings of the company system are to switch you at the least excuse, and you’d better get up in the grill of a human employee to make sure the keeping your grandfathered plan part is affirmed at every step of the process.
I recently upgraded and usually go to the Apple store, but this time there were several changes that needed to be made to the account for 2 different lines. We went to the AT&T store to make sure everything we needed done was taken care of. I no longer have the grandfathered unlimited plan, but even between the 2 of us we barely use 2GB a month. I am happy we went to the AT&T store this time to get things straight. We wanted to make sure that we got the trade-in deal as well.
Verizon does next day shipping on phone upgrades, and I’ve been doing it that way for around 15 years. Online. Click a button. Always been very simple. The first time I bought an iPhone my 8 year-old son got the Fedex delivery and activated it while I wasn’t home (I found out when my current phone stopped working unexpectedly). I understand preferences vary. I have always found the Verizon stores similar to waiting in a doctor’s office and not very pleasant. Never been in an Apple store. Couldn’t even tell you where one is. My apple products are limited to the Verizon iPhones.
Huh. Maybe it’s because I asked about trading in my old one for a credit? Oh well - it should be here soon enough.
Well, I got a surprising data point today. I went to the Apple Store. Five hours later, after seven different people helped me, I gave up. They couldn’t get my stuff moved into the new phone and get it working. I left with my old phone again, feeling like I never want to buy electronics again. I think they have made everything so complicated and messy and unpredictable and interconnected that the technology had kind of gotten away from us. I just hope all the refunds eventually show up in my bank account, and Verizon agrees that I have not renewed my contract after all.
I know it’s just a phone, but, what a spectacular disappointment.
That’s very surprising.
May I ask why you had them do it, instead of the standard “Backup to iTunes, restore to new iPhone” route?
Sprint user here. Bought my first iphone, upgrading from a flip phone, at the Sprint store. The whole transaction was simple, the salesperson was helpful, everything went well.
A couple of years later my husband wanted to upgrade to an iphone. Back to the Sprint store I go. Check in, wait, wait, wait. Wait some more. There were plenty of staff members standing around but none qualified to help me. Attitude galore (not from me). Waited some more. I finally left the Sprint store and went directly to the Apple store, where they were happy to take my money and set up my husband’s phone, minimal waiting required.
When it came time recently to upgrade my iphone 4 to a 5C (don’t judge me!) straight to the Apple store I went again. Awesome sales person, happy to take my money. I will probably never set foot in a Sprint store again.
I wanted it to go smoothly and easily, and often find doing these things myself does not work right and takes hours of floundering.
And in the particular case of backing up to iTunes, I haven’t been able to do that for 21 months. I can’t upgrade OS-X. That’s another one I spent hours on. When downloading a big file to do the upgrade, I see the download starting over again a few minutes in, and it just starts over and over and over. Consensus in the Apple support forum was that it was some weird incompatibility between Apple and my ISP.
I can figure out lots of things on computers, but then there are things like this that I never get to the bottom of, or at least not in just a few hours. And I’ve become really tired of spending the time and not knowing if it will ever work. So I figure I will go to Apple and have them do it, and pay more than for other brands and systems, but it will work. However, that hasn’t been panning out for me lately.
I’m wondering if I don’t have the patience and enthusiasm for geekery any more…?
I would strongly suggest finding a local Mac user’s group. They’re everywhere, but somewhat invisible. Generally, there will be helpful folks there who can sort out some of these issues. I’ve been doing this for years, and I would be happy to help, but a house call might be a bit impractical…
Hey beowulff, let me ask you a question that arose out of this afternoon’s trials. It used to be that sending txt messages to other iPhone users would show the conversation in blue “cartoon speech balloons” rather than the green ones that non iPhone users show up with. But since this afternoon, other iPhone users show up in green balloons on my phone, and I show up green in theirs. What gives? I think I heard that the blue color indicates that the message traveled through an Apple server, but I don’t know if I remember that right. Any idea why that would have changed?
I’ll look around for a Mac user group that’s local.
I knew a fellow at work who was big on Macs. One time long ago he set up a table out in the hallway and put a computer on it and he had a funny little box with a long cord on it, and as he slid the box around on the table, an arrow on his screen moved accordingly, and he could click a button on the box and make things on the screen happen. There was a big crowd gathered around, as nobody has heard of such a thing. That’ll tell you how long ago this was. Sadly, though, he’s no longer with us.
It dawned on me a few hours later (actually, about when the sun also dawned on me) that this little suggestion here is very close to the Big Question I’ve been chewing on.
I’ve come to hate that having a computer and a smart phone available seem to require that I also be a hobbyist. In a sense, the reason I started to buy more expensive Apple products was because “they just work” and users don’t also have to join clubs to be able to fix them.
That started to break down, the winter before last, when the OS-X upgrades stopped working (I looked it up and the problem was a “hash mismatch” error that kept coming up during the download part). While I was short term focused on the technical issues, there was also a long term thinking part of me that was quietly observing that I was putting an insane effort into basically maintaining an appliance.
I tried to buy an iPhone app weeks ago, and got the message that App Store Terms & Conditions had changed and I had to read and agree to them. I skimmed over the text as I scrolled to the bottom of the screen, and there at the bottom it said “Page 1 of 55”, and a little piece of me inside went “poink” and broke, and the long term thinking part of me quietly observed that signing an agreement without reading and understanding it, and reading and thinking it through sufficiently well to understand it, and taking it to my lawyer and paying at least a few hundred dollars to have him do that and explain it to me, were all insane options.
And there that long term part of me was yesterday afternoon, sitting on my shoulder, when we were over four hours into the process and they were suggesting the next thing to try was they would spend a half hour upgrading software, then bringing over my most critical data (contacts, calendar, that sort of thing), then verify that my email hadn’t become broken in the process, and then they’d send me home with clear instructions about how to wipe my phone clean and start over again the process of restoring from iCloud, which they said shouldn’t take any more than around ten hours, twenty at the worst, and it should all go just fine, and they want to help empower me to take care of my own needs. Which is not what I thought I came there to make happen. The long term thinking part of me quietly observed that I had 12 GB of data, and the larger iPhone 6 option is over ten times that, and that means customers restoring one of those loaded with data should only need about 100 hours to do it. Two hundred hours at the worst.
And so I keep ruminating about how happy I feel after diving into one of these self-inflicted projects, and how much they have to do with me being the person I want to be, and wondering if I’m insane or millions of other customers are insane – but not finding any other viable conclusions.
I’m not sure about the SMS ballon color - I just checked, and on my iPhone, running 8.0.2, iMessage conversations were in blue, standard SMSs were in green.
FWIW, I had a Mac 512K…
I don’t have an answer the the “terms and conditions” problem. I just ignore them and click “agree”, which may not be the smartest thing, but hey, I’m not a lawyer…
The saga continues. I hear it’s harder to move stuff from the old phone to the new one if there’s lots on it, and I haven’t cleared out unwanted photos for a while, so I deleted a whole bunch from Camera Roll and from Photostream. But the Photo app was still using 6.5 GB so I searched online and learned there’s a new Recently Deleted album and deleting just moves them there without deleting them, so I went in there and deleted them there too. Still 6.5. So more online searching and I read that maybe I need to sync with iCloud or maybe I need to reset the phone, so I reset, then sync, then reset again. Still 6.5.
I gave a presentation to seventy people on Friday, talking about a computer program I had written. It was quite clever and made good use of reflective metaprogramming as well as several statistical regression methods and an iterative optimization. But I can’t delete photos off my phone.
The part of me sitting on my shoulder keeps asking “how did that feel” and “ok, how did THAT feel”.
Well, crap, now stuff’s my fault. There were a few videos, and they were way bigger than I thought, so the 6.5 GB is something dumb I should have figured out myself, and not a conspiracy.