Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

A replacement is being sent to me.

The camera is absolutely amazing! I love the size, and I hate the fact that Apple seems intent on forcing everyone to larger phones. I hope that the trend changes when it comes time to replace it in some years. I've got more than enough memory that I doubt I'll ever run low again - and BOY, do have a story about that!

But THIS is not what the lock screen should look like!



Those big white blobs should be graphics for little alarm clocks and stuff.

And the phone does this once or twice a week, ever since I bought it on Christmas Eve.

Today I took the time to contact Apple Support via chat, I described the problem and said I had a screen shot of it and could upload it. I did so. The advisor replied "Oh wow" and when asked, had never seen anything like this before.

And I got a laugh out of the advisor when I texted back: "YAY! I AM UNIQUE! (rofl)"

Anyone who has done extensive work on PCs would probably think it looks like bad memory on a video card, that condition can frequently produce glyphs or artifacts at random locations on the display because what is written is not reliably read. The thing is, while smart phones are computers, they're also rather different. I don't know exactly how the 'video card and memory' paradigm translates to the classic PC architecture world.

But it doesn't matter, Apple is sending me a new phone. Hopefully it ships Monday. I do incur a temporary $900 hit on my credit card until I send them this phone back, I don't mind that. It saves me a 5-6 hour trip driving down to El Paso for this purpose.

Now here's where this might be fixing a two-fer.

My phone has been driving me absolutely CRAZY (yes, very short drive) with my hearing aids!

My hearing aids connect directly to the phone via Bluetooth and they have a control program from their maker, Widex. There is the problem that Widex has not updated their program in over a year, so they're behind the curve when it comes to OS improvements, I can't do anything about that. But man, it was bad! You see, Widex has the ability to create sound profiles, or equalization curves, to improve the sound quality in your day to day life. I have one that I named HissZap. It's only a three band equalizer that I'm dealing with, which is kind of poor, but you work with what you have. Basically it turns the bass and midrange all the way down and the treble all the way up. And all of the hiss is gone! And that includes the constant noise of the air movers at the library!

And the air movers run ALL. THE. TIME. Libraries try to stay cool/cold and keep the air moving to retard mold growth and insects because of all those lovely paper pages. And it's a miserable experience if you wear hearing aids and have to keep them cranked up all the way and all the time because of working with young women with soft voices.

Well, my iPhone would reset my sound profile to the default after I did almost anything with it. Both the sound curves AND THE VOLUME! It is so bad that pretty much every time someone comes up me my right hand goes up to my ear and I have to check that my hearing aids are at max volume!

I had the idea of creating a new sound profile just for the library that gives me the same equalization curve, but defaults the volume to max - but every time I try to save it, the program glitches and bounces me back before I can enter a name! Now I don't know if it's because the program is a year old and has an incompatibility with the OS, or is it because the phone is glitchy! It closes the Save screen so fast that I can't even save it as a one-letter profile name!

*sigh*

It's been a very frustrating time since I got it. But a new one is on the way, and I have some cautious optimism that whatever is glitching the display is also responsible for my hearing aid problem. Regardless, my trouble ticket with Apple has the hearing aid problem added to it, so after I get the new phone, I will be reporting back to them!!!

But it was an absolutely amazing support experience. I must say, it was perhaps the best support experience that I've ever had.