dewme

My only experience has been with Sprint, AT&T, and now Verizon. In general, having to go into any of their stores or attempting phone support is like submitting to an unmedicated colonoscopy. Somehow they've figured out how to turn what should be a painless experience into an hours-long ordeal. In nearly every case the original pain is compounded when I get my first billing statement and realize they've screwed it all up in every way possible. My wife threatens divorce whenever I mention acquiring a new Apple device that involves direct carrier interaction.

The only remedy that works some of the time, if you're lucky, is to do everything you can directly through Apple, and preferably in the Apple Store. Unfortunately, even Apple cannot always fix the problems the carrier has created and some people don't have an Apple Store to go to. During my last trip to the Apple Store about a month and a half ago I witnessed an Apple store employee having to tell a customer that they would have to go to their carrier. It was sad and painful to witness.

That said, the last few trips to the Apple store that involved carrier related dependencies (Verizon), with Apple Watches no less, went off pretty well for me without any major issues. These all involved upgrades or battery replacements (which are actually a full swaps of the Apple Watch with direct replacements). The process that has worked for me is described here:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/119601

As you can see, even Apple cannot guarantee that you'll get away without having to contact your carrier. I've been successful following Apple's advice 3 times in a row and with Verizon no less. No activation fees. I'm lucky I guess. No divorce so far. 

Edit 1: When I upgraded to Apple Watch Ultra from Apple Watch 5 I removed the Verizon account from my old watch, as suggested by Apple. When I activated my new watch I was prompted to install a cellular plan on my new watch from my iPhone. As part of the process Verizon added the new watch to my account and removed the old watch from my account that was linked to my iPhone. No activation fee was incurred and the new watch was working on cellular within minutes. This was done from my iPhone 14 Pro Max. I subsequently received a text from Verizon confirming the new Apple Watch being associated with my account. They must have seen both IMEIs but somehow they figured out what I wanted during the initialization process on my iPhone.

Edit 2: The process I used to replace the Apple Watch that's associated with my iPhone relies on the "My Verizon" app. Here's Verizon's process that uses their app that I used to move my Verizon to my new Apple Watch:

https://www.verizon.com/support/knowledge-base-219982/

In my case Verizon had no prior knowledge at all of the IMEI number in my new Apple Watch that I bought in the Apple Store. This conflicts with the statement in the article that Verizon was only activating Apple Watches that contained IMEis it already knew about.  It's been a few weeks since I went through this process. Maybe Verizon screwed something up since I was able to make it work. The My Verizon app dependency may be a contributor to the problem other users are seeing???

The iPhone 4s was the first iPhone that made carrying a point & shoot camera superfluous for me. It's only gotten better from there. Every single iPhone I've had since, and even the iPhone 4s, exceeded my abilities as a picture taker, i.e., non photographer.  I've mainly upgraded for performance, storage, battery life, and big beautiful screen reasons. Camera, not so much, even though I do a lot of picture taking. A one-point difference between the latest iPhone and its closest competitors is way way down on my dontgiveashitaboutit meter. Does not even register as noise.

But if a one-point deficit bothers some folks ... there's always next year. Hey, maybe Apple will sneak out some computational processing tweaks over the next year to ease the pain, maybe pull in another point. Everything is going to be okay. Switching to an Android smartphone may get put you up a point on the camera side, but you may be punished in so may other ways everywhere else.

brianjo said:

A crappy thing about homekit is Apple doesn't give you an easy way to see where data is going. You just have to trust it.  I get it from the 'make it easy to use' side of things, but it really sucks from a troubleshooting standpoint.

It would be awesome if they had log files available with things like protocols devices used, hops the signal went, etc.  It would make it much much easier to troubleshoot and determine why things aren't working as they should.

The open source Home Assistant app provides a lot more details and logs about connected home automation devices, including state changes, status, internal counters, etc. But I don't think it provides anything like path tracing, packet capture, or protocol dissection. I'm only starting to get my feet wet with Home Assistant but what I've seen so far is pretty good in terms of providing a lot more detail. It even exposes details from Ring device, Unifi devices, all kinds of printers, etc., some of which are difficult to get at using the dumbed down interfaces that some of these products come with. You can install it without impacting your other home automation equipment or systems like Apple Home or the Alexa app. It's available on the Mac and iOS/macOS app stores. Like any open source project it is always a work-in-progress and will likely have a few rough edges, but it's definitely worthy of looking at if you crave more details about your connected devices. I'm running the data acquisition part of the system on a Raspberry Pi 4B that's sitting in my network cabinet.

cygnus23 said:

Not sure who needs to hear this but the spec comparison chart I just realized was a chart for the first time after viewing comments. In the main article in Safari on iPhone 14pro with iOS 17, the “chart” shows as a vertical text list. It’s been like this every time one of these comparison charts has been used. For some reason it looks correct if you click on comments. I always wondered why the specs were listed in such a weird way. 

It’s been like that for as long as I can recall. If you turn your phone into landscape orientation these charts will appear as intended outside of the comments.

williamh said:

I won’t pretend to have medical knowledge but my doctor detected my sleep apnea when he saw a characteristic effect on an ECG and that was
confirmed by a sleep study.  It’s possible the Apple Watch could do likewise with its ECG feature.  

You are correct and thanks for adding this.

 I do know from five experiences with in-lab sleep studies they look at ECG, EEG, pulse oxygen, and oxygen saturation. They place several sensors in various places around your head and torso. You end up looking like Medusa when it’s all set up.

The key thing they are looking for In the case of obstructive sleep apnea is how many stopped-breathing events you are having, typically expressed as events per hour.  Measurements like oxygen saturation, changes in heart rhythm, abnormal ECG, abnormal EEG (sleep architecture issues), are all consequences of the stopped-breathing events, I.e., the negative impacts on your heart and brain.