god. fucking. dammit. I mean, on the one hand of course they do. On the one hand, a freak-flag Chinese manufacturer has to be. On the other hand, I was really looking forward to feeling good about whatever I replace this gets-worse-with-every-update infernal-machine-I-hate-you-Google Pixel.
This is why we can't have nice things, I guess. At least it can be turned off, but still... My OP2 is almost two years old, and besides the battery life being shit and Bluetooth eating all of my RAM it's still a good phone. I was thinking of picking up a 3T if it dies but their official response to this 'opportunity' is everything except reassuring.
Say what you will about Apple, I resisted the iPhone for a while, but Android is the fucking wild west and I don't want to put up with random fucking update schedules and manufacturers dicking with software. Also my Razr got seriously hot in my pocket after a year
I will happily take the Wild West over Apple's bullshit. "What's that? You want to send a text message? Well, we don't actually use SMS or MMS for that, we use a hot mess of MMS, IPV6 and literally-whatever-the-fuck-we-feel-like-at-the-moment to communicate between our devices and if it doesn't get to someone who doesn't use our devices, will that just proves their racial impurity." "What's that? Your phone is intolerably slow after the latest update? That means your phone is too old to live. Buy another. They're only a thousand dollars now." "What's that? Your phone can't make phone calls? It must be because you're holding it wrong. Okay, fucking fine, we'll ship you a goddamn rubber bumper but we want you to know you should feel bad." "What's that? All your .tifs are now giant black squares? Well, you shouldn't be using .tifs. It's an ancient yukky format and it was either patch our shitty operating system against 'malicious tifs' or fuckin' rewrite your shit so that your data is gone and we all know how you'll fare in that discussion." "What's that? you bought a Time Machine because we told you to and it only works on AFP and now we're deprecating AFP because we've decided that what we really need is a proprietary fucking file system so that we don't have to worry about your shit ever again? Wait, did you have a question?" If you honestly think that Apple is innocent of "random fucking update schedules" and "manufacturers dicking with software" you either aren't paying attention or your iPhone still has it's magic unboxing cellophane on it.
That has been my favorite Apple fuckup in recent history, because I still see a lot of tifs from designers, photographers and other artsy types, who have traditionally been the folks keeping Apple alive. It's kind of Apple since the iPhone in a single poorly thought out patch."What's that? All your .tifs are now giant black squares? Well, you shouldn't be using .tifs. It's an ancient yukky format and it was either patch our shitty operating system against 'malicious tifs' or fuckin' rewrite your shit so that your data is gone and we all know how you'll fare in that discussion."
Buddy of mine compared this to that moment where the cops come in, turn on the lights, shoo away the DJ and say "awright, party's over, everyone go home or we'll crack skulls" causing the crowd to disperse from the warehouse and nurse their high at Sheri's. I had those. All six of 'em. They were sold at 36x24. I paid $5 ea to scan them in at 600 dpi then sold the lot on eBay for $150. They're $60 each now. And I have 600dpi of black. All six of 'em.
I use ImageMagick to do things like that, it's remarkably lightweight (nowhere near the disk space required for photochop), but still very powerful. And not that you asked, but after I've built all my image frames from the data, I stitch them together into .mp4's with ffmpeg. Video data products are so obviously the future, but don't tell all the old men who still get printed journals delivered to physical mailboxes.
It's so too late, dude. Apple rewrote them. And when I looked at my time machine backups on Apple, it rewrote those, too. Theoretically I could have attempted to mount time machine stripes on my Windows machine and hope for the best but the act of looking for them in OS X destroyed anything that wasn't destroyed.
I meant deployment of updates varies by manufacturer. Want the latest version of Android? Wait til we customize/ break it. Or: fuck you. Can't have. I'm not trying to argue. To each his own. I never had a flagship and I threw up my hands one day and said I'm tapping out of the Android ecosystem after trying for years. Both have strengths and weaknesses. And both are awful in their own ways. It's whatever you think is important and whatever bullshit you are willing to put up with.
I threw up my hands in 2001 and went from WinXP to Apple. However, I had the second Windows smartphone (back then, they were "PDA phones") because if I was going to carry around a chunk of shit like that, it better do more than make calls. It didn't do quite enough - I still have a Gen1 iPod and it still fires up and plays music. But I threw up my hands in 2015 and went Android and, professionally, back to Windows. Android? Windows? They're stupid and capricious. But Apple has become mean. They are actively harming their existing userbase in pursuit of the new user experience. They're training consumers that if you want reliability you need to buy a thousand dollar phone every year, pay $15 a month to listen to your music, and keep all your photos and documents on their servers. They have become a vicious and greedy organization. Android? Windows? Clumsy, flat-footed and often completely wrong-headed. But they act out of stupidity, not spite. Apple used to know better. It makes it infinitely worse.