I just have to say Thank You! to everyone who has contributed to Low End Mac in March and April. Both months you have brought us beyond our goal, and it means the world to us. Yesterday we passed our funding goal for April.
Because of your generosity in March, my Late 2008 Aluminum MacBook has an SSD, and that makes this 2.0 GHz machine a much better performer. I also found a very nice used iPhone 5S to replace my wife’s iPhone 4S.
Speaking of which, it’s very nice of Apple to provide iOS 9 for such old hardware, but I’ll bet not a single member of the development team or testing team actually uses an iPhone 4S in the field. It works, but it can be excruciatingly slow. For instance, I can hardly ever answer a phone call, because by the time iOS 9 on my iPhone 4S gets to the phone app, the call has gone to voice mail. Let’s hope Apple stops providing new iOS versions for the iPhone 4S, nice as it is to be fairly up-to-date otherwise.
Thanks to April donations, I picked up a very nice iPhone 5 with 32 GB of storage today. I backed up my 4S, restored that backup to the iPhone 5, and everything is going much more smoothly now. The iPhone 5 has about 3x the power of the 4S, and the 5S doubles the power of the 5. I would not recommend anything lower than an iPhone 5 or 5C if you want to run iOS 9. The 5 is a huge step forward from the 4S – and Space Gray is gorgeous.
Problems
I ran into two problems with my iPhone 5. Within about 90 minutes its battery was down to 67%, so I estimate I might get up to 4 hours before the 20% warning kicks in. I’ll have to look into a replacement battery, and the previous owner says Genius Cell Phone Repair offers one for $50 installed. If that gives me a couple years of use, I think it’s worth it. I’ve never taken apart an iPhone and am not sure I’d want to try battery surgery.
The second problem is with AT&T. We’re on their Friends and Family plan, and that requires that an authorized user be in the store before AT&T will set up the newer phone. Problem is the account holder is in Texas, while I’m in Michigan. There is a local authorized user, but I don’t know her either. I’m sure we’ll figure a way to get past this obstacle, and once I have a nano-SIM, it should be clear sailing moving it to a newer phone in the future.
Opportunities
Your generosity over the past two months means we can send some additional money to our accountants this month. They’ll appreciate that, and it will bring us one step closer to having that debt paid off. After that, the IRS.
Next month, we plan to replace the hard drive in my wife’s 2010 MacBook Pro with a 240-256 GB SSD, which will make a world of difference. And get a copy of Microsoft Office 2011, so I can update her from OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard to 10.9 Mavericks, so she can have a current enough version of iTunes to support iOS 9 on her iPhone 6S.
Each step forward seems to require more steps than planned, but that’s part of being a low-end Mac user, isn’t it.
Short link: http://goo.gl/YTrUym
