I finally got around to updating my 4S to iOS 7.1 last night, ten days late, because I always wait a week or so to see if anyone's phone catches fire before I install anything. Nobody's did. So around midnight, while half-watching a rerun of something I'd already seen, I plugged in and let it churn through the update.
First impression: the phone app icon looks different again. Apple keeps fiddling with the green icon and I keep not caring, but I noticed it this time, which I guess means something changed more than usual. The bigger thing is the call screen. In iOS 7 they'd gone all in on that ultra-thin font for the slide-to-answer text and it always looked like it was about to disappear if you squinted. 7.1 walks that back a little, thicker text, and it's a small thing but it's the kind of small thing that tells you Apple actually reads the complaints instead of just shipping and moving on. Good. More of that, please.
The part everyone's talking about is CarPlay, which shipped as part of this same update. I want to be clear that I cannot use CarPlay. I drive a 2003 Civic with a tape deck adapter for my phone, held together at this point mostly through spite and electrical tape. The list of cars that actually support CarPlay right now is basically a handful of Ferrari, Mercedes, and Volvo models that most people will never sit in, let alone own, so this is one of those Apple announcements that's really a preview of a preview. Fine, whatever, it'll trickle down eventually the way most of this stuff does. I just find it a little funny that the tech press covered it like it was shipping to everyone's dashboard this week when in practice almost nobody can touch it yet.
Also in the release notes: a fix for the lock screen bypass bug that let people get into your photos and contacts without the passcode, which, yeah, probably should've been priority one and not buried three bullets down. And some Touch ID authentication improvements that don't apply to me at all since the 4S doesn't have a fingerprint sensor, it just has a home button that's slightly less responsive every single month like clockwork. I'm not bitter about it. I am a little bitter about it.
The other thing eating up my feed this week is Titanfall, which came out last Tuesday on Xbox One and PC, and every single person I follow who owns either of those things has posted at least one screenshot of a mech stomping through a burning building. I don't have an Xbox One and my desktop is old enough that I'd need to check if it even has a graphics card worth mentioning, so I'm just reading other people's excitement from the outside like it's a party in the apartment across the street. I'll probably get it eventually on a Steam sale two years from now the way I do with everything, and by then everyone will have moved on to whatever's next and I'll be playing it alone, which is honestly fine, that's kind of my whole deal with games at this point.
None of this is a big update to how I use my phone day to day, if I'm honest. The lock screen fix matters, the font tweak is nice, CarPlay is a rumor with a launch event. But there's something I like about small, boring, incremental releases like this one. Not every update needs to reinvent the thing. Sometimes it's just: here's a bug fix, here's a slightly better font, go on with your day. I'd take ten of these over one giant redesign that breaks all my muscle memory again, which is more or less what happened when 7 first landed back in September and it took me a solid month to stop hitting the wrong buttons.
Anyway. Phone updated, mechs are stomping without me, and I still can't play music through the Civic's tape deck without it sounding like it's coming from the bottom of a well. Some things don't get a point release.