Spent about ninety minutes last night doing something I never expected to spend ninety minutes doing: deleting old vacation photos off my phone so Apple would let me install its own operating system. iOS 8 dropped yesterday, and if you've got a 16GB iPhone that's more than a year old, you already know what I'm talking about.
The over-the-air update wants something like 5.5GB of free space, which is an absurd number when you actually stop and think about it. My iPhone 5 has 16GB total. Do the math. That's over a third of the whole phone sitting there empty, waiting, so the installer has room to unpack itself before it cleans up after. I ended up plugging into my Mac and doing it through iTunes instead, which only needs about 1.5GB, and that worked fine once I remembered iTunes still exists as a thing I use maybe four times a year.
Not going to pretend I'm mad about the update itself. Interactive notifications are nice, actually letting you reply to a text from the lock screen instead of unlocking and switching apps like some kind of caveman. QuickType, the new predictive keyboard row, is decent too, though it's already suggesting some strange word choices for me by hour twelve of using it. The extensibility stuff, third-party keyboards, sharing to apps like Pocket right from Safari, is the part I actually care about, even if barely anyone's built anything worth using yet.
But the storage thing is genuinely bad design, and I say that as someone who defends Apple more than I probably should in arguments with my brother-in-law. You shouldn't need to delete photos of your own kid to install a system update on a phone you paid $650 for unlocked. I know, I know, buy more storage next time, except the entry point on the new 6 and 6 Plus is still 16GB, so this exact scramble is going to happen to a fresh batch of people in about a year, all over again.
And can we talk about the U2 album for a second? It's still sitting in my Purchased tab, "Songs of Innocence," an album I did not buy, did not want, and did not ask to have appear in my library like a fruit basket from a neighbor I've never met. Apple pushed it to every iTunes account on the planet last week and only just got around to putting up a removal tool because so many people were furious about finding it there. I get that it was meant as a gift. I do not think giving people something automatically, with no way to say no first, is actually a gift. It's closer to being volunteered.
If you're doing the iOS 8 update tonight and you're on an older device, here's the actual tip: don't fight the OTA installer for an hour like I almost did. Just plug into a computer, open iTunes, back up first (seriously, always back up first), and update from there. It skips the whole storage juggling act entirely. Wish someone had told me that before I deleted forty pictures from a trip to Maine two years ago that I'm now mildly annoyed about, even though they're all backed up to my laptop anyway and I knew that the whole time.
Tomorrow the actual phones show up in stores, and from what I'm reading the lines outside the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue started forming sometime around 2am. Not my thing, standing on a sidewalk overnight for a phone I could just order online and get in a week or two. But I get the appeal for some people, and I'm sure this blog will have more to say about the 6 and the 6 Plus themselves once actual units are in actual hands instead of pre-order limbo.
For now I've got a functioning phone with a slightly emptier camera roll and an unwanted Bono album I still haven't figured out how to fully exorcise. Small victories.