Updated my phone to iOS 13 on Friday night, two days late, because I always wait for the "is it safe yet" tweets to roll in before I touch a fresh Apple update. This time I didn't wait long enough, but more on that in a minute.
I'm running an iPhone XS, nothing fancy, no Face ID complaints, battery still holds a decent charge for an 11-month-old phone. The update itself took about 40 minutes over wifi, one restart, and then there it was: the marquee feature, Dark Mode, staring back at me at 11pm looking genuinely great. Not the fake dark mode some apps have been faking with a black wallpaper trick for years, this is system-wide, Messages, Mail, Settings, all of it. I sat there for a solid five minutes just tapping into different apps to see how it looked. Worth the wait on that front alone.
Then Saturday happened.
Bluetooth stopped reliably connecting to my car. Not every time, maybe one in three tries, which is somehow worse than it just not working at all, because you never know which drive is going to turn into a red-light fumble with your phone. I've seen enough complaints from other people online (some losing AirPods pairing entirely, which sounds much worse than my problem) to know it isn't just my unit being weird. Reminders got a full redesign this cycle too, with the ability to tag people and set flags on lists, and I actually like the new layout, but it now takes an extra half second to load every time I open it, like it's thinking real hard before showing me my grocery list.
None of this is shocking, exactly. Every September Apple ships the new OS a few days before the new phones hit shelves, and every September the first point release is the one you install if you're either brave or just forgetful about waiting. The iPhone 11 lineup went on sale Friday too, the regular 11 starting at $699, the 11 Pro at $999, the Pro Max at $1099 if you want the big one, and Apple Watch Series 5 came out the same day with the always-on display people have wanted for years. I didn't buy any of it. My XS still does what I need, and the always-on watch face is a nice trick but not $399-worth of nice trick to me when my Series 3 still tells time just fine, thanks.
What's actually stuck with me since Friday is how many people at my office were out for the climate strike that same day. Not a small number either, probably a third of the floor, and a bunch of the Amazon and Google people I follow on Twitter mentioned walking out too. Odd timing for Apple to launch new phones into a week where "we're overconsuming the planet's resources" was the other big headline, though I doubt anyone in Cupertino planned that on purpose. Just one of those weeks where two completely unrelated stories end up sitting next to each other in your feed.
Back to the bugs though, since that's really what this post is about. The keyboard has a lag now when I'm typing fast, maybe 100 to 200 milliseconds behind where I'd expect a letter to land, enough that I've mistyped words I've typed my whole life without thinking. Photos crashed twice trying to open a picture sent through Messages. None of it is catastrophic, nothing that makes me wish I'd waited, but it's exactly the kind of thing where you figure two more weeks of testing would've caught it. I keep telling myself I'll wait for the point release next year and then I never do, because Dark Mode is sitting right there being pretty and I apparently have zero self control about that sort of thing.
If your Bluetooth is acting up too, for what it's worth, forgetting the device and re-pairing seems to fix it for a few days before it creeps back. Not a real fix. Just something to try while we all wait for Apple to notice.