New iPhone 16
Lilli and I had iPhone 11s that we bought in 2019. They were no longer supported by Apple and Lilli's had a black line across the display caused when Grimm the cat pushed the phone off the desk. Battery capacity of our phones had degraded to about 75%. It was time.
We decided to get new phones and pay for them over time. We went to the AT&T store in Egg Harbor Township and spoke to salesperson Greg.
Results
This was an easy store visit. Took about an hour. We left with new iPhone 16s, with all our old phone info copied to the new phones. All of our software was installed and running.
We ended up paying less on our phone bill every month despite paying for the new phones.
Recommendation
Greg was terrific. He was patient, knew his products, and knew how to set up the new phones and move the data from our old phones to the new.
Horrible experiece with AllFi hum
TBD returned the hard ware, got UPS recipt many phone calls told every thin was OK and then got mail that it wasn't filed dispute
iOS 26.5
The new phones came with iOS 26.5. We had been running 26.4.2, and Greg had to upgrade our phones to 26.5 before migrating their contents to the new phones.
We bought 2 phones, with screen protectors and cases for each.
Features
We didn't use the AI features on the old phones and we didn't turn them on for the new phones.
Things we had to buy
New iPhones don't come with chargers or cables. Our new phones use USB-C cables instead of USB-A. Afer we got home I had to buy a bunch of things from Amazon:
- 4-pack USB-C fast wall chargers with cables $40
- Car cigarette lighter socket dual USB-C charger $16
- 5 USB-C to USB-C braided cables, mixed lengths $10
- USB-C wired earbuds ($10/pair)
Things we may buy later
- MagSafe charger
Problems with Picture Editing and Photos 10
A major feature of how I use my iPhone is to take pictures and then transfer them via AirDrop to my (ancient) Mac Mini (running Big Sur) on the living room TV as a screen saver. This broke.
I noticed that pictures taken with my new iPhone appeared blurry compared to those taken with older phones. This showed up especially when I looked at the photos on the big TV. My new iPhone created HEIC image files, like the old phone, but bigger.
I tried to fix this by adjusting settings on the iPhone's Camera settings panel. I accessed Settings -> Camera -> Photo Capture -> Photo Mode and set it to 24MP. I accessed Settings -> Camera -> Resolution Control and turned it ON. This gave me an additional shooting control named HEIF that let me choose resolution of 48MP or 12MP. This didn't solve the problem: pictures still looked fuzzy.
Photo editing on Sequoia
I took a pair of test shots at 12MP and 48MP and read them into my Mac laptop, and imported them into Photos 10.0 on the laptop, which is running macOS Sequoia 15.7.4. In Photos on my laptop, I looked at the 12MP and 48MP versions. For each version, I clicked on the photo and selected EDIT from the top bar. Clicking EDIT showed a top bar with manual controls, and tabs for Adjust, Styles, Crop, and Clean Up.
- Adjust gives me picture editing controls: Light, Color, etc in the left sidebar beside an edited version of the photo
- I don't know what Styles does and I never use it.
- Crop gives me picture cropping: Straighten, Vertical, Horizontal, etc in the left sidebar beside an edited version of the photo
- I don't know what Clean Up does and I never use it.
These controls worked as expected on the laptop.
My Photos library on the laptop is connected to my iCloud account, ane picture edits are sent to iCloud.
Editing Photos copied to High Sierra
My living room Mac Mini is running macOS High Sierra 15.7.4 and has Photos version 3.0. (The Mini is so old that it can't run a later version of macOS.) My laptop and the Mini are both connected to my iCloud account and so the Photos app on the Mini gets new pictures from the laptop added to the Mini's Photos app library automatically. This worked: I launched Photos and could see the new test images.
On the iPhone I sent new 12MP and 48MP versions of the photos to the laptop, and then to the Mini. On the Mini, for each version, I clicked on the 48MP photo and selected EDIT from the top bar. Clicking EDIT showed a top bar with many controls, and tabs for Adjust, Styles, Crop, and Clean Up: they looked normal. The pictures looked fuzzy. The Mini's Photos right panel showed picture adjustment controls but they did nothing. Clicking the Adjust, Styles, Crop, and Clean Up tabs had no effect: the Adjust controls were there but did nothing.
I tried quitting and relaunching Photos on the Mini. NO DIFFERENCE. I tried restarting macOS and relaunching Photos. NO DIFFERENCE. When I ran Activity Monitor, it showed Photos using 100% CPU for many minutes.
I suspected that the Mini's old version of Photos was having trouble with the large HEIC files from the new phone.
Portrait Photos
Photos taken in the iPhone's Portrait mode did not work well for me in Big Sur's Photos app. They were blurry and hard to convert to useful screensaver images. I disabled Portrait mode in Camera.
Workaround for These Problems
I tried the following steps for each file I wanted to add to the Mini:
- On the iPhone, under Camera, turn "Portraits in Photo Mode" to OFF.
- On the iPhone, export photo files to the laptop using AirDrop. These files will appear on the laptop in the Pictures sub-folder of my home folder.
- On the laptop, in Photos, import these pictures. You can edit, drop, sharpen, etc. on the imported file. These files looked OK on the laptop.
- In the laptop's Photos, choose File > Export > Export 1 Photo for each photo to be fixed, and export it as a JPG file with quality "maximum". This export step converts the HEIC file to a JPEG and makes a large lossless export file rather than whatever Photos did. Export creates a JPEG file in /Users/yourname/Pictures.
- In Finder on the laptop, open a window on Pictures.
- In Finder on the laptop, open Locations :: targetmachine :: AV's Public Folder :: Drop Box (this assumes both Macs are on the same network, and that the user name on my Mini is "AV.")
- Drag the exported file to Drop Box. This copies a photo to the Mini. You can then delete the exported copy from the Pictures folder.
- On the Mini, in Photos, choose File > Import and navigate to Drop Box
- I remame the files to be imported to prefix a "y" to the name, to avoid possible conflict with those sucked in by the iPhoto app.
- In Photos, select all the files to be imported from DropBox and click Import. This adds the big JPEG files to the Photos library. If the imported files need cropping and so on, do that.
- Add these imported files to the Photos screensaver folder: mine is called screen. The imported pictures are not fuzzy.
This seemed to work. Tedious though.