It’s interesting to me even now because the aesthetics of iOS have been stuck in iOS 7 ever since.  I still don’t like the look, the design language, how many things operate – the interface is ugly, unintuitive, lacks personality, and – as the hosts of ATP might say – is absent the whimsy that defined Apple for decades.

It felt like a betrayal, too – now iOS, as of version 7, looked like a cheap Android rip-off.  Apple had wilfully and pointlessly thrown away their most important positive differentiators.  Insult was further added to injury by the mere existence of Windows Phone Metro, which – while still ugly to me too – at least demonstrated originality and a kind of bravery – it at least had a style, even if it wasn’t the one for me.

And it was dog slow.  It basically killed my love of the iPad, because it made my iPad 3 frustrating to use.  Even when I later got an iPad Air 2 (as a hand-me-down), my iPad love never really rekindled.

Nonetheless, I had been wondering for a few years: were I to go back now to iOS 6, would I be revolted & repulsed by it, and suddenly realise that iOS 7 and its ilk are in fact the current pinnacle of user interface & visual design?

A few months ago I got out my original iPad and turned it on.  It was running iOS 5, the last version of iOS support on it.  I hadn’t intended to go back in time – I’d forgotten entirely that it was pre-iOS 7.  I didn’t realise straight away, either.  My first thought, upon booting to the home screen, was “wow, this looks amazing”.  It genuinely took me a while to figure out why this non-Retina, decade-old, square & heavy iPad felt fantastic.

Then I realised – because it looks good and is easy to use.

Without further ado, my until-now unpublished iOS 7 first impressions:

• It’s buggy. The task switcher has a terrible time dealing with landscape orientation.
• It’s slow. Both in general – perhaps just lacking some optimisations – and by apparent design flaws. e.g. many new animations are unnecessary to begin with, and unnecessarily slow to boot, and you can’t interact with things until the animation is done. It’s quickly frustrating.
• The new slide-up gesture (for the little control sheet) steals scrolls periodically, which is exceedingly annoying. Perhaps in time I’ll recalibrate where I need to touch things in order to avoid that, but it’s annoying in the meantime.
• Actually installing it was a pain and took multiple attempts, as per usual for any system restore. Le sigh.
• Spelling correction is more aggressive now, and will even re-incorrect things after you explicitly fix them. Fucker.
• To delete emails you now have to swipe the opposite direction – from right to left. No obvious reason, and certainly no indication on how to do that.
• The new icons and dock design look like UI mocks. By someone who’s either not very good at them or just needs a really basic placeholder. They’re probably the most disappointing thing about iOS 7 so far.
• The new lock screen is obtuse, as others have noted. The whole slide to unlock debacle is ridiculous and Apple has no excuse for it. But furthermore, it displays your chosen lock screen image arbitrarily cropped, and jitters it about randomly in what must be intended to be this infamous parallax effect, but in reality has no apparent relationship to the orientation of the iPad, and so just looks broken and stupid. Big cock-up all round there.

I love (meaning am tremendously sad) how certain aspects of those first impressions have lasted – some becoming huge memes of their own (e.g. damnyouautocorrect.com).  And how some parts of the iOS upgrade experience – like having to do the install repeatedly to get it to work – persist to this day.

If you have multiple accounts on a Family Sharing arrangement, and some use “two-factor” while others use “two-step”, you’re in for a bag of hurt.

For example, any time you change the password on any of the non-master accounts, you’ll have to reauthorise all devices on that account with the master purchaser.  You’ll be prompted, when trying to download apps or purchase anything etc, with a dialog saying “Your Family Organizer, [foo], must enter the security code for their payment method”, asking for some kind of input.  There is literally nothing you can enter there that will make it work.  Not the password for any of the relevant Apple IDs, not any security codes for any credit cards, nada.

The problem is that it’s asking for a verification code that you can only create on a device which has “two-factor” authentication enabled.  Compare for example what you see with “two-factor” authentication enabled on your iDevice:

Versus what you see with “two-step”:

That “Get Verification Code” “button” is what you’re looking for.  As you can see, it simply doesn’t exist with “two-step” authentication enabled.

The only solution – to allow your family members to download apps, purchase music / videos / books / etc, or pretty much do anything else on their iDevices – is to force the master account over to “two-factor” authentication.

To do this, you have to go to https://appleid.apple.com/ and turn off “two-step” authentication (which will require you to complete some stupid ‘security’ questions).  You cannot turn off “two-step” authentication from any of your actual iDevices’ Settings apps.

Then, stupidly, you can’t actually enable “two-factor” authentication from that same website.  That can only be done in the Settings app on one of your iDevices – by (in iOS 10.3 or later) going into Settings ➜ <your name at the top of the list> ➜ Password & Security.

There’s no way to enable “two-step” authentication anymore.  And not having any form of two-factor authentication enabled is a very bad idea.  So if any of your family’s accounts have “two-factor” authentication enabled, you basically have to switch to “two-factor” on all of them.

Which would be broadly fine, if Apple hadn’t made it so needlessly complicated, and the two systems so incompatible that their own software can’t figure out what’s going on.

Long story short, it’s far worse than even I thought.  I wish I could believe it’s just a bad joke, a prank, and we’ll get the real thing in a few months, but I just doubt it.  It looks deliberate.  It’s depressing.

You have to actually use it for a while to really appreciate how badly it’s broken.  It’s just hard to explain otherwise – you wouldn’t believe some of it, for a start.

There may be a careful-what-you-wish-for moral here.  I’ve long disagreed with Apple’s domineering focus on iOS over all else.  The Mac is still what gets the work done in the end, and it’s been horribly neglected.  It was a small part of why I left Apple.  Yet when I look at OS X Mavericks, aside from the dumb name it is actually a very promising release.  Both from an end-user and a developer perspective.  I’m actually looking forward to it (but, since as noted I actually need my Mac, unlike my iOS devices, I’m not putting the beta on it).

It appears that all the Mac engineers that were stolen by iOS over the last few years were put back on the Mac, and then some.  iOS 7 is superficial, crass, styleless and boring.  Mavericks isn’t a correspondingly revolutionary upgrade, but it’s at least some kind of solace.

But on the other hand, despite others’ talk of wifi issues, I’ve seen major improvements in wifi behaviour. Previously when I walked between buildings at work, my iPad 2 (and iPhones) would try to cling stubbornly to the dodgy wifi signals. They’d be completely unable to do anything, but they’d keep trying and trying for the full five minute walk.

The new iPad, on the other hand, just switches to LTE and you can’t even distinguish the two. In fact for the first few days of this I didn’t even notice it was working! Even once I realised, I’ve been unable to actually catch it switching over – it’s quick and painless and there’s no disruption to existing connections. Pretty damn sweet.

So I wonder if the heuristic for when it should give up on wifi has been adjusted – perhaps it’s now more confident about falling back to LTE. Perhaps then that’s what people are seeing when they believe it’s having “issues” staying connected to wifi. I can certainly say that it has no range issues on good wifi networks – I can still pick up my home network (5GHz Airport Extreme) from inside my car some thirty or more metres away, outside line of sight and through at least one wall, just fine. That’s with the base station on half strength, to boot.

And lastly, the most marked improvement of all (well, aside from the screen, arguably) is the additional RAM. I’m yet to see a single web page refresh due to a memory shortage (or app crash, for that matter, though I’ve rarely had trouble with that anyway). And I’ve been deliberately opening the maximum number of tabs in Safari, including ones with HD videos in them and more. Previously I’d limit it to four, maybe five, and even then it’d more often than not fall over.

I was very hopeful that the doubling of RAM would make a substantial difference, but even that optimism fell short of reality. On this basis alone it’s worth the upgrade.

Another downside, though, is that it’s piqued my interest in typography, to the extent that I now have about forty fonts shortlisted for use here, for my blog, and am having a devil of a time narrowing it down to just one. I’ve not paid this much attention to fonts since.. well… pretty much as long as I can remember. I’ve not had to for so long; the last time I printed anything that wasn’t a pre-made form on a crappy laser-printer or inkjet was so long ago. But now with the iPad 3’s screen the subtle differences between like fonts are really visible.

Most disturbing of all is that Helvetica actually looks good. I’ve never liked Helvetica. Has the whole world gone topsy-turvy?!?

So I’ve changed the font of this ‘ere website to something that looks nicer on the iPad 3.  It looks less impressive on pretty much any other device.  So get an iPad 3.