Updating My iPhone Software

Apple sent me a request on Friday asking me to update the operating system on my iPhone. It said before doing the update I would need to make more room on the device as I didn't have enough free space. That surprised me as I had over 10 GB available. Fortunately it brought up a utility to help me remove large files from the phone.

I take a lot of pictures and movies with my phone that I use on my YouTube channel. That requires me to copy the files from my phone to my desktop computer. I don't need the copy on my phone and so I spent some time making sure I had copies on my computer before deleting them from my phone. I did keep several photos on my phone as sometimes I like to show some of my pictures to friends and family. There is a balance though as keeping too many pictures makes them difficult to find and deleting to many means I can't share some of my adventures.

I went through my phone and freed up quite a bit of space. Apple's utility then showed me my largest text message attachments. My daughter-in-law often sends me large videos of my grandchildren being cute. I made sure I had copies and then deleted the ones on my phone. That freed up even more space to the point I felt I could install the operating system update.

I made sure to plug my phone into a stable power source and started the update. It ran smoothly and half an hour later, I had a phone with the latest operating system. My hope is that Apple doesn't continue to make more large updates. If they do, then I may need to upgrade my phone simply to have more memory so I don't have to worry about these updates in the future.

A Great Story About Apple

I spent the day in a special meeting where we had a former Apple employee share a very interesting story about the development of the original iPhone. It isn't protected by any confidentiality agreements and so I thought I would share it in my blog to help illustrate the point of making proper technology decisions.

Many years ago Apple decided to create a new product called the iPhone. They didn't make phones at the time but had an idea of what smartphones should look like. They had a hardware division that would create the physical device. They also had a software division that needed to build software for this new piece of hardware. The software team had to decide the basic operating system that they would use. One group felt they should take the existing operating system running on their computers and modify it so it would run on the much less powerful hardware. Another group wanted to start with a different operating system that could already run on it.

If you take the short-term approach, there is a lot less work involved in using an operating system that could already run on the planned hardware. The downside is that Apple would then have to maintain separate operating systems for their computer and mobile devices. Taking the long-term approach meant doing more work in the beginning but simplifying maintenance and code updates in the future.

Ultimately the long-term approach won out and proved to be the better decision. This made it much easier for Apple to switch their computers from the Intel platform to the same ARM platform they run in their phones. It also shows that taking a long-term approach opens up more possibilities for future product development.