i said “apple storage ratchet” because i'm effectively forcing myself to buy a higher storage tier each time (ratcheting: goes forward but not back), but i maybe should have said “racket” because have you seen what apple charges for higher-storage skus? it's utterly obscene

anyway uh. are there android phones that let you store photos on an external sd card and encrypt them? asking for a friend.

wow i have never seen an iphone start up to the apple logo, stay there for a while (a minute maybe?), then have the logo disappear, appear to turn off, then have it appear again… this is gonna be a boot loop isn't it.

ooh, not a boot loop but an exciting new thing: on the second attempt it did boot, but it doesn't respond to touch input and there's no home button haptics. i can bring up the password prompt but not enter the password. exciting!!!

huh, putting an iphone into recovery mode is easier than expected, you basically just keep holding the power button after the apple logo shows up. nice. i guess dfu is an even more last-resort mode then

i regret to inform you that apple's recovery mode handling will start downloading firmware without checking if there's enough space on the host to store it. i was forced to force kill it so my laptop won't die

maybe a good thing i was forced to abort preparing to use recovery mode, because on a third attempt my phone did actually boot into a usable state, and i can rescue my photos from the last two weeks! there's tons of should-be-deleted apps with placeholder icons though…

here's my suspicion: in worst-case scenarios, maybe iOS is able to roll back to a previous filesystem snapshot or something? or maybe there's multiple partitions and they're not all in sync? god knows. i'll salvage what i can and then restore from backup.

(realises 15GB of disk space is just dedicated to ANGLE) aaaaaaaaaaa

oh and then my laptop suddenly involuntarily hibernated due getting down to 5% battery or whatever the threshold is, which is either due to apple's usb-c hub thing not being able to provide enough power or due to me having set the max charge level to 80%, idk. great day today.

while i'm upset at apple, did you know that photo sync between an iphone and an mac is one-way? you can sync the library from your mac to your iphone, and you can separately import new photos, but if you for example move something between folders on your phone, that's not synced

by the way, deleting files on a mac that is using time machine doesn't immediately free the space for them, i think? because it's always keeping old apfs snapshots of the filesystem around so they can be synced to your backup drive, so the deleted file is still in the snapshot.

maybe something similar goes on with ios, idk

when your phone dies you see your life flash before your eyes (photos being imported one by one over usb)

oh my god the fact that signal does not provide ANY way to export or backup message history on ios is awful. you can move it to a new device, but right now i have to restore an old backup on my current device, so i've spent half an hour desperately screenshotting/saving stuff

i completely understand why signal want to make it difficult for you to make a copy of your message history, but in this case it meant i nearly lost like, all the precious photos my friends sent me from a thing we did together. i could always ask them to re-send me them, but 😭

when did ios firmware images become like 8GB and why does it take far longer to extract the image than to download it

why does it take more than half an hour to extract. this computer has an ssd and is basically not doing anything else. apple what are you doing

actually in the recovery process now. it's so cute how the progress bar displayed on the phone under the apple logo is synced with the progress bar displayed on the computer

not looking forward to how, after my phone has been restored, i will also have to wipe and set up my watch again, despite my watch being just fine. this one's entirely apple's fault. the apple watch is not a fully independent device, it's paired to the phone and mirrors its data.

the data on an apple watch doesn't belong to the watch, if that makes sense. everything stored on an apple watch is basically a temporary copy of data stored on the iphone it's paired to, and the iphone copy is authoritative. this is reasonable but like anything it has tradeoffs.

my phone restored and now it's “upgrading” (apple force you to upgrade the ios version when restoring so i guess it has to do some migration stuff) and… huh, my watch is also doing something??? did my phone do this? does that mean it re-paired or what???

‪hello from my restored iphone! incredibly, i was apparently wrong about the apple watch? perhaps apple must have changed how this works: it seems to have automatically re-paired synced the last two weeks of fitness data back to my phone. nothing lost. i'm impressed!‬

@hikari Apple Watch sync is very good these days. I swap them about once a year and they slowly went from “goodbye all fitness data” to “you’re missing the 15 minutes you had it off your wrist”

@saagar @hikari Is that a model thing or a watchOS version thing? At some point I’m going to have to replace my series 3, and I don’t want to lose my 6 year move streak

@h0m54r @hikari I would guess watchOS

@saagar @h0m54r my watch definitely didn't have these magical sync capabilities a year ago, they must have improved the os