I just can’t believe this is our current state of the art for setting up a new iPhone in 2019. I’m pretty savvy about such things, and I was still confused or dumbfounded by various aspects of the process. I can’t imagine a “regular” user trying to do these things. In a time when Apple is worried about fewer people upgrading their iPhones, I view it as a minor miracle that anyone upgrades their iPhones given such hoops.
Apple fans in Washington, D.C. were treated to an exciting Saturday morning at Mount Vernon Square. Crowds, cameras, and special guests gathered to celebrate the grand opening of Apple Carnegie Library, the most ambitious store project Apple has ever completed. Tim Cook and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser had the honor of opening the store’s doors, and Apple executives Deirdre O’Brien and Phil Schiller were also in attendance to welcome customers.
Downstairs, a gallery of historic D.C. images curated by the Historical Society now occupies what was once known as the bicycle room (quite literally, a space where visitors parked their bikes before moving upstairs to the library). One of the building’s most charmed features is its Guastavino-vaulted, terracotta ceilings on the basement level. There, guests are invited not only to take a gander at historic photos of the building’s history, but to also employ an art app called Smartify. By scanning an image with the app, users can immediately pull up more information about the piece on their smartphone—technology that Historical Society of Washington, D.C. Executive Director John Suau says can eventually be employed throughout the building.
“I thought that we were something that Apple was going to have to contend with,” Suau says. “But as the project progressed, I understood that Steve Jobs had articulated that Apple is about where technology and the humanities intersect. So when I started to hear that language and learn about them creating an experiential retail opportunity—where you’re not necessarily coming here to transact but you’re coming here to learn or engage—it made a lot more sense.”
The iPhone is still a really great phone, but it continues to feel familiar in a world of increasingly changing tech. It's almost, dare I say, the comfort choice? It's the device that connects to all my things, and it powers the connections to most of the tech I test and wear. It's a cornerstone device and it does a good job at being exactly that. It's the product Apple makes that feels the most recommendable. And yet, as the shape of phones (figuratively and literally) begins to transform to farther-off possibilities, the iPhone remains the familiar, stable -- almost boring -- device, not the more exciting and unpredictable new one.
I was looking for a RSS client for my iPhone, that doesn't require any of the web-based RSS service log-ins, that does RSS subscriptions locally on my iPhone, and that does import of OPML files.
After a lot of downloading and then deleting of apps, I declare failure. I can't find a single app that does this.
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Thanks for reading.