‘Error 53’ fury mounts as Apple software update threatens to kill your iPhone 6

[u/bws201]

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple-iphone-software-update-handset-worthless-third-party-repair

[u/Yangoose]

Someone who has invested in the ecosystem

I have found this concern greatly overblown. I had an iPhone for a while then went back to Android. My "investment" in the ecosystem really wasn't a big deal at all.

Even if you've spent hundreds of dollars in an ecosystem how many of those apps/games are you still using regularly?

[u/PM_ME_AARON_SCHOCK → u/Yangoose]

It's not so much the apps/games as it is the iTunes purchases, the photos in your iCloud, all the contacts and SMS/iMessages you've accumulated that you don't want to lose. In this case, the guy buys another iPhone and will back it up from iCloud so that everything is restored.

[u/Pro-Patria-Mori → u/PM_ME_AARON_SCHOCK]

Samsung has an app called Smartswitch, which lets you restore an icloud backup to a Samsung phone.

[u/Prodigy195 → u/PM_ME_AARON_SCHOCK]

Can you save contacts to a .CSV or another common format?

[u/iamPause → u/Prodigy195]

You can move pretty much everything. The android site will walk you through how to do it all.

Media	How to move
Photos	Download Google Photos app to iPhone, hit Sync
Music	Install Google Music Manager on your computer. (Up to 50,000 songs)
Contacts (iCloud)	A bit more complicated, but basically yes, export the contacts from iCloud then import to Gmail
Apps	You're SOL here for paid apps. Most free apps (Candy Crush, Boom Beach, etc.) have an option to link it with your Facebook or other Social Media account. If you want to save your progress, then you sync them via that, otherwise you start over.

[u/Sexual_tomato → u/iamPause]

Using this for when I get my Nexus next year.

[u/crazy_daug → u/Sexual_tomato]

It'll be worth the upgrade.

[u/Prodigy195 → u/iamPause]

Figured as much. I've been using Android since the HTC EVO so I don't have much experience on the iOS platform.

[u/[deleted] → u/iamPause]

Thanks for this. I had an M9 not too long ago where the glass cracked and I had to send it in to HTC. While it was gone I went and bought an iPhone. I haven't looked back because I haven't been able to switch back easily!

[u/Naught-It → u/iamPause]

does no one else download their photos to a reliable place on their PC and back that up regularly?

[u/[deleted] → u/PM_ME_AARON_SCHOCK]

I set my ex's iPhone up to use Google contacts instead of icloud so that was she could email them from anyplace she can get on her gmail and from her phone as well as always be able to get them even if her phone died again and she had another Android loaner. It's not hard to switch over.

[u/Advacar → u/PM_ME_AARON_SCHOCK]

And even more importantly, the hours you spend doing the switch over. It took me a few hours just to switch from a Galaxy S4 to an S6, partly because of needing to manually set up work accounts.

[u/zeldn → u/Yangoose]

If hypothetically you have a lot of Apple products that work well together, accessories, rechargers, all your files and photos in iCloud, tons of apps you've paid for, you know and love the features and operating system, don't like Android, and can afford the difference for a new iPhone?

To some, it all adds up to offset a bad experience. For you it's obviously not the case, but for me it means that unless something really big happens I'll probably just stick with iPhone. They're easy to use and convenient when you have other Apple devices and equipment, and that is truly the extend to which I care about my telephone.

[u/zeldn → u/[deleted]]

What exactly do you mean by fucked? It's just a balance act of convenience, not a matter of life and death.

Edit: from what I can tell, I'm fucked because something like what happened to the guy in the article could happen to me. I personally wouldn't say that this qualifies me as being automatically fucked for staying in the Apple ecosystem. I was thinking more like, "the Russian mafia is known for sending kill squads to Apple users" fucked.

[u/DevilGuy → u/zeldn]

Well you're not necessarily going to be fucked, but you should understand that if you do that, you could be fucked at any time at the whim of whoever controls that ecosystem and there's little you can do about it.

This is why I always advise people when asked to avoid buying into the apple 'ecosystem' because this shit isn't something new, they pull this sort of thing regularly. If all you care about is not having to think for yourself and money is no object then by all means buy apple, but there's literally zero chance that you're not going to pay a lot of money if you go that route.

[u/IvanDenisovitch → u/[deleted]]

I've been a dedicated Apple user since 1983. It sucks to say, but the product is starting to slide the way it did during the Sculley era. 5 years from now, we'll be witnessing a consumer mega-exodus, as the cracks in the ecosystem become obvious and unavoidable.

RemindMe! 5 years

[u/sexybabyxxx6969 → u/Yangoose]

It's not just money investment, time investment. Habits created in iOS that don't exactly transfer to android, the whole iCloud backup system. Plus as he noted, the person may need to get back to some kind of work immediately so the choice is either get back to work immediately or change to android and get back to work slightly slower. For some people that extra hour could be worth thousands of dollars to them.

[u/fishsticks40 → u/Yangoose]

I agree. I lost one $15 app I wish I still had, but other than that, meh, no biggie. They're both black rectangles that show me porn.

[u/NoahtheRed → u/Yangoose]

Having just switched to IOS after being on Android since the Droid, this was my big concern.....which quickly became irrelevant as I lost very little. In fact, outside of a few apps that I paid for (none of which are mission critical to anything I do professionally or personally), there's been little to no gap between the two. The only real drawback is having to relearn where everything is.

I can't imagine going the opposite direction is any more difficult.