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Rip Van Winkle Buys an iPhone 15
21 November 2023
We've never been shy about identifying our iPhone shots as iPhone 6 Plus images. It was the first iPhone to offer image stabilization and with some judicious editing in Camera Raw, we always liked what we saw at these sizes.
But iOS 12 is several generations behind the current iOS 17. App after app insisted on being updated but the updates wouldn't run on iOS 12 so we were gradually being shut out of the iOS ecosphere.
Not by Adobe or the major imaging apps but by almost all the other kinds of apps from banking to medical to entertainment to utilities.
But on Saturday our iPhone 15 Pro Max arrived.
Running iOS 17 after iOS 12 is a big jump. But it's the one feature old Rip Van Winkle here desperately needed. Rip rubbed his eyes and sandpapered his fingernails to give it a shot.
SETUP
First there's the setup to do.
Since this phone was delivered via UPS, there were no geniuses handy to help Rip with the setup. But the Internet would not leave him stranded.
For the general setup of a new iPhone, he reviewed Apple's own Set Up Your iPhone or iPad page to familiarize himself with the nine-step process, which is not as convoluted as that may sound.
In fact, it went very well. He simply turned on his old phone, laid it next to his new one and let the two communicate, copying settings and apps from the old to the new.
This all went smoothly.
He was glad to see the Wallet on the new phone wanted the security codes for all the credit cards he had activated on the old phone. Contactless payment became a life-saver for him during the pandemic and he's continued with it since, the same crumpled $20 bill in his pants pocket (only the pants changed) since 2019.
Transferring our apps and data was estimated at two hours, which quickly fell to an hour. Most of our 64-GB iPhone 6 Plus storage was still free.
THE ESIM
Replacing the old phone with the new one was a bit more challenging.
The old phone had a physical SIM card. The new phone uses an eSIM. The new phone was unlocked because Rip uses an obscure carrier who promised to supple a QR code to set up the eSIM.
But getting there was tricky.
That's because there are two phones on the account and his information was not the controlling one. Once he figured that out, he was able to plug in the new phone's 15-digit IMEI number to confirm compatibility and to activate it with no fee using that QR code.
FOCAL LENGTH
He was anxious to try out the Camera app armed with three lenses now.
One of the reasons to go Pro Max over Pro is to get a 5x telephoto over a 3x telephoto. You may bemoan the lack of a 10x telephoto but first try to handhold a 5x telephoto. Not easy.
He cycled through the options by tapping them in the Camera app and very much liked what he saw. The old phone was strictly wide angle.
FORMATS
Before you even take a shot, though, you should ask yourself what format you want to save it in. And there are some new ones for Rip.
HEIC replaces JPEG on the new phone. Live Photo, via an option at the top of the screen, is a new option for Rip, too. As is Apple ProRaw.
Apple ProRaw has to be enabled in the System app's Camera settings. Once enabled you see a small Raw icon on top of the Camera app screen to activate it for any particular shot, much as he used to enable or disable the flash. System settings provides a few ProRaw options as well.
FILE TRANSFER
Rip used to cable his iPhone 6 Plus to his laptop to transfer images using Image Capture.
Using a USB cable connection, as Rip always has, still works and lets Rip select the images he wants to transfer in Image Capture, which is automatically launched by his Ingestor app.
But he can also use AirDrop now, although in that case, the selection is done on the phone.
AirDrop is an attractive option because old Rip doesn't have to fiddle with a USB-C cable connection to his M2 MacBook Pro. He just Shares via AirDrop, after enabling it on both devices.
He can see thumbnails of his images from the Share screen and tap them to select them for transfer, exactly as he does with Image Capture except on the phone.
The first time he hit AirDrop, he let out a whoop. The files transferred instantly to the M2.
But where were they?
He found them in the Downloads folder, which was the first place he looked. After all, where else would they have gone?
But he wanted them in the temp folder in his Pictures folder where all his ingested images go for processing.
This proved interesting.
AirDrop does not provide an option to target a different destination folder. But once again, the indispensable utility Keyboard Maestro came to the rescue.
INGESTOR UPDATED
His Ingestor software already watches for a memory card, a USB device (his cabled phone) or a keystroke, so he just added a Folder trigger to watch for new files in /Downloads.
But that launched a fresh copy of Ingestor for each file AirDrop dropped. So he added a semaphore lock to prevent more than one copy of Ingestor running at the same time.
At this point Ingestor had nothing to do in /temp but files in /Downloads. So he added some code to look for recent .heic and .jpg files in /Downloads (otherwise cancel the macro) and move what it finds to /temp. Piece of tiramisú.
From there Ingester knew what to do. So Rip could now use AirDrop to archive iPhone images.
CONCLUSION
Oh, no conclusion yet. Rip is still rubbing his beard trying to figure out how to squeeze the most out of his new camera.
But it is remarkable that a nine-year gap in devices was so quickly bridged, that the new technology so easily adopted and the wrinkles so easily ironed out that he is no longer dependent on the old phone for, well, anything.
Stay tuned.