Apple makes some really awesome products, and I use a lot of them every day, but hands down the most valuable gizmo that Apple makes that I use every day is running iOS. iOS used to be called iPhone OS back in 2009 before iOS 4, when it was just the iPhones and iPod touches that ran Apple’s touch screen mobile device operating system.
An iPod touch was my first real Apple product. It gave me a ton of flexibility and freedom at an affordable cost that didn’t require me to sign a contract with a cellular company. I still have that iPod touch and it’s still cranking along to this day. One of the things I’m most impressed about with Apple is the major software updates we get every year. When I purchased the device I got everything I was hoping for and more, but there were some shortcomings. If I wanted to switch from one app to another, I had to press the home button, return to the home screen, find the icon for the app I wanted to switch to, tap on that icon to launch the app, wait for the app to load, and navigate back to where I needed to be within that app. If I wanted to switch back to the last app, wash-rinse-repeat. When I was doing that regularly it would become tedious. There were some other things I couldn’t do in the old iPhone OS 3 of 2009. Skype was one of my favorite apps because it allowed me to call friends on the telephone, not tie up the home landline, talk for hours on the cheap, and not use any of my expensive pay-as-you-go mobile minutes. If I was talking on Skype though, I couldn’t do anything else on my iPod touch or the call would disconnect. If I was waiting for a call, the app needed to be open and I couldn’t be doing anything else on the device. If I wanted to listen to music through Pandora, I couldn’t do anything else; leaving the app would stop the music. I could listen to music through Apple’s music app (called the iPod app, complete with a picture of the iPod classic in the app icon) while doing other things, but that required me to sync the music through iTunes. For some of us that just feels like a bit of a process.
Apple announced iOS 4, changing the name from iPhone OS, to be more inline with the range of devices it would be running on: the iPhone, iPod touch, and the new (this was back in 2010) iPad. There were many features, and to date, what a lot of enthusiasts regard as some of the most significant hardware updates. What I remember with no difficulty is the announcement of the iPad, where the biggest frustration of the iPhone and iPod touch, (as well as their biggest asset) of their size was addressed. With a much larger device, expanding the user interface from a 3.5” screen to a 9.7” screen, a more comfortable user experience resulted. I could spend hours in an app before feeling claustrophobic and limited by the size of the screen. The retina display on the iPhone was a huge deal. The clarity was beyond anything else available in a digital handheld device. FaceTime was also announced (Apple’s video chat). That reminds me how far into the future I live. All this was great, but the biggest thing missing was multi tasking. Those frustrations I described above where I had to leave an app, go back to the home screen, were going to be far behind me. All I had to do was double tap the home button and the screen would slide up to reveal a drawer with all the recently opened apps in there. I could tap any one of them and be sent to that app, generally right back to where I was. I could leave Skype running in the background if I was on a call and still play around with other apps, like checking facts or movie show times in Safari, or taking a note in the notes app. I could have pandora playing in the background while I poked around on Facebook, or any other app that I might want to use. It was a big deal. It was like Christmas. I can’t even remember anything I got in the 2010 holiday season, but I remember iOS 4 and multitasking.
Every year there’s been huge updates that have made me even more impressed with these devices Apple makes. This has been a brief walk down memory lane for me and I have so much more to say, but we’ll continue on all that later.