The reality is that while a smartphone is almost a necessity for most people these days, a five-year-old iPhone would probably suit your needs (provided the battery still holds up). But we want the latest games and gadgets, necessitating the purchase of a new phone. And boy are we proud to show-off the new phone to everyone we know.

For me, it was software. There was a time when I wanted the latest and greatest piece of software… even when I had a suitable app that did the same thing already, it just wasn’t “new.”

At some point, everyone comes to the realization that they DON’T actually need nice new things, and can make-due with what they have. Once I realized that, and stopped caring about showing off the latest dingus I purchased to everyone, I had a lot more money in my pocket and found more satisfaction in other aspects of life.

This is an awesome collection of 30 ringtones and 6 alarms created by composer and sound designer, Ilija Cvekovski.

The upside when this sort of thing happens is that I’m forced to clean out and delete a bunch of things that I know I’ll never want or need. But in this case, it still wasn’t enough. I still needed another 8GB of space. Then I remembered the article.

Turns out, I had 24GB of iOS apps backed up in iTunes that macOS, iOS or myself will never use. 24GB! I almost didn’t believe it. Needless to say, I dumped that folder like a bad habit.

If you don’t want to read the article, allow me to summarize:

1. Navigate to ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Mobile Applications
2. Delete everything in that folder (those are all backup files of your iOS apps that you can never actually use)
3. There is no step 3

Being paranoid I made a backup before deleting the folder, just in case things went south the next time I synced my iPhone with iTunes (which I don’t do very often). The next sync with iTunes went just fine, and that folder backup has since been deleted.

The more apps you have ever installed on your iPhone or iPad, the larger that folder is likely to be.

The following are just a few of my thoughts on the major touch points of the presentation:

Super Mario coming to the app store

I thought it was great that they started the show with such big news, and make no mistake about it, this was very big news. Having Shigeru Miyamoto translated live on stage was awkward and distracting, but it was a quick enough segment that I got over it fast.

I’m not a huge fan of Mario Bros., but I’ve always enjoyed playing a game or two, and I’m happy to see that Nintendo isn’t going to nickel and dime us to death with in-app purchases. I’m probably going to waste hours of my life playing Super Mario Run. The only thing that concerned me immediately was the “we’ll release pricing later” comment at the end. To me that means $30 minimum.

iWork update

Wow. I was happy to see the word iWork appear on the screen, I honestly thought the iWork apps had been quietly sunsetted by Apple. Unfortunately, the screen was the hero of this segment. Apple’s Susan Prescott looked unprepared and uncomfortable in front of the crowd. The entire segment looked thrown together at the last minute. Realtime collaboration in Pages, Keynote and Numbers is a big deal, but only if you can get people to use the apps. Apple showed us nothing new that would get people to do that. So much is still missing from the previous version of Pages, I can’t believe they haven’t done anything with it. Still, I look forward to any update to iWork apps. Who knows, maybe there are more changes and Apple just didn’t want to spend too much time on it.

Apple Watch

Blah, blah, blah. GPS has been integrated. Blah, blah, blah. Faster processor & brighter screen. Blah, blah. watchOS 3 is going to be cool, but we’ve seen this all before. Waterproofing is a big deal, particularly for swimmers, and runners. The new Ceramic Apple Watch looks beautiful, and the price makes it a little more attainable for a much larger audience than the previous Edition model. What I didn’t see or hear was any mention of battery life improvements, or the dramatically reduced selection of bands for each watch that you can get “in the box” when you first buy the Apple Watch.

iPhone 7

Phil looked uncharacteristically clumsy, uninspired and nervous in portions of an otherwise cool presentation. Apple really pushed the “new design” of iPhone 7, which is to say that they’re very proud of the solid black matte and glossy finish. The Jet Black color looks pretty on screen, but that thing is going to be one ugly, scratched up mess in real-world use—Apple states as much on their iPhone sales page.

I’m going with the Black model when I upgrade. I like the solid black matte finish, and the fact that the antenna lines seem to completely disappear with it. Speaking of that, why can’t Apple make the antenna material match the gold and rose gold colors more closely?

The haptic feedback Home button is great news—it’s just one less thing to fail. The camera on the iPhone 7 Plus is going to be awesome, of course. Apple said that a free update that adds some sort of depth of field feature will be made available later. I’m not sure why it couldn’t be available when the phone ships. Again, it seems Apple was unprepared. Still, an exciting camera update. Better speed and battery life are always welcome, and so are the stereo speakers.

“One word: Courage”

Can we talk about the Barbie doll hairdryers Apple is selling for $160? I completely understand why Apple dropped the headphone jack from the phone. Quite frankly, I haven’t plugged headphones in my iPhone in nearly 3 years. I use Bluetooth in my car, and have a pair of Bose wireless over-the-ear headphones that I like quite a bit. I applaud Apple for sparing us the $30 fee for a Lightning-to-HeadphoneJack dongle and just placing it in the box for us—though it kind of screams “we’re not very courageous!”

The biggest issue with this whole headphone-jack-gate thing is the weak-assed effort Apple is selling for $160, known as AirPods. I had six immediate thoughts about them as soon as I saw them:

1. They’re stupid looking—like something a Barbie Doll would use in a hair salon.
2. They look uncomfortable as all hell, much like the current wired ones.
3. They’re going to fall out of your ears on your first run and slip quickly into a street drain never to be seen again.
4. Before they fall out of your ears while running or working out, you’re going to lose one or both of the AirPods, or the included charging box (what kind of cable is used for that?).
5. Five. Well that’s a great number and all, but I generally want my headphones to work at least as long as my frigging phone. 5-hour battery life? Are you serious? Why bother…
6. They’re stupid looking.

Bluetooth isn’t perfect, so I totally see why Apple would want to work around it by coming up with their own system for wirelessly connecting devices. This will likely go beyond just headphones. Think Apple Car. Anyway, if the Beats headphones can use the W1 chip and get battery life 3 to 4 times as long, why can’t the AirPods? 5 hours. Pffffftt!

Overall

Overall it was a pretty good event, in my opinion. Some cool products put on display, and the show itself didn’t feel like it was drawn-out too long. I noticed Apple was consciously putting women front and center in the presentation. It almost seemed forced, but in the end it’s a good thing.

The entire presentation could have used a bit more polish, and a lot more WOW factor. But I suspect the fact that rumor sites leaked almost everything weeks, if not months, in a advance kind of put a damper on the whole thing.

When Apple pushes an update to iOS, you have two miserable choices.

Miserable choice #1:
You can render your phone completely useless for as long as it takes to download the OTA (over the air) update, unpack/prepare, install and restart your iPhone. The annoyance is compounded by the fact that you must keep the phone from “sleeping” while the update downloads, otherwise it just stalls. So you basically have to sit there like a jackass flicking the screen every minute or so to keep it active. Unless you have a death-wish, you definitely don’t want to do this while driving.

Miserable choice #2:
You can render your entire home network useless for hours by downloading an enormous iOS installer. It’s like downloading the entire OS just to get the updated components. Everyone in the house will hate you, because your Internet service slows to a crawl while you download what appears to be something the size of the entire Amazon video library just so your Apple Music app gets improved playlists, old photographs stop showing up in Photos app as new every time you connect your iPhone to your Mac, and your Email app works the way it should have to begin with.

…And as is always the case…
I decided to update to iOS 9.2 this morning. At 4am, to be exact. Nobody in my neighborhood is awake, so there is no internet traffic from other users in the local pipe. I made sure no other downloads of any kind were occurring. I decided to ‘download only’ the iOS update via iTunes on my Mac. The 2GB file download offers me the wonderful news that it might be finished downloading by the time I get home from work tonight. That doesn’t include actual install time.

So I decide to go the ‘quick’ route by doing the OTA download. A much smaller file, my iPhone claimed it only need ‘about 15 minutes’ to update. So after 40 minutes of downloading, another 15 or so minutes of updating, and 5 or so minutes of excruciatingly slow restarting, my phone is finally ready to use again.

In contrast, I downloaded and installed the entire Mac operating system from scratch in less time than it takes to do a run-of-the-mill iOS update. And I didn’t have to sit there and babysit the download—–as the Mac is smart enough to not fall asleep while downloading/installing.

Seriously, Apple. FIX THIS SHIT!

The Swiss know watches. And Golden Dreams knows how to make the Apple Watch Edition better looking than Apple does. Open the full size image above in a new window to get a closer look at the beauty! And did I mention it costs less, too?

You can order the 42mm Apple Watch (pictured above) in 24ct yellow gold, beautifully hand-engraved in Geneva, with a lucious black alligator (ostrich, shark, and a few other choice skins are also available) band for the cool price of around $9,900 U.S. That’s around a $6,000 savings off a comparable model bought directly for Apple—except you can’t get hand engraved designs or 24ct gold directly from Apple.

If all you want is a nice alligator skin band, you can save a few bucks and only pay around $700 U.S. Blue ostrich skin is even less.

Don’t even get me started on what Golden Dreams can do with an iPhone… They don’t list a price for the “Masterpiece” collections, so I can only assume it’s out of my spare-change-range.

And since you surely would want to carry one of these iPhone’s in a case, you can grab a Python skin case for a mere $800-ish.

Animated GIFs for your Mac, the web and your iPhone. Personally, I can’t live without GIPHY!

When you don’t have time to finish typing an email on your iPhone, you can hit the Cancel button and save the email as a Draft to finish it later. What’s not obvious is where to actually find the email Draft once the window closes.

Your email Drafts are hidden under the Compose icon at the bottom right of the iPhone screen. Simply tap and hold the Compose icon to bring up a list of your email drafts, then tap on the one you want to continue typing.

Google recently announced their next Android operating system, 5.0 Lollipop. The most visual change is the interface, which they refer to as Material Design. While I can’t think of anything good to say about the OS, I can say that these Material Design wallpapers shared by Brian Parkerson on Google+ are gorgeous. All will look great on an iPhone, and many look pretty damn good on my 15″ Retina MacBook Pro

If you like what you see but don’t want to be bothered to download them individually, you can grab all of them in a single 60+MB ZIP file from here.