Category Archives: Apple suckage

Updating iPhone while connected to Mac

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This info might be useful if you update your iPhone while it is connected to your Mac.

TL;DR: It’s 2023 an you’ll probably have to force quit/relaunch Finder on your Mac. My anecdotal experience is that, if the phone has updated and restarted, you should be OK relaunching Finder with the phone still attached.

I just updated my iPhone 14 Pro to IOS 17.0.3 from 16.7.1. I mostly did this so that I could use Progressive Web Apps, or “Save to Dock” as Apple calls this. It’s nice that Apple is enabling this 4 years or whatever after the world.

I decided to back up my phone to my Mac (2018 Intel Mini) before doing the OS change. I don’t have much on my phone, and I know I could back up to iClown or whatever, but I’m just funny that way.

Because it had been about a week since the last time I connected my phone to my Mac, I had to download an update in order to connect to the phone. I noticed that the phone started trying to sync before the update actually downloaded and installed, but I’m pretty used to Apple’s sloppy interface stuff, so I just glossed over it.

Seeing as the phone was already connected to the Mac, and the Mac is on a wired connection, I figured it would be faster to do the update from Finder while the phone was connected to the Mac.

So now we will jump ahead to the meat of the story: The update ran, the phone restarted a couple times, bugged me to set up FaceID, and Apple Pay, and asked if it could collect my user data in order to “improve” whatever. The phone is now saying that it is updated to 17.0.3 and seems to be running just fine.

Finder on the Mac however, was still saying that the phone is running IOS 16.7.1, that “Your Mac is preparing to update the software on this iPhone,”” the status at the bottom is showing a stuck barber pole and says “Updating iPhone firmware.” And all Finder windows were beachballing and unresponsive.

I had no better choice than to force quit/relaunch Finder and see what happened. The iPhone was still connected, but given how many times you have to tell the thing to trust the Mac before you can do anything normally, I assumed that after restarting Finder, the two devices would be pretty much unaware of each other.

..aaaand Finder came back up. When I click on the iPhone, Finder now shows it with the proper IOS version showing, and immediately started the sync process.

So there you are: Finder still sucks, but sometimes you can still fix it.

Not my actual notes

IOS Notes are blank

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On my iPad or iPhone, I will often switch to the Notes app and find that my existing notes all appear to be blank. I can see the list of notes on the left pane of the Notes app, but the right pane, where the text is supposed to appear, is blank.

This is a great excuse to freak out, so I will put my solution right here, in case you came here all freaked out.

The short solution that works for me

If there is a “Done” button at the top of your open note, tap that. Then force close the Notes App, then re-open it.

So far, this has always worked. When I re-open Notes, all my notes are there, the text is visible, and everything behaves as it should.

It looks like this is yet another problem in how stuff is displayed on the screen in IOS, and doesn’t affect the actual content of the notes themselves. In other words, it seems that this problem just prevents you from seeing the text, but the text is all there, and is saved whether you can see it or not.

I’ve looked for solutions/ways to prevent this from happening, and there just doesn’t seem to be any other advice that works better than closing and opening the app. Yup, I just said that about an app that does basic editing of text files in 2022.

There may be more than one cause for this, (apart from “Apple does not feel like fixing it yet”), which means that this solution might not work for you, and other solutions might.

I think this has only happened to me after the device has gone to sleep, but I am not absolutely sure of that. I’m not going to test it, because it doesn’t matter–“Never let your device sleep” is about as dumb a solution as buying your mom a new phone so her texts are a particular color.

Here are the two most plausible theories I found about this, which may or may not work for you.

It might be related to dark/light screen modes.

Turning off the “Automatic” setting under “Display and Brightness” –> “Appearance” might stop this from happening.

I had this problem even with “automatic” turned off, but it looks like this may have worked for some people. Doesn’t hurt to try it.

It might be because you are saving notes somewhere other than on the device or iCloud.

I keep a lot of my stuff–including notes–on a server I own, in a domain I own. Unfortunately, like a lot of stuff, Notes just might not be compatible with the Internet.

If you are the same kind of wild renegade who does things outside of iCloud, you could try copy/pasting all your stuff into notes you store in iCloud and see if that fixes this problem.

And then pour one out for the Internet we’ll never have.

Notes is probably the most useful app in the entire Apple universe. It’s the Apple application I use most, in no small part because its basic functionality allows me to work around problems that other applications create. I dream of a future in which Apple manages to solve the hard problem of transferring plain text files between devices using existing technology without screwing something up.