Okay, so this morning I have to traipse — again — to the far west side, to the Apple store at Arrowhead Mall, there to take a course in how to use the iPhone. My son gave me this thing months ago but, being no fool, refuses to try to teach me to use it. So it has set, brickish, on my desk for month after expensive month.
Yes. I do have service for it.
No. I do not know how to use that service.
Nor, entre nous, to I especially want know. Ohhhh goodie! Another intrusive device that effing solicitors can use to interrupt what little peace and quiet we have left.
But it’s now clear you can NOT do without a cell phone of some kind. And since I already have Apple computers, I guess it behooves me to use Apple’s phones.
Not that I’m likely to continue using MacComputers much longer. The fact that you can’t get adequate service for these devices from Apple tends to discourage….especially when Best Buy will send a guy out to your house tout suite if you have an expensive contract with them. Especially when getting service from Apple entails driving halfway to San Diego or halfway to Payson, trying to explain to explain what’s wrong without the salesman/tech dude/whateverheis being able to see what’s happening or being able to ensure that it’s not a connectivity issue, leaving the device there for days, then having to schlep across the city to retrieve it, schlep back across the city to get it home, and then try to reconnect it to power and modem and godknowswhat, all by your untechie little self.
The Best Buy techs do know how to fiddle with Apple products, it’s true. But PCs present a number of advantages, not the least of which is that MS Word on a PC does a far, far more professional job of word processing.
Apple’s Pages word processor…ugh! What a piece of junk. The damn thing double-spaces between paragraphs, forgodsake. Well, actually, it spaces-and-a-half between grafs.
No. You cannot submit that to a scholarly journal.
No. You cannot format a manuscript for a typesetter with any such stupid gaffe in it.
I haven’t even tried to use their spreadsheet software. Why, when Excel does the job just fine?
The prospect of trudging across the city again this morning does NOT appeal. It’s a 45-minute drive out to Arrowhead Mall. Admittedly, Arrowhead has its appeals — it’s a very nice mall. But…but…I should drive 45 minutes through lunatic traffic for window-shopping?
Well, it’s almost 9:40. Better wrap this up and start driving…driving…driving…
If you do switch to PC – I would highly recommend downloading a tool called “keepass” – it’s a lovely little utility that lets you store records for every account/password you need to keep track of, including room to put in your “secret questions” (and their answers) – in a secure encrypted file that you then open using ONE password (the only one you need to remember!)
So then, when you go to log into a site that wants a username/password – you open up the keepass utility, find that site in your well-organized database, click on the entry and it shows you the username – you can then CTRL-C to copy the password – click into the box on the website and CTRL-V to paste it in – making it irrelevant how complicated and annoying the password might be to have to type!
You can back up the one database file – it can be stored on a usb stick or “in the cloud” – it integrates with things like dropbox – if that is something you want (but not necessary).
I have been very happy with it – I have not used it on Mac – but some enterprising people have taken the challenge to make it work, it looks like.
https://macpassapp.org/
But otherwise, it works on PC and Android devices very well.
https://keepass.info/
I’m smiling. My kids gave me my first computer when I was about 62. I’m now 87 and have slowly, inch by painful inch, managed to come to terms with it. I’m fortunate in that I have very computer savvy grandchildren who enjoy helping me. My smart phone is another problem entirely. My dil gave it to me a year ago and everybody believes I can figure it out on my own. Well…..not easily.
So my suggestion to you is to cultivate patience, perseverance and practice. Good luck!!
Yeah…I think we have several forces at work… Quite understandably, young people don’t want to spend their time teaching someone to learn systems they grew up with that and that they assume everyone just naturally knows.
Then there’s the fact that at some point it occurs to you to wonder WHY you need this stuff. Really???
And another fact: no, you can’t figure it out on your own…easily or not. When I learned what computer-savvy I have managed to accumulate, it was in the company of friends and coworkers who were learning it at the same time. This means that yeah, you probably figured some of it out yourself…but AFTER you had learned HOW to figure it out yourself. The new stuff is not the same as the stuff that was new when we were pups. It’s different enough that you’re not bloody likely to figure it out by guess and by God.
We’re doomed.
Just learned that YouTube has a variety of detailed and understandable instructions on how to use the iPhone! Just go to YouTube and enter “how to use iPhone [your version] in the search bar!