January 8, 2012

iPhone WiFi Sync Drains Battery

The other day I picked up my iPhone 4S and when I pressed the home button the screen remained black. Pressing the sleep button didn’t do anything either. At first I thought the phone might be dead, but then I realized it had probably just turned itself off because the battery had run out. Indeed, it had. When I plugged it into a power source the screen came on displaying the empty battery image.

The weird thing about this was that I was pretty sure I had fully charged the iPhone the day before. I usually get about 2-3 days of light use out of my iPhone before I have to recharge it. I have all the radios (WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G) and Location Services turned on, so 2-3 days is pretty good I think. Since I wasn’t absolutely sure I had charged the phone, I just dismissed the whole issue. Then, the next day, the phone was dead again when I picked it up to use it.

This time I was positively sure I had fully charged the phone the day before. Alas, when I plugged it into a power source, it was obvious that the battery was empty and the phone had shut itself off again. This was strange. After getting 2-3 days of use/standby now I was all of the sudden getting less than a day?

I proceeded to fully charge the phone again and then closely watched the battery indicator after unplugging it. An hour later the battery had gone down from 100% to 93%. Yet another hour later the battery was at around 84% and so it continued. Something was eating power like crazy. At that rate the battery would have run out within 12-14 hours.

The phone’s usage stats were also very strange. They showed a usage time of about 50% of the overall time since the last full charge, but the phone had been entirely on standby except for the occasional battery check. Usage time should have been a couple of minutes at most, not hours.

I googled the issue and immediately found this monster thread at Apple Discussions. People were (and still are) reporting massive battery drain on their iPhones and no single solution seemed to have emerged that fixed the issue for everyone.

Many people in that thread seemed to be having battery issues since getting their iPhone, some were attributing it to faulty or incompatible SIM cards. Others suspected corrupted contacts, iCloud, 3G data usage, the Location Services Setting Time Zone setting and several other things to be the culprit, but there seemed to be no clear pattern or solid evidence. What was peculiar about my case was that the battery drain started all of the sudden, out of the blue. Had I changed anything in the last couple of days that might be causing this?

Indeed, I had. When I synced my iPhone the last time I had enabled WiFi syncing in iTunes, a feature introduced with iTunes 10 and iOS 5. I did it without thinking too much about it, it was more like: “Hey, that’s handy. I’ll activate that.”

WiFi sync automatically syncs your iPhone with iTunes only when it’s plugged into a power source. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work. When the phone isn’t plugged in you can also initiate a sync manually. The status bar of the iPhone shows a Sync icon when it’s syncing, but this wasn’t showing on my iPhone. So even though it wasn’t actually syncing, it was definitely doing something in the background that was causing the massive battery drain.

To be sure WiFI sync was the culprit, I disabled it again, charged the phone to 100% and then kept an eye on the battery indicator over the next couple of hours. Sure enough, things were back to normal. After about 16 hours of mostly standby the battery was still at 95% and usage stats were normal (16 minutes of use and 16 hours of standby).

While I’m glad I found the cause for the battery drain, I’m not quite sure what to think of the whole issue. I’m hoping there’s a bug in WiFi syncing that causes the phone to use so much power, but there’s also the possibility that this is normal behaviour because the iPhone needs to constantly poll iTunes to check for updates it should sync and all that WiFi activity is massively affecting battery life. If the latter were the case, that would make WiFi sync all but useless, at least for me. Less than a day of standby time from a phone that’s more or less idle is unacceptable. So I’m hoping iOS 5.1 will improve things in this regard. Once it’s out I’ll be reactivating WiFi sync and keeping a close eye on the battery indicator.

October 10, 2011

Apple haters, read this ◆

This article does a superb job of summarizing what I’ve been relentlessly telling people who spew forth the well-known boilerplate assessment that we Apple users belong to a cult that worships Steve Jobs and that we buy Apple products just because they’re so shiny and we like showing them off to those with inferior machinery, i.e. a PeeCee. Besides being offensive and judgmental, these notions are simply lazy and stupid, because those who utter them are just parroting this recurring theme without looking beyond this all too obvious and convenient stereotype.

My favorite quote is this one, which illustrates how Apple critics seem to be completely oblivious to their hypocrisy:

[Eric S.] Raymond also resorts to using the always-handy line of attack against Apple fans by calling them cultists, which is a weird thing to do when you’re the one who’s so insistent that the other guy should adopt your beliefs.

via Marco Arment

P.S.: Richard Stallman, despite his undeniable contributions to computing, is a dick.

October 6, 2011

RIP Steve Jobs

Never knew the man personally, never will. But my life and my work would be considerably less fun without Apple and its products which so unmistakably embody Steve’s vision of what computers should be like. For that, and for being an inspiration to anyone who wants to Think Different, thank you.

October 5, 2011

Whiners

So the new iPhone is called the 4S and not the iPhone 5 and people are whining because they didn’t get what they had been expecting or the various rumor sites had been suggesting. As far as I can see, the only thing “missing” from the 4S is a new case design. Apart from that, the new iPhone is full of great new features and I’m happy I waited.

Like many people I’m on a two-year iPhone schedule. I started out with the original iPhone and right now I’m on the 3GS. This is mainly due to the fact that I get my iPhones subsidized by T-Mobile (Germany) every two years and I didn’t really feel like paying over 700 Euros for an unsubsidized iPhone 4 while I’m perfectly happy to stick with T-Mobile anyway.

The added benefit of this schedule is that the technological jump from one phone to the next is pretty significant. The jump from the original iPhone to the 3GS was huge in terms of performance, and I expect the jump from the 3GS to the 4S to be even more significant, both in terms of performance and features. I’m especially looking forward to the much better camera, which will allow me to get rid of my Panasonic point-and-shoot. The 4S will also be my first iPhone with a Retina display.

So, if you’re disappointed that there will be no iPhone 5 this year, I suggest you study the 4S’s feature list closely and ask yourself if there’s really not a lot of cool new stuff there. I’d also suggest you reconsider if you really need to get a new iPhone every year. I for one can really recommend joining the “Every Other Year iPhone Club”.

Update: I forgot to add that the white iPhone 4 being released so late was a pretty good hint that there would be no new case design for the next iPhone model. It would have made – at best – limited sense to release the white iPhone 4 just a couple of months before introducing an iPhone 5 with a completely new case. Sure, the iPhone 4 including the white one would have still been sold alongside the new iPhone 5. But why invest so much effort into a device that will be just the “old iPhone” in a couple of months?

September 28, 2011

Voluntarily paying for TextMate 2 ◆

Marco Arment:

If the free-update offer still stands when TextMate 2 ships, I will not take you up on it. I’m buying TextMate 2 as a new customer at full price. And I bet many other developers will gladly do the same.

Yup.

September 26, 2011

TextMate 2 Alpha coming before Christmas 2011 ◆

Absolutely awesome news. I just might celebrate Christmas this year.

via Ben Brooks

September 23, 2011

Business Insider ◆

I always thought Business Insider had something fishy about it, now I know what it is. These are the kind of slimy tactics you have to resort to if your business model more or less consists of getting traffic to your site via search engines by publishing the same stuff everybody else is publishing and trying to monetize that traffic through advertizing.

via Ben Brooks

September 22, 2011

Single or Multiple Screens?

I’ve seen arguments both for and against using just one screen, and they all make sense in their respective contexts. Let me add my own take.

On my main machine, an early-2008 Mac Pro, I use two 30-inch Dell UltraSharp 3008WFP, the main screen directly in front of me and the second one off to the right at an angle. I use the main screen for all “active” tasks, such as a web browser, a spreadsheet, a document, an email I’m writing etc. and the secondary screen for “passive” tasks, like my email inbox, Twitter, iTunes etc. That way what I’m working on is always right in front of me, but I can easily catch a glimpse of other, non-essential stuff on the secondary screen if I want to (I know, distractions, focus and all; deal with it). But where the secondary screen really comes in handy is when I’m writing and, above all, for development.

More often than not, when I’m writing something, I want to refer to various sources of information without having to switch away from my editor. For example, while I’m writing this blog post directly in WordPress on my main screen, I have a Safari window with a couple of tabs open on the second screen where I can refer to the posts I linked to in the first paragraph of this post. I can even switch between the tabs in that window without switching focus away from the window I’m editing in by holding down the ⌘ key while clicking a tab. Bet you didn’t know that ;)

But where a second screen is nothing less than essential to me is when developing. If I’m developing a website, I use the secondary screen for the preview windows. With a tool like LiveReload I don’t even have to manually switch to the preview window to reload, it just happens automatically. Huge time saver. If I’m in Xcode, I use the secondary screen for referring to the documentation. Sure, I could switch back and forth between the main Xcode window and the documentation, but that gets old incredibly fast. And it adds friction to my workflow. Not much, but since I refer to the documentation probably hundreds of times a day (I’m just starting out developing in Xcode), it adds up over the course of a day.

And while we’re on the topic of Xcode: Sure, you can work in Xcode on an 11- or 13-inch screen, I’ve done it myself. But the benefits of a 30-inch screen at 2560×1600 pixels cannot be understated, especially with Xcode 4 where you can have two editors side-by-side (e.g. one with the header file and the other with the implementation file, or for comparing two versions of the same file), which is incredibly useful.

Bottom line: If and how much you’ll benefit from a second screen depends entirely on the type of work you do and your personal work style. For a lot of the stuff I do a second screen is indispensable. Frankly, I’m having a hard time coming up with scenarios where a second screen would not be useful some way or another. That said, two screens – especially two very large ones – do have some drawbacks: Twice the desk space, twice the power consumption, twice the heat emission, twice the cost. And yes, depending on how you use the second screen, it can be a distraction. But that’s not the screen’s fault. And while I’d like to get by on a single monitor, the second one is just too damn useful for the type of work I do. YMMV, of course.

September 15, 2011

Vintage 1956 Hagenuk W49 Rotary Dial Telephone

Hagenuk W49

So you think you’re hip because you have an iRetrofone or you’re using the iRetrophone app on your iPhone. OK, I’ll admit they’re both pretty cool and the dock probably looks quite elegant on your desk. But I prefer the real thing. Real bell, real rotary dial. I accept no substitutes.

As much as I love new technology, I’m also fascinated by vintage gadgets, especially if they’re still usable. That’s probably why I have way too many old Macs and PowerBooks lying around and why I decided to buy a vintage rotary phone and put it on my desk.

The phone is a Hagenuk W48 from 1956. Actually, it’s a W49, but the only difference is that the W49 can be re-configured to hang it on the wall while the W48 is only for desktop use. Otherwise both models are identical.

The crazy thing is that this 55 year-old phone still works like a charm. It’s in perfect condition, even the bell sounds crisp, clear and loud:

What’s even crazier, though, is that I’ve hooked this dinosaur up to my VDSL router and I can actually use it to make and receive calls via my ISDN phone line or via VoIP. All it takes is this little box that converts the impulse dialing signals from the phone’s rotary dial to touch-tone signals for my router. 1956, meet 2011.

It’s going to take a while for me to get used to the W49’s bell, and I doubt I’m going to actually be making that many calls with it. But for a vintage tech geek like me, I don’t have to actually use it to appreciate it. Just having it sit there is more than half the fun.

P.S.: If you’re in the US and looking for something similar to the W48, the most popular phone from that era is probably the Western Electric Model 500. Just hop on over to Ebay, there are always a couple of dozen or so being sold.

August 13, 2011

Quick tip for removing sticker residue

I was preparing a white MacBook for putting up on Ebay today and when I pulled off a sticker I had put on the cover (yeah, I’m that kind of person), it left some fairly sticky residue. I started figuring how I was going to get that residue off without doing any damage to the plastic of the MacBook. My first idea was to use some kind of thinner, which would probably have worked, but I wasn’t sure if it wouldn’t do damage to the cover’s plastic.

Fortunately, I came up with a better idea: a rubber eraser. It worked perfectly. The residue came off easily and the surface of the MacBook’s cover didn’t get a scratch. The eraser I used was of the very soft variety. I wouldn’t recommend trying any of the harder kinds. The softer, the better (both in terms of effectiveness and not scratching the plastic).

So, before you whip out the chemicals to remove sticker residue, try an eraser. I haven’t tried it, but I’d bet this method works on an aluminium MacBook just as well.

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