The iPhone crashes. A lot.

Calls drop all the time. Safari, the Apple web browser, crashes continually. Woe on you if you navigate a partially-loaded page (fed up with the abysmally slow AT&T network). The mail app creaks when opening, often leaving you with a blank white unresponsive screen. The SMS program occasionally refuses to open.

Owning an iPhone—even the second-generation iPhone—is much like fighting through Internet Explorer 5 or Netscape 3.0 on Windows ’95. When it works, you get a clear sense that this is the new way of doing things. Through the grime of incompetent implementation can be seen glances of what could, and likely will, be.

But holy shit, man. For the first time in a decade, I have to periodically shutdown and reboot a computing device in order to keep it working. What?! This is the era of protected memory spaces, of preemptive multitasking, of garbage collecting programming languages. The rats nest of memory leaks, of shuddering freezes and race conditions underlying the gloss, is totally inexcusable. How come nobody talks about this?

Apple justifies their aggressive control of their products—refusing to allow third party hardware manufacturers, third-party web, mail or SMS apps on the iPhone—by claiming this control makes sure things “just work.” Apple, things aren’t just working.

I can’t say I regret my purchase. The iPhone—and particularly Safari—have changed how I interact with the Internet and organize myself. That browser is incredible. But I’d suggest people take a long and hard look at Google’s android platform-based phones. Not everyone enjoys reliving the Windows 95 era.

Good thing I didn’t try posting this from my iPhone—gotta go reboot the thing again.

Jonathan Golob is an actual doctor.

53 replies on “iPhone 95”

  1. safari crashes all the damn time, especially if i’m listening to music at the same time. there are some websites, seekingalpha.com for example, that it just CHOKES the fuck on and dies almost every time.

    programs that worked yesterday will often not work today. sometimes i notice there’s an update for the program in the app store, which fixes it, but i should NOT have to update a program if I haven’t updated anything else.

    Camera can often start up quickly, but often takes 15-30 seconds before that shutter opens. by that point, my kid has usually stopped doing whatever cute thing he was doing and is back to being two and a half.

    i love the damn thing. but jesus christ, my sinclair zx80 had better uptime and reliability.

  2. My Windows Mobile phone has only locked up about 3 times ever. Admittedly the interface isn’t as slick, but it can do everything an iPhone can and much more. Plus it’s not subject to Apple’s Orwellian restrictions.

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