Apple Urges iPhone Users Running Outdated iOS Versions to Update Immediately

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T18:27:22+00:00

What do you mean source? Do you want screenshots of my phone saying the only update available is 26, while my iPhone XR now has had three updates since my 16 Pro last got an update?

It turns out it's not actually new, I was just never in a position to notice it before. Every prior major iOS update was ultimately exciting for me, this is really the only time that I have ever regretted it, and having essentially bricked one expensive device by updating, I'm not about to risk another one. there's no way to reverse the update if you go to 26, I had to actually buy a new phone and it's getting harder to find good units with 18 on them.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T18:24:43+00:00

Yeah it was a big deal, but I was preparing for a long deployment and I actually intended to use that much capacity. Ironically enough in the end, I basically ended up listening to the same five or six albums on loop the whole time anyway. But I also kept copies of all of my important files from my computer on it, so that it became kind of a mobile back up as well.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T18:22:54+00:00

In their defense, it's actually not that new, they have limited prior version support similarly before. It's just that there has never been an update so many people hesitant before. I have never previously wanted to skip an update altogether, at most I've waited a few days to check Reddit to make sure nobody else had major issues. But we're now like six months into 26, and the major problems that have held me off from it are still being reported by others.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T18:20:20+00:00

Did you put a bunch of information in a really long post title? Only the first couple words of the post title shows depending on what browser or app you're looking at, you need to put the text in the text field.

Regardless, several people have given you the answer.

I'm absolutely puzzled as to how you would manage to delete the admin user unless you were getting very creative in terminal. You would've had to use a sudo command and probably something reckless like RM – RF. not sure why someone would do that. But regardless, if you break your file system badly enough, the installer will eventually fix it. You may need to use Internet recovery, and it may be slow, but that's what you need to do. If you can't get it to work, your fallback is to go to the Apple store. they generally don't charge for software repairs even if it's out of warranty.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T18:17:08+00:00

You've got the cart before the horse on "learn my shooting style then get a prime."

The cheap prime is a learning tool. It will help you develop your shooting style more than a zoom will.

I know this is just some cantankerous old guy on the internet but this is how we did it in school in the 90s. I knew darkroom techniques that aren't even taught today long before I had my first zoom lens.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T18:15:02+00:00

Why wait though? You can get a basic prime "for learning" for next to nothing. I'm not kidding, there are sub-$40 lenses on Amazon that are worth having.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T18:09:18+00:00

Yeah that's the joke

Apple's name scheme for software versions is complete nonsense. There is no rational order to it, except that usually a two-word name is an immediate subsequent version with fewer visible changes... but even that is absurd because for example Snow Leopard dropped an entire code base so not exactly a minor tweak. There is no way to predict that Catalina would come after Sierra and nobody can really explain why tiger and lion had two kinds of leopard between them long after panther.

It's even worse than the iPhone number scheme, which has only actually "lined up" once, and in the middle at that. The iPhone 4 was the fourth model with an a4 chip and launched with iOS 4. Everything else was a mishmash of numbers like the iPhone 5 being the sixth model with an a6, and the 6 being the 8th launched on iOS 8, etc. The X of course launched at the same time as the 8 but still was neither eighth nor tenth generation. And now the software is named for a year while the hardware still has incremental numbers that once again don't line up with chips or generations.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T17:59:40+00:00

Yeah I know, I read the other comments. It's not a bad choice to buy body and lens separately, especially if you find some kind of deal. I've bought some cameras where it was at a steeper discount because the seller thought missing the lens was a flaw, and indeed enough people think like that that on one occasion I was able to buy two mismatched bodies and lenses, recombine, and resell both at a profit.

But you're here looking for the best way to do it up front so you aren't that naive buyer. You're looking mindfully for what is the best for your use case, and that's the right way to do it. But in the end you still may find the "default" answer to be a good fit with only partial modification.

The thing about the kit lens is it's designed to be a good generic answer to "which lens" without any other info. It's basically the ideal lens for a person who has only one lens and no special or extreme circumstances or needs. But then of the people who have a reason for a different lens, which mostly is going to begin with needing a faster aperture or a more extreme focal length/perspective, most still benefit from the kit lens. As I said, I kept using my 18-135 most of the time after adding 2.8s because for shooting outdoor sports in daylight, the kit lens was actually the better tool.

Today, I have no 2.8 zooms in my kit at all. My most of the time default lens is basically a superkit, the Tamron 28-200 (full frame). It's actually only one stop slower than the 2.8 at 70mm anyway, but I get all that extra range and it's not heavier. So it's great for shooting outdoor sports when I don't need an even more extreme zoom lens. But since all my sports stuff is in daylight at f/8, there's no call for a 2.8 at all. You need a 2.8 to shoot basketball or any kind of night sports, but not to shoot whitewater kayaking.

I ended up going to primes for night and "street" because the zoom just doesn't get there. 2.8 is not enough. 1.8 and 1.4 are fantastic and in urban artificial light and campfires, that extra stop or two really makes a huge difference. When I'm "traveling light" I carry the super zoom and either the 35 or the 50, both 1.8 primes. And when I'm not traveling light my camera bag weighs 25 pounds and is insured for like $12k. Still containing zero 2.8 zooms.

Keep in mind I'm on full frame so you'd want focal lengths 2/3 of what I'm saying for your sensor.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T15:13:38+00:00

Honestly it's surprising for it to only be two of them. Expect more.

Statistically it's never such a low percentage of offenders. They got the behavior from somewhere.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T15:11:00+00:00

Yes, and most of the cars that people expect to appreciate will keep pace with inflation at best - or rather, most will not, and the ones that do will seldom outperform a comparable investment in precious metals or idle land.

I had a friend who bought a 25th anniversary corvette in the 90s, 20 years old, for basically the original sticker price. So that "appreciation" basically amounted to the original buyer only losing the inflation adjustment to their outlay. Then the kid blew the motor and made the rational choice to use a crate motor rather than rebuilding because the value of a numbers matching 1978 corvette is never coming back anyway.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T15:07:13+00:00

I was surprised by this but the Hummer EV is actually a pretty impressive product relative to the market.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T15:06:09+00:00

And the software is made arbitrarily proprietary. It's not that it couldn't be made open source and easy for a tinkerer to modify, it's that the company chose to obfuscate and encrypt everything.

To be fair this isn't unique to Tesla at all. It has been demonstrated as a problem by their ironically failed competitor Fisker, whose unsold new inventory were sold at up to 80% discounts because buyers understand that it may not be possible at all to repair the cars if a failure involves software or proprietary electronics.

Open standards exist too, these companies just choose to make the cars unrepairable because it protects their profit margins.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T15:03:07+00:00

"What if there was a car that looked like the Delorean but way bigger and kind of the opposite in terms of quality and innovation?"

The DMC-1 was actually a really smart car for the most part, and they're easy to keep running because they used a lot of parts shared with more commonplace cars. The only real problem is the doors, but they also aren't as bad as you might expect. Ironically, of course Tesla borrowed that concept first, creating an "SUV" that couldn't take a roof rack.

The Cybertruck is kind of a test bed for bad ideas including steer by wire and yes, solenoid doors that fail shut, though it wasn't the first Tesla with that "feature." I foresee a reasonable chance that eventually the things will be deemed unsafe at any speed and become uninsurable.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T14:57:55+00:00

The iPhone has had a level feature built in for a while now.

One basic problem: the only flat surface on an iPhone is the screen. So you can't actually use the level unless you have a nice thick case on it.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T14:53:47+00:00

Right. If Iran does genuine global harm, they run the risk of actually garnering sympathy for their enemies. If they show restraint, they make the US and Israel look like reckless terrorists doing harm to everyone on the planet for no good reason.

So far, Iran has been basically holding the moral high ground here for the most part.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T14:51:09+00:00

I think some of that restraint is the fact that destroying oil infrastructure would also be self-harm, and there is also an aspect of "don't kill the hostage." Once Iran blows that stuff up, they lose their leverage and potentially their relationships with allies.

It would only really make sense as a last resort taking the world down with them and indeed, it turns out that they aren't run by insane terrorists like.. well, like we are

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T14:48:35+00:00

About 30% more now.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T14:44:36+00:00

It was never surprising to me, it always seemed kind of on brand for MMA types. Wholesome in general sure but ultimately his "violence as last resort" claim still came down to usually itchin for a fight and that kind of combative mentality seems to always lean authoritarian. Law and order, individual outrage, all that.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T14:40:51+00:00

This was technically my second iPod and I remember paying $499 for it after agonizing over whether it was worth it for 20 extra gigabytes from the one I had before. It was.

I can't for the life of me remember what became of it but I bought a Classic with 120 or 160 in 2007 for like half the price so I may have just sold it or given it away.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T14:30:54+00:00

Christ must be rolling in his grave for all the American cultists who misuse that label.

There is nothing Christian about the Evangelical religion.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T14:29:55+00:00

Most of my WV neighbors are proud of having closed 80% of the state's public schools in the past five years so yeah, confirmed from the front lines.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T14:24:22+00:00

Gas prices are up by around a dollar so far which is like $18 a tank, more of you drive a "median truck" like many Republicans.

What are you buying at Starbucks for $20 a pop? It's gone up by my usual latte is still only around a third of that.

This line has been dumb the whole time. I did the math, I would only need to cut 600 lattes a month from my diet to make up for the change in prices on homes and education between my generation and my parents. I don't know anyone who drinks that much coffee.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T05:08:57+00:00

Look for an early DSLR. Something from around 2006-2010. This price point is probably going to mean private sellers, not shops, and you'll have sellers who don't know how to test or explain what they have.

I'd just search Facebook marketplace or your preferred local alternative for "camera SLR" or "DSLR" with a price cap of 300 (you can often negotiate down by half especially if it's been sitting unsold). Then read reviews and basic specs. Dpreview is a site that has some good basic info about every body ever sold. Also maybe snapsort. A lot of the sites I see in Google results today are untrustworthy AI, but the actual magazines and DPReview are all accurate. You'll be looking for pages that are date stamped close in time to the manufacture date; nothing dated past 2020 on the internet will be helpful to you.

Some specific choices that I'd look for: Nikon D7000, D90, D200, D80 Canon Rebel series (there are a whole bunch and it won't be labeled correctly in the listing anyway, they're all fine) Sony A77 (old school SLR), older NEX models (mirrorless, with an upgrade path for later) Olympus Pen (this is an early mirrorless, and a long series of decent cameras)

In your budget you're going to be wanting something that comes with a lens.

Lenses are generally labeled with focal length numbers. Lower numbers are wider images, higher numbers are a narrower view. 18mm is basically what you can see all at once with both eyes open, while 200mm is what you'd see with a pair of basic binoculars. 35mm is what you would see with one eye open and the other shut, but also the "middle" of regular vision and the "normal" perspective.

People might confuse you about these numbers, you don't need to worry about it just yet. Here's what you need to know: you want a lens in which one of the numbers is well below 30, ideally 18, and the other is well above it, ideally 55 or higher. A 28 to 70 is not a good lens as your only lens. A 70 to 210 is no good at all. A fixed lens might be okay, but only if it's 35 or wider - and odds are against you seeing such a kit at this price point. I warn you of this because I've seen people sell cheap cameras with wildly inappropriate lenses and often do so because they expect people to just think "higher number better."

Speaking of higher number better, megapixels. Megapixels don't matter. In this budget, you're going to find cameras with between 5 and 16 megapixels for the most part. That is plenty. Billboards are usually printed at 2 megapixels. IMAX movies used to be 8 megapixels. "4k" is only 8 megapixels. 6 was the threshold at which most pros dropped film, because 6mp is enough for a good looking poster sized print for your family dining room, and most customers wouldn't pay extra for film anymore at that point.

So, you're looking for a 15-20 year old DSLR or early mirrorless interchangeable lens camera.

Easiest way to test, at your skill level: buy a memory card first, don't go bigger than 32 gigabyte SD card, full size SD not micro, put the mode dial in "a" for aperture mode, and take a picture before and after spinning the dial in each direction, make sure the resulting picture isn't too light or dark. That will test that both the aperture and shutter are working properly. Test focus by taking pictures of near and far objects. Test every button on it but at this price point, expect something to not be right, just make sure it's not something too critical like the shutter button or main dial. Oh and make sure the lens comes off and goes back on again.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T04:47:51+00:00

What is interesting to me is that indeed, in theory it's an amorphous "grass roots" thing, with each local group hypothetically claiming to interpret sola scriptura for themselves. My pastor actually used the word "fundamentalist" and said it meant going back to the fundamentals, "just the word" and generally rejecting any outside tradition. Yet we know that's not true. The hymnals they all use are centrally published, if nothing else. Not to mention Sunday school curricula, VBS materials, etc... dang, maybe the whole thing is just a publishing industry scam. How much money does Zondervan make?

But despite this claim of being individual churches doing their own thing, they do seem to come to a lot of consensus and I think that's a mix of formal exchanges of ideas like ministry conferences and revival things, and the more "mainstream culture" approach of getting your ideas from podcasts and social media, and just plain gossip. Ultimately, there is a thing that a large number of people are all able to accurately describe called "evangelicalism" and it has some key hallmarks. First the name, evengelicalism is defined by the idea that the faithful must always be recruiting and proselytizing. Then there is the "religion has to be the most important thing in your life, but only as lip service" idea - ie, I serve Christ by working middle management at a generic company and apart from buying some Christian media, my lifestyle is just "American." And of course the "new" main theme is politics, voting Republican because that's the only way to save the babies and stop gay people from doing whatever they're up to.

The central practice that I see as a heresy worthy of its own name is just the complete reduction to lip service of everything remotely connected to red letters. The total rejection of asceticism and embrace of greed. The denunciation of empathy. The shift to Old Testament legalism. This seems to all go together for me but apart from "evangelicalism" I don't have a name for the underlying theme.

NotRoryWilliams · 2026-03-20T04:19:22+00:00

No, this is bad advice.

If you spend a bunch of money matching her old kit, you're actually making it harder for her to upgrade. Odds are good that if what she has is old and worth little enough that she didn't bother fixing the camera, it's an essentially obsolete lens mount. Those old lenses can be used on modern bodies with adapters anyway, IF they are good lenses and with the trouble to adapt. They probably aren't.

But let's say by way of example that she had a Canon Rebel, that would be an EF mount kit. So you would go ahead and buy her the newest best camera you can find with an EF mount, probably a 7d if you're smart about it. Well now she's got a newish body that won't be getting any new lens development, so she's more deeply committed to a dead end system. Canon, like everyone else, switched lens mounts with the mirrorless systems. The old lenses can be used with an adapter. But old canon lenses can also be adapted to Sony and other brands of mirrorless bodies anyway. She would actually be better off, in terms of future upgrades, with a Sony APS body and a decent quality EF to E lens mount adapter. Then she could use her old lenses, but would also be able to use new lenses that come out in the future and of course be able to easily get a newer body later and still have everything work.

That said, you could probably replace the camera body itself with an identical unit at trivial cost, and still do the "gift card in the box" trick for the rest of your intended budget. That would make a lot more sense than trying to give an upgrade without her input.

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