11 vs 950: Books

Apple offer a number of apps where Microsoft offers none. For example, Apple books is for reading books, oddly, which is more than a glorified PDF reader. On the 950 XL, you use Edge to read PDFs.

The are obvious advantage with the iPhone 11. First of all, the phone always remembers your position in a book. The 950 XL loses it if you close the app.

Secondly, the iPhone is, unsurprisingly, much to pleasant to use whilst reading, and much easier on the eyes.

Now, all I’ve really done so far on the iPhone is read the users’ manual, something that would have been nice to have on the 950 XL. I have not explored many other features of the books app, nor have I tested it with files in different formats. All the same, I have no hesitation in saying, here, the iPhone 11 is the winner.

UPDATE

The Books app has a dreadful bug. I loaded some books on my iPhone, put them in the App, looked at a couple. I returned to them a week later: they’d been deleted.

I actually wanted to check my camera’s manual, but found the Books app had deleted all my photography books from the iPhone. Fortunately for me, I was at home at the time, so could nip upstairs and check the info on my iMac. Macos doesn’t randomly delete information, unless instructed to do so by the iPhone’s abortion of a podcast app (deleted from my iPhone, but not, unfortunately, from the universe).

This is obviously completely unacceptable, and is another reason to keep my Windows Phone. That phone has never ever deleted non–cloud files spontaneously (there is, or was, a OneDrive bug that means it wrongly deletes downloaded files, but that has a workaround).

Unless I can find a work around for this dismal Books bug, I will have to remove it from my phone. Applications that delete data at random are utterly unacceptable.

I suspect this might be an iCloud issue. I allowed the iPhone to be backed up to iCloud. However, Apple soon started nagging me to spend more money on iCloud, which I have absolutely no intention of doing: their prices, like all cloud prices, are ridiculous.

I can understand why they presume I don’t have my stuff backed up, many people are idiots in this regard, so their nags to keep a full backup make some sense. But, actually, I already back up my stuff up: indeed, those books were copied from my own, reasonably priced, cloud.

Anyway, I didn’t want their backup, so I deleted it (from my iMac). I now wonder whether, iCloud, insulted, presumed that, because I’d deleted the unwanted backup, that meant I didn’t want the original data. That would be very silly of it, but perhaps the designer of the world’s shittiest app was involved in the design of this app too.

In consequence, incidentally, whatever the cause of the flawed behaviour by the books app, I reverse my original conclusion that the iPhone is better; clearly, because it doesn’t destroy valuable property, the Windows Phone is ahead. It has many flaws when it comes to books, but it doesn’t do a Fahrenheit 451 on them.

I’ve looked around online, and the Books app is famous for deleting data. It goes. FFS, what is wrong with the people at Apple? Have they not learned from their arrogance of the 1980s, the arrogance that almost killed the company? How dare the decide for me what I want to read? How dare they decide to prevent me reading things by deleting them at random. FFS.

I’m coming to the conclusion that buying this iPhone was a big mistake.