I wish I could have a simple iPhone again

I still call on Siri quite a bit for easy stuff, many times per day at least, despite many problems, annoyances, and amusing and/or maddening misinterpretations. I usually invoke her with the “Hey Siri” feature, which has always worked amazingly well. But she stopped listening to me yesterday, which persisted through a reboot and toggling the feature on and off. I then started flipping switches on other system features, and Siri started working again … after toggling Low Power Mode on and off. 🙄 Huh?

This kind of flaky bullshit seems routine with iOS now, which is particularly irritating considering how robust it used to be. Windows and macOS have always been like this, of course, but the early iPhones were so freakishly reliable that it was hard to remember that they were little computers, albeit simple ones. They definitely seem more like (flaky) computers now! After several years of adding features that I mostly don’t need, my iPhone now does something funky about 3 times per day, and more serious problems come along a couple times a month.

I’m sure all the new iOS features are lovely for those people who use their phone as their primary computer, but more and more I wish I could give a bunch of them up and just have a simpler, more robust iPhone again.