I relented and upgraded my iPhone because 1) I was able to so figured why not, and 2) because the GPS in the X is absolutely horrid. I drive and travel a fair bit, so having a GPS that was constantly off signal, re-routing me, and not actually keeping up with me was proving to be downright dangerous. T-mobile was great - ordered the phone 2 days ago and got it this afternoon before the weekend. That's where the convenience stopped quickly.

Setting up this iphone has been one of the most irritating and aggravating experiences I've ever had with a phone. iTunes had to be updated first, after which only then could I back up my current iphone (that required an uninstallation of the old version, re-installation, and restarting the computer). Then once that update was complete, I had to update my new iphone because it didn't have the right version if iOS, which requires me to set it up as a new phone. Once that update was done, I had to go back into itunes and run the restore which requires yet another download to the iphone before my data can be restored. Also, the number of times I've had to enter my password....

When I bought the first Google Pixel 2 years ago, all I had to do was log in to my gmail account, and plug one wire in from my iphone into the pixel and let it start the data transfer. No computers, no updates, just login and plug in.

This apple experience has been less than magical. What happened to "It should just work"?

I'm not trying to troll. I'm legitimately wondering why this type of set up needs to happen the way it does. Why hasn't apple moved entirely to cloud based set up? I'm not paying for iCloud service when all of my information, contacts, and mail are through Google. Given the costs of these phones, and the amount of cash apple has on hand, devoting some resources to making cloud backups free and more than 5GB would be nice. This is the most ass backwards way of setting up a new phone I've ever experienced.

And it only took 12 versions of iOS to make grouping notifications together by app a reality, so huzzah I guess.