Why everyone with an iPhone should see Top Gun : Maverick
I had a surprise call last week from an old acquaintance. I’ll call her Julie. We hadn’t heard from her in a few years. She was probably the last person I’d have expected to pop up on my iPhone.
Turns out Julie was in a real bind because her iPhone had locked up and swallowed four months of photos.
And not just any photos, mind you; her cousin’s wedding.
Having exhausted her other resources with no success, she had reached out to me.
I always cringe when I get a call from someone who’s lost any photos, much less important ones. Sometimes it’s not so bad, but other times it’s just plain tragic. I feel for every one of them, and I offered up all the long shot options I could think of to help her out. But unless she was very lucky, I knew those pictures weren’t coming back.
She had stumbled into Coffin Corner and the outlook was grim.
If you are one of the two dozen people left who haven’t seen Top Gun : Maverick, then just flag this email and come back after you have. For everyone else, the movie teaches a wonderful lesson about how not to use an iPhone.
In the movie, Tom Cruise is charged with flying a near-impossible mission that ends up with the pilots having to manage a full speed climb up a cliff wall, endure 9 G’s of acceleration with the chance of blacking out. And they have to avoid heavy missile defenses and enemy jet fire to escape.
Coffin Corner.
What’s the message here? Well it’s all about circumstances. What you’ve got to do, what you’ve got to work with and what you do with it to lessen the odds of failure.
Here’s what Coffin Corner looks like on the iPhone:
1. No active backup to iCloud or anywhere else
2. Little or no space left on the iPhone
3. Out of date Operating System
I see one out of three all the time, but all together it’s a problem waiting to happen.
So, in this story, Julie had run through her 200GB storage on iCloud and didn’t want to pay for the next level of storage. Her photos stopped syncing to iCloud about four months ago. She kept taking photos because there was still room on her iPhone even though it couldn’t back them up to iCloud Photos Library.
But eventually, Julie’s iPhone got full too - with the wedding - so she decided to back up her photos manually to her Mac. But the thing was that it wouldn’t export or back up correctly without a software update. When she finally tried to do that, there wasn’t enough space to do the update and the whole iPhone locked up.
At that point she upgraded her iCloud account to the next storage tier, but it didn’t matter because of the disabled iPhone.
So don’t get stuck in Coffin Corner on your iPhone.
Whatever storage size (128GB, 256GB, 512GB, etc.) iPhone you think you need, go one size bigger.
When you run out of space on iCloud, upgrade to the next tier. You can always downgrade if you get rid of some files.
And do the software upgrades when prompted. It is the best way to keep everything working smoothly.
We're not saving the world here. But we're saving memories.