One more thing

Gary Marshall gets his iOS go-faster stripes out

I’ve been abroad, driving a hire car. The difference between it – a factory fresh Gallic hatchback – and my own car – a knackered and ancient Swedish estate – is dramatic. But while the newer car is much more powerful, it’s not the horsepower that you notice when you drive it. It’s the refinement, the countless little improvements that make the new car feel so different from my old one. Where my car rattles, the new car purrs. Where mine clunks, the new one thunks. Where my car sounds like a washing machine full of spanners, the new one has manners.

It’s the same with iOS, and with OS X. On the same trip I helped a few friends with phone settings, and those friends were using older iPhones running older versions of iOS. Their devices did the same job as my one, but my one did it more efficiently and with less effort. Even something as simple as turning HDR on and off in the camera app was that little bit more annoying on the older OS.

I notice it at home, too. My MacBook Pro isn’t modern enough for the Mavericks that’s on my iMac, and my ancient iBook is running a version of OS X that’s older than my kids. The machines are generations apart in horsepower terms, but what you really notice when you move between them is the lack of features you’ve come to rely upon.

In many cases, they’re features you didn’t know you wanted. Who looked at the HDR toggle in iOS and cursed it for demanding two taps when one would do? Who thought they’d be sitting, quietly furious, because a website wanted card details and the machine didn’t have iCloud Keychain?

But you get used to it, and annoyed if it isn’t there. When I got home and into my own car I was annoyed that the wing mirrors didn’t unfold to welcome me; that I didn’t have a fancy Start button; and that I didn’t appear to have any brakes. My car was doing exactly the same job as the hire one – going from A to B, albeit at legal speeds and with much less disregard for the long-term life of the gearbox – but it felt heavy and sluggish, old and unrefined. To lift a line from Elbow, it felt like a horse that’s “good for glue and nothing else”.

That’s how I feel about older iOS, OS X and app versions now, too. They perform the same basic tasks and comparing the feature lists doesn’t uncover any show-stopping differences, but between the old and the new there are hundreds, maybe thousands of little changes that collectively amount to a very big deal. The old ones still do the job, but the new ones do it so much better.