iPhone 6.

It was about 40 days ago that I stepped up to the Verizon Wireless kiosk at the mall, spoke with our trust Verizon person named Mike and ordered a Space Gray, 64GB iPhone 6. Since placing that order I have been nursing my aging iPhone 5 along, waiting for the day for the new iPhone to arrive.

Today was that day.

Verizon sent me a tracking number on Wednesday night, advising me that my iPhone 6 was in FedEx’s hands. Thanks to a wonderful little app called Deliveries, I knew the exact instant that my iPhone 6 arrived at the mall kiosk. When delivery was confirmed, I sent a text message to Mike who assured me that he was at the store. I raced down to the mall and picked up my new phone.

iPhone 6 and iPhone 5 side by side.

If I am to be honest, I can’t say that I have been delightfully thrilled with the Apple Experience lately. Work recently sanctioned the latest version of OS X, Yosemite, for our work MacBook Pros and this crippled my ability to use the built in Mail app with our Office365 mail server at work. Thankfully, Microsoft released Outlook 15 for Mac and it works great. iOS 8 has been a little buggy, especially on my iPhone 5. The thing about that is that I don’t know whether the actual iPhone 5 was starting to fail (I suspect that it is) or if iOS 8 was having some sort of fit, but whenever I left the house I would have to toggle airplane mode to make my iPhone 5 find the nearest Verizon tower.

I haven’t had to do this with the new phone. This looks promising.

While I have found that the excellence of the total Apple experience has come down a bit in quality, I still believe that they offer the premium computing experience overall, so I continue to keep my faith in Apple products. I’ve had several Android phones over the years and while the experience has improved drastically in the past year or two, I don’t find the Android experience to be as cohesive as I have come to expect on iOS. Yes, I think that some of what Apple does is kind of gimmicky but I believe the quality of their hardware is the best in the business and as I mentioned before, I think they offer the closest thing to “it just works” that we have right now.

I’m excited about my new iPhone 6 and I look forward to having a happy run together. I still proudly wear the Dude (Apple Dude) badge.