Oh No!

My wife & I finally decided to get new iPhones. We had iPhone 7s, 256 GB memory, maybe 5-6 years old. We both got new iPhone 14 Pros, me the smaller one with 1 TB memory, her the bigger one. I decided the better camera might help me take better pictures of birds.

They give us $40 each for the old phones, xfer our data to the new phones, and wipe our old phones. I like the new phone.

Next day, I'm going through and notice the Recorder app I have used for the life of the old phone is showing the "needs an update" flag by its icon - but, it is gone from the Apple Store! That app predates Apple adding the Voice Memo app, which addition probably meant it was going to go away someday. So not only did we get new hardware, we got new software, and that app was no longer supported.

For at least the life of my old phone, I had used that app to record snatches of melody or lyrics that would come to me randomly, with the idea that someday they might become the seed of a song. There were over 100 of them. I have lately been thinking that, since I am really not good at songwriting - I've written ~10 songs & none of them are very good - I would pass these on to someone else, maybe my nephew Logan who seems to have some songwriting talent.

Well, that is a moot point now. I looked at app storage usage & saw 300 MB for the Recorder app, got flustered, and deleted the reference to the app. It was now completely gone from the new phone. I don't think that really mattered, I think by that point I was already screwed.

Over the course of this discovery, I probably said "Fuck!" loudly ~20x. That didn't seem to help much.

The life lesson from this: take plenty of time before getting rid of your old phone. [Added 2023-05-08: why did I want to get rid of the old phone at all? 1/4 TB of storage, 22,000 tracks of music, it could have functioned as a 2ndary music player indefinitely. Worth way more than $40 I would guess. I think that was a bit of a bum rush from Apple.] As much as I refer to my devices as my exocortex, you'd think I would have realized that.

Meanwhile, I will take this as confirmation from the universe that I am definitely not meant to be a songwriter - a BS copout I know, but, as I've already said, it is now a moot point. Still hard to believe > 100 song snippets stretching over many years now completely gone. Oh well, live & learn.