A Tale of Two iPhones
TLDR: Having two iPhones with the same Apple ID wreaks havoc with my text messages, voicemail, and hotspot. Change the password on one for the hotspot and it changes it on the other. Throw an iPad in the mix and have one iPhone’s hotspot turned off, the iPad will turn that hotspot on and connect. Apple ID was the culprit. My fix was to ditch one of the iPhones and replace with a droid. Problem solved and an extra $100 in my pocket per month for switching to T-Mobile.
Full story. My first cell phone was circa 1996. Was a Motorola StarTAC flip phone. Battery was thicker than the phone. I want to say my carrier was Cellular One. 20 minutes of talk-time came with the phone. There was no texting. Talking to other people on the same network didn’t count towards those minutes, provided they resided in large area that encompassed us both. My sister had one too on the same carrier so we got to chat as long as we wanted, limited only by our battery packs. And you kept a couple of those bad boys at arm’s length at all times.
Then I moved to Texas and had to change both my number and carrier, but kept the phone. Details are hazy to this old memory, but I think that the carrier changed names because it was bought by another – VoiceStream. Within a couple years after that VoiceStream was bought out by T-Mobile. It was at this point I had a flip phone. Can’t even remember the brand but it did the job. Made phone calls, had voicemail, and rudimentary texting via the keypad.
In 2004 appeared the first phone that I actually wanted because of what it was – the razr by Motorola. It was sleek. Sexy. Metal. Shiny. Damn thing cost $500 with a 2-year contract. First time I ever paid for a phone outside of the usual 2 year contract. Before then your phones were usually free as long as you honored the contract.
When I tried to get one, T-Mobile would not sell me one. They said it was for new customers only. I said fine, terminate my account and let’s start a new one. Ported my phone number over to the new account and got my new razr. Since I was technically a repeat customer of T-Mobile and not one coming over from another network I had to pay full price for that motherfucker. And I did. I wasn’t happy about that, but that’s how bad I wanted that phone.
I was quite happy with that phone until murmurs of an Apple iPhone started sounding. Something that would merge the convenience of my cell phone and my Palm Pilot, akin to the BlackBerry but without the button keyboard. Being a long-time fan of the defunct Apple Newton, this seemed like the next logical step. June 2007 would be my long anticipated date of getting my hands on one. In the meantime, I would have to settle for having the iPhone’s signature ring-tone played over my razr. That was pretty funny too. When that ring-tone would go off peoples’ heads would snap! WHO HAD AN IPHONE ALREADY?
Knowing that the iPhone would only be released on the AT&T network, we started working towards that goal early on by switching the rest of the family over to AT&T prior to the event. I’d be the remaining holdout on T-Mobile with the razr until I replaced it with the iPhone. I got up early, headed to the AT&T store and got in line. Early. Rumor had it only 100 phones would be available. I was number 3 in line. It was a long wait that day too. The store opened. But there were no iPhones yet. They were scheduled to be delivered by FEDEX to the store that day. The shipment arrived to the store around 10:30AM and they didn’t start seeing us customers for the iPhones until around 11:30 or so. By 2PM I had mine and was out the door. We then immediately started our summer vacation by using the Maps app on the phone to get to my folks new house in Jackson, MS. I had never been there yet.
We stayed with AT&T from that point until just this month, with me leap-frogging every other iPhone year since I’d be on a 2-year contract.
During COVID I wanted to have another line dedicated to work since most of us were teleworking at the time. I did not want to give out my personal phone number to a hundred different customers every month. I ended up getting a burner phone and that worked out OK. Having the convenience of this second phone grew on me and eventually I just added an additional line to our existing AT&T account and would get the iPhone SE. It ended up costing about as much as having my burner phone. And of course the phone was free. Or near free. I think they charged me a dollar for it. I chose the rose gold one. Because if I had to pay THAT much money for it, it better be gold. After a few years, I ended up getting the iPhone 15 Pro Max (hereafter referred to as just “15”) while my “work” phone was an iPhone 12 mini (hereafter, “12”).
Here are where my problems started getting bigger. I had already worked through the issues of texting on two different lines with one Apple ID. I had to instruct my 12 NOT to use iMessage. Otherwise my customers would end up knowing my iMessage account and I didn’t want that. I couldn’t find a fix for the other problem I was experiencing – voicemails for both lines were showing up on both phones. Another issue is that I use my 15 as a hot spot for my iPad. I didn’t want my iPad to connect to the work phone’s hotspot, so I would turn that hotspot off. But that didn’t stop the iPad from turning it on and connecting to it. Crazy right? Why the fuck is my 12, that has its hotspot capabilities turned off, turning on and allowing my iPad to connect to it? I took it a step further and designated a different password for that hotspot. That’s when I realized some strange things were afoot at the Circle-K.
When I gave the 12 a different password than the 15, some fuckery started occurring. The iPad would still connect to it. Even though I never typed that password into the iPad to join that network. So I looked at the settings on the 15 and guess what? That hotspot password had changed to the hotspot password of the 12. More experimentation provided the same results in reverse. Change the password on the 15 and it would automatically change on the 12. Turns out Apple ID was the culprit. I don’t want to have two separate Apple IDs, so my fix was to get an android device for the work phone.
And guess what Android device I ended up getting? The new Motorola razr 2024. I’ve come full circle. It’s not as elegant as my iPhone to be sure, but it is a nice phone. I’m getting used to the external display. Not to mention all my issues have gone away now. My voice mail is separated. My texts don’t combine. And my iPad hasn’t once connected to my razr.
The cherry on top? We are paying about $100 less per month with T-Mobile.