It’s no secret that the latest iPhone is garnering a lot of controversy, and it’s pretty obvious why. The ridiculous-looking camera that’s twice the size of the phone’s actual width may be what everyone’s criticizing, but it’s not just an awkward look that’s the problem.

Now, if you had asked me about my opinions on the new iPhone a week ago, I probably would have just shrugged my shoulders and said I didn’t really like it. Not that I hated them, or that they were the worst phones ever made, just that I didn’t particularly care for them.

However, I’ve become a tad more radical in the past few days. When setting up a new iPhone, it is required that you go through a tedious process to activate the core features of the device, like your password, Face ID, and language.

It is also, coincidentally, where they bombard you with all the new fancy features this generation has, along with any updates the phone may need. Let me repeat that: when setting up a brand new phone, straight from the factory, you may need to update it with new software.

Now, if this were just a formality or maybe even something that could be done later, then I wouldn’t mind it in the slightest. However, the phone is entirely soft locked until these updates and transfers are finished.

This may not seem all that annoying at first, but I can assure anyone who will listen that it is. Recently, my father bought a new iPhone just last week and asked me to set it up. I thought it would be a quick and easy 30-minute waiting game for all of the apps and pictures to transfer- turns out, I was very wrong.

For some background, my family uses upgrades to get new phones, and my phone just so happened to have that upgrade. This basically means that after a certain amount of time of owning a phone, a provider will allow its client to buy a new device with a discount. Thus, when my dad made the purchase, the company thought that it was my phone being replaced.

When setting up my dad’s phone, my electronic SIM (e-SIM) card automatically transferred over, along with my dad’s old e-SIM from his previous phone. Normally, this would be a quick and easy fix by going into settings and transferring my eSIM back onto my own phone; however, it took over two hours just to finish the general setup.

The timestamps were: 20 minutes to follow the prompts on the screen and actually choose the settings, over an hour and a half to wait for the phone to update at first, and then an extra few minutes to transfer all of the data from my father’s old phone.

During this time, I could not text anybody, nor could he. What was supposed to be a simple but boring process turned into a long, drawn-out waiting game that could have been easily resolved if the core functionality of the phone hadn’t been locked behind progress bars.

Overall, in my opinion, the new iPhones definitely don’t look the best. They look too slim, almost like their out of a weird movie. The main gripe that I have, though, is the software; for a company that has its net worth in the billions, Apple’s software continuously proves to be very lackluster.