Apple ecosystem frustration and general cynicism about the state of things

[cjsuk]

Bit of a rant this one. Apple are really poking me with a stick to the point I am considering walking away. I tied myself into everything and it now it is hurting me.

Some recent highlights...

• The incursion of Apple Intelligence into everything, the last resort being the 5.5 gig that disappeared off my phone even though I turned it off. I have no need or interest in the current LLM fad at all. I don't want to be upsold it and told that it's great all the time. I expect to be respected as an end user. Solution: live with it and play whack-a-mole - grr.
• The white balance on my iphone 15 Pro is DIRE as is the default image enhancement stuff which won't disappear even if you shoot ProRAW. It looks like I've rubbed bronzer into my camera lenses and cranked the sharpness off the scale. I can't kill it whatever I do. Any attempts to compensate for it with photo styles for example result in everything being puke green or it being even worse. This also occurs on another 15 Pro a colleague has so it's a likely a software flaw. Solution: drag my mirrorless camera around.
• iOS Photos app user interface changes which turn out to be utter garbage and really broke me for days. Solution: live with it - grr
• Serious problems with photo sharing. Half the time the web based galleries crap out or take forever to load any images. Solution: get so fed up of it, provision a standalone Linux box on Hetzner with Debian+nginx+letsencrypt etc, written my own damn gallery front end generator and just rsync static stuff over to it.
• Tracks disappearing from Apple Music at least once a month and incomplete albums. I assume this is all due to licensing issues, but I don't give a crap about that. I just want to listen to music. Solution: stop paying for Apple Music - rip what CDs I have to FLAC and obtain everything else however I can and use VLC.
• The sudden grifting and upselling by some of the app companies who got users hooked and then changed their sales model to subscriptions. Goodnotes I'm looking at you. Solution: fire goodnotes. Use paper. Two years supply of Muji A5 notebook costs less than 1 year of goodnotes, doesn't **** up your eyes and doesn't need charging.
• Data loss when syncing numbers between iPad via iCloud to the Mac. Occasionally it just craps on a bunch of sheets and wipes out everything and I have to hit time machine to get things back. Solution: disable iCloud files and use one computer only.
• The fact I have absolutely no reasonable way of exporting my Notes content without copying and pasting it all into something else manually. Same for Reminders. Both databases are entirely impenetrable CRDT based models and totally undocumented. Solution: back to paper.
• Airdrop is so so so unreliable. Literally half the time it doesn't even work any more. Solution: no idea - just retrying over and over again
• Some problems with iCloud IMAP crapping out semi-regularly and refusing to download messages. One time I'm at an airport having had to change plane booking and I can't get the boarding passes that they emailed me. Total nightmare. Solution: move domain and IMAP over to a more reputable provider.
• Honestly after using the M4 mac mini for a few weeks now I really like it but I NEED type A ports still. I'm having to use wobbly dongles to connect CD drives and things and it's annoying as hell. Solution: live with it
• Not Apple specifically here but the current incursion by national governments into our data, especially my own one (UK). Solution: Turned off iCloud files and photos and work offline entirely. iPad is about as useful as a brick so sell it and spend the money going on holiday. If you want my data you'll have to actually come and get it with a warrant.
• Every damn macOS release seems to break Qt which means some stuff I need, via Homebrew, is broken for at least a month until someone patches everything. Solution: roll out 10 year old PC with Debian Linux on it.
• Totally fed up with my AW S10 nagging me and needing to be fed daily. Plus it's a nightmare if you're out hiking on a wet or hot day because it gets damp and the thing goes bananas even in "wet mode" resulting in lost tracking. Plus it's difficult getting a GPX out of it. Solution: stop using it and go back to the ancient Garmin eTrex 10 GPS chucked in the top of my backpack.
• Obviously, the political side of things, which I won't get into further as last time led me to a 2 day ban. You know the deal though. Solution: move to another planet

So really I worked out I have no control over my own stuff and I regret embedding myself in this and am unpicking it all slowly now.

I'm frustratingly back to 2008 working model now.

 

[01cowherd]

I resonate with this. While I haven't yet moved back to "2008 working model", it's looking more and more tempting each update. So far, I've only ditched Apple Music and Notes.

Music: I switched back to buying music for the same reason as you, plus now nobody is keeping a catalog of every song I've ever played or paused and when. I'm currently buying through iTunes out of convenience, but Apple works hard to corral you back to Apple Music. I'm convinced they would shutter iTunes Store if they could without backlash.

Notes/Paper: Apple ruined the Notes app in iOS 18 for handwriting for me and doesn't seem to care to fix it. They added spellcheck for handwriting and you can't disable it. Enjoy blue underlines when it can't figure out what you wrote! And the longstanding issue that long notes heat up your device and kill the battery. I've been going back to paper and rediscovering how nice it is to use a good quality pen or pencil. Plus no worrying about charging the battery.

Subscriptions: I prefer paying to support apps when possible, but yeah. Some apps barely get updates but still charge subscriptions.

iCloud Drive: Something I've wanted for the longest time is a local/device-only "iCloud" sync (i.e., not store data on iCloud servers). Surely Apple can come up with something seamless, considering Syncthing and Magic Wormhole both exist and are open source. But they have to upsell iCloud storage, so it would never happen.

no reasonable way of exporting my Notes content without copying and pasting it all into something else manually. Same for Reminders

If you are looking for tools to export, Obsidian has a plugin that will import the Notes database and convert to markdown files. It's annoying you can't natively export, though—just one more instance of lock-in.

 

[cjsuk]

Thanks for the detailed reply - appreciated.

I resonate with this. While I haven't yet moved back to "2008 working model", it's looking more and more tempting each update. So far, I've only ditched Apple Music and Notes.

Music: I switched back to buying music for the same reason as you, plus now nobody is keeping a catalog of every song I've ever played or paused and when. I'm currently buying through iTunes out of convenience, but Apple works hard to corral you back to Apple Music. I'm convinced they would shutter iTunes Store if they could without backlash.

Yeah I've noticed that with Apple Music. Some of the defaults are to put it bluntly rather annoying.

Notes/Paper: Apple ruined the Notes app in iOS 18 for handwriting for me and doesn't seem to care to fix it. They added spellcheck for handwriting and you can't disable it. Enjoy blue underlines when it can't figure out what you wrote! And the longstanding issue that long notes heat up your device and kill the battery. I've been going back to paper and rediscovering how nice it is to use a good quality pen or pencil. Plus no worrying about charging the battery.

Oh don't start me on the handwriting stuff and some of the iOS 18 features. So I spend a lot of my time writing LaTeX stuff which is heavily mathematical and the infernal inline mathematics in every text field keeps shooting me in the face. I turned it off but it still occurs some places.

About an hour after the original post I went hrmph and actually moved the document I was working on over to Linux as it doesn't have that problem. And you know what, surprisingly it's better there. Never thought I'd say that. Wondering how much other stuff I will end up moving over. My entire mathematical world runs fine on Linux.

Subscriptions: I prefer paying to support apps when possible, but yeah. Some apps barely get updates but still charge subscriptions.

iCloud Drive: Something I've wanted for the longest time is a local/device-only "iCloud" sync (i.e., not store data on iCloud servers). Surely Apple can come up with something seamless, considering Syncthing and Magic Wormhole both exist and are open source. But they have to upsell iCloud storage, so it would never happen.

There is of course the option of rsync. I use that heavily for other things.

Agree on subscriptions. I need out. I am not a cash cow to be milked.

If you are looking for tools to export, Obsidian has a plugin that will import the Notes database and convert to markdown files. It's annoying you can't natively export, though—just one more instance of lock-in.

Thanks for this tip. Just what I needed. I am slowly moving most of my (150 or so) notes to text files at the moment by hand and clearing it up. What a pain!

 

[Global_traveler]

Why not try SMB Share directly from iPad to Mac, using the iPad Files App. If both are on the same WiFi, it’s easy. I move a large folder (34 spreadsheets) to my Mac for backup, regularly. Once on the Mac, I can select which ones to move to Numbers on Mac. In fact, I move my iPad folder to an M2 NVMe SSD, which is located in the Satechi base unit, under my M2 Mini. I can also move files from Mac to iPad (or iPhone) using SMB File sharing. You can watch a video on YouTube for the method. Let me know if you need help.