Eddy Cue needs to be forced to use iCloud.com for his company email, files and documents for the entire year. Then he can write a state of Apple services letter with some conviction. 😂
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Eddy Cue Shares Letter Reflecting on Apple's Services in 2022
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I don't think you're being entirely fair. But I guess we need to define services. If you're talking Apple TV+, sure, I agree with you 100%. I have no idea what they're doing there or, more importantly, why. Seems like someone's vanity project. Arcade is weak. The games are weak. I haven't tried Fitness. I've heard mixed things.
I'm happy with Apple Music. When I think about buying CDs at $15/each when I was a kid, any music service today is an insanely good deal. I don't care for music recommendations, I just want access to the catalog. I still buy music when I really love something and Apple Music is great for trying before I buy. What I really appreciate about Apple Music is that I can still maintain my massive lossless library on my home server and have those tracks show up in my Apple Music Library. No one else offers a desktop music manager than integrates with the cloud and an online music service the way Apple does with Music.
iCloud has also matured nicely. There's no third party cloud offering that comes close to iCloud's deep integrations if you use Apple products. Apple continues to improve iCloud and add important features like the new data protection. I love having everything in sync across all my devices and having native apps to access my data.
I've used both extensively and I don't think Apple Music is anywhere near Spotify honestly, it handles local files better for sure but it's the other thing it does do better.
Spotifys search fuctionality is much quicker and responsive and I can start listening to an album on one device and hand it off to another even halfway through a track. It's fantastic. Apple hasn't been able to build anything like it and that seems like a strange omission given that handoff fucntionality exists elsewhere in their operating systems. Spotifys recommendation engine is also superb.
The biggest indictment of Apple Music has to be the that when it launched Spotify had 28 million premium subscribers, they've now got 195 million and more than double AMs market share. Ouch!
It's only really useful on Apple devices so I don't really think of iCloud as a service, more an extention of iOS/MacOS but yeah it seems to do what it does fairly well. That said all i use it for basic syncing between my Mac and phone and don't pay for any extra storage. There's no third party that comes close to the integration because they aren't allowed to.
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I've never been a Spotify user. I tried it out a little years ago, but never took to it primarily because it doesn't handle local files very well, much less a huge off-line library.
That handoff feature sounds cool. Personally I'm not interested in any of these recommendation engines, but I've heard that Spotify is vastly superior.
No argument!
Of course they're allowed to. Anyone could write a Photos-style desktop app that integrates with a cloud service if they wanted to. No one has. Google has Google Photos on iOS. They haven't written a Mac client, though. Google Photos has pretty good integrations on iOS. There's really no incentive for a third party to reproduce what Apple has built with iCloud because iCloud is that good.
Aside from a $0.99 a month iCloud subscription for HomeKit Secure Video and Apple Fitness+ I don’t really need the rest of their services.
Apple Arcade requires many more games. Will be good if TV+ has more shows.
Nor can we search the content of PDF files stored locally on iPhone or iPad nor do we have Smart Folders in Mail, Files, the Music app, etc despite them being headline features of macOS over 15 years ago
I emailed Eddy in 2016 asking why they failed to get Netflix on board for the TV app. He replied for me to stay tuned.
Well it has been 7 years Eddy. Steve would have gotten done.
I think you misunderstood. He’s asking you to keep tuning in to Netflix. He’s a nice guy 😂
I've tried Apple Music, it was ok but platform agnostic enough (typical Apple though). I've tried Apple TV, the UX is horrible and the content lacking (not to mention the price is meh IMO). I've tried News; that's an ordinary app and the whole news cycle is toxic anyway. I haven't tried fitness but that's because I go to a gym and I don't need that. So yeah, I have tried them but they're not worth using. They're the epitome of mediocrity because Apple don't allow 1:1 competition on their own platform.
Thanks for the suggestion on PhotoFiler but I'm not sure if you're serious. The app that came up has an icon that looks like it was designed in MS Paint. I'm also aware of the two components of storing photos. If I could point my Photos app on my phone to store in say OneDrive (where the storage is sooooo much cheaper) and still get the functionality of the Photos app (which in a rare occurrance Apple have done a decent job with) I would be super happy. Do you know if that's possible?
It all makes sense now. The lack of quality features in updates in services like their podcast app and music app isn't because they don't care, it's because they think it's already great. Wish these guys checked out literally any Apple forum on Reddit...
Seriously. The early 90s called, it wants to tell Apple about caching image files. Magical and Revolutionary new technology.
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Why would they check out a forum full of people who have no clue how to actually provide a service? Forum on Reddit... please....
Steve, it's not about providing a music service. Reddit is a great place to see widespread and very common complaints. It isn't like one person complains about a feature or lack of feature(s) a lot of the issues with AM in particular are widespread.
So, when I mentioned reading through comments/posts on Reddit, it was more for customer feedback to maybe enhance a service that they are already providing. Not to learn how to make a service. A lot of services utilize things like Reddit to get feedback from customers. Some are Spotify, Macrofactor, and Supercell (mobile games).
Be careful not to stick your nose too far in the air. You may accidentally fall over backward.
They should be checking out all the complaints they get on their own feedback form then. People have been using that feedback form for years and it seems like Apple ignores it, at least when it comes to music. Why even have a feedback form if you're not going to use it.
I imagine it's like many other software problems. The developers might be running the latest and greatest hardware with upgraded specs and gigabit or 10 gigabit connections to a server that's maybe hundreds of yards away so "it runs fine for them".
Had someone from Microsoft tell me as much over ten years ago. Someone complained about Windows assuming high bandwidth availability all the time and he said “we all have 10 GigE, we don’t really think about it.”
The bay area / west coast reality distortion is real.