Apple Raises Prices on Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, and Apple One

Their upselling techniques are so annoying, I deliberately cut all Apple subscriptions a few months ago and they still pop things up every day telling me to resubscribe to iCloud Pro Plus nonsense.

Idk who they think needs or wants any of this trash but I am fairly certain I can come up with an arbitrary number of things I want in life that are not more useless software subscriptions from an entity that has been extremely hostile to its professional userbase for years. In the last week I also feel like my MBP has been artificially hindered in performance and battery life after an OS software update, which doesn't feel like the first time.

It will be difficult but I see myself switching to one of the Ubuntu laptops that are on the market, like system76 or something. Apple just doesn't deserve my money anymore

I adopted Apple Music pretty early in its life and actually liked it in the beginning. But I've noticed the quality is deteriorating.

The UX is slow. It takes 5 seconds to add a song to my library now. Half the time images don't load - so I have a bunch of black squares with words underneath. Sometimes music just doesn't play. 5G/4G handoffs confuse it, forcing me to force quit and restart. The shuffle/repeat options are buried in a weird location. Should be right next to the play button. These are all relatively new problems (the last 6 months or so.)

I don't mind paying for software. But I'm not going to pay for half-baked efforts like Apple Music is quickly becoming, especially if the price keeps increasing.

Yeah, they somehow manage to break the app more and more despite recent rewriting efforts(?), moving to more native views, etc.

I’d love to use and support a music streaming service that allows me to incorporate my own files in a good way, but there doesn’t seem to be any great solution. I’m close to just migrating to a file-based approach and just keeping a big local library of mp3s/flacs (and Spotify as a fallback for stuff I don’t own yet or want to check out temporarily).

I have a local music library, and it's annoying how everything I use has been shoved into a small part of the UI on the iPhone. Plus it occasionally pops up asking me to subscribe to Apple Music. I just don't need it. I discover new music through YouTube usually.

But iTunes/Music has supported that library since 2003 for me, so I trust it. 19 years, that's like 19 Google service lifespans! Even most software hasn't lived that long.

The same way that I believe the web version of MS Teams to be superior to the (what is really just an Electron web app) Mac desktop version: I'm assuming the web version that will later be turned into a desktop app has to work. How is it going to work as a desktop app if it doesn't work in the native container it was designed to work in? Then throw it at Electron, and profit???

Having never written a web-based desktop app in my life, this is all out of my butt. But at some point I think it reasonable that there are assumptions once the web app is working that don't cleanly port to Electron or summat, and no one cared to check or cared to fix it.