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Setting the bozo bit on Apple

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Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#2
For about 10 years I’ve considered Windows iTunes to be malware. Music playback w/ apples own apps on MacOS has been bad ever since Apple got into the music business…. Sigh, if only the Beatles estate had won that lawsuit over the use of the ‘Apple’ brand for music…

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#5
Apple Music got considerably worse from early 2020 to 2022. I was impressed by the features, search by lyrics, promise of personalized recommendation, things were pretty smooth, but cracks started to show.

- issue with being repeatedly slammed to reauthenticate

- bizarre iTunes integration

- won't play nice with sleep-locked Windows laptop

- random features ripped out of the PWA, like "Artist Radio" (presumably an attempt to protect their recommendations from adversarial scrapers)

The last straw was I "got auth booted, playback cutoff, buy a family plan" at midnight NYE, left an angry ticket. Next week, ticket closed, final cheeky de-auth. I immediately canceled, and can't say I've had any reason to consider returning.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#6
I have a ~100 item Notes file of stuff like this that I experience regularly on iOS and macOS. It's optimistically a list of Radars I would file should I ever work at Apple again, but I'm fully aware that 95% of Radars like these go nowhere so it's more realistically just a space to vent.

A few of the really bad ones are Radars I filed years ago that went nowhere and still annoy me to this day (top prize probably goes to FaceTime audio ducking).

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#7
I echo this - I bought an apple watch but ended up returning it because it was so hard to reliably do basic tasks like connecting your AirPods and listening to a podcast. It would work fine ~80% of the time but sometimes it just wouldn't work at all and there's no clear fix other than resetting everything which is super annoying. Apple support was also completely useless. The apple watch hardware is amazing but the software was such a letdown.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#8

For about 10 years I’ve considered Windows iTunes to be malware. Music playback w/ apples own apps on MacOS has been bad ever since Apple got into the music business…. Sigh, if only the Beatles estate had won that lawsuit over the use of the ‘Apple’ brand for music…

[deleted]

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#9
Sync'ing from laptop to devices, via anything but iCloud, has gotten so much worse than it used to be. It used to be pretty good -- for it's time anyway.

The ecology just isn't built for actual owned media anymore. And so many people have only a phone now, so no reason to try to sync.

I think this is probably true on Android too.

I don't know about the Watch, or what the documented ways are to get media files on it.

But for iPhone, I think there are probably better ways than Apple Music, even for audio files. That's just not what Apple Music is about anymore, it's mostly about purchased music.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210598

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#10

For about 10 years I’ve considered Windows iTunes to be malware. Music playback w/ apples own apps on MacOS has been bad ever since Apple got into the music business…. Sigh, if only the Beatles estate had won that lawsuit over the use of the ‘Apple’ brand for music…

Services and operating systems should just be separate things. They can (and should) be able to work together, but pre-installing AppleTV+ on my Macbook and Candy Crush on my Windows machine are both stepping over the line. iTunes/Apple Music is definitely the perfect example of this, going from "slick Winamp upgrade" to "Apple Music sales vector" over the course of 20 years.

It's reasons like this why I advocate for Apple to separate their hardware and software. It's fine if they want to integrate their first-party offerings, but gluing them to the OS makes me uncomfortable. I don't trust Apple to not degrade my user experience anymore, unfortunately.

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