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Setting the bozo bit on Apple

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Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#81
post #32

> These are sent via WhatsApp so the audio recordings are mp4 files, which for some bizarre reason won't open in Music and instead open in QuickTime Player, despite definitely being audio files. .mp4 being associated with a video player seems reasonable, since it's almost always used for video. (I think the only difference between .mp4 and .m4a is the extension? It's just serving as a signal about which app should op…

Does iTunes not support music videos?

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#82

I don’t think Music is really intended for this use case. Maybe look at third party apps that let you play local files like Vox Music Player. If you want to stick with Music you can always subscribe to iTunes Match that will sync your local files libraries seamlessly

> I don’t think Music is really intended for this use case. What do you think are the intended use cases of the operating system's proprietary audio-file-playing application?

I thinking streaming music. Like Spotify

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#83
Funny enough, I had a similar issue last night. I daily drive a Windows machine and wanted to send some clips of me gaming to a buddy via iMessage. Apparently you can't simply drag and drop files onto an iPhone once it's plugged in. You must use iTunes or some other program. iTunes took 20 tries to finally see my iPhone, and once it did it froze trying to sync it. Finally, I was able to drag my clips into iTunes and sync them over to my phone (a transfer that should've taken 1/10 the time it did given I was using USB 3). Great, the files are now on my phone and I can send them to my buddy. Nope, they are only available in my "TV" app and cant be exported or shared.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#84

I've always hated Music.app's and iTunes's concept of a "Library". I already have a library for my media--it's organized, hierarchal, consistently named, and fully-integrated with my computer's operating system. It's called "the filesystem". I don't need the app to re-invent the concept of a filesystem on top of my existing filesystem. This isn't really limited to Apple applications, either. For a lot of applications…

a majority of the people don't have your idea of library so it makes sense to have some kind of unified system that automatically sorts the library.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#85
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and there is no easy way to get around this limit.. I mean, Apple could just add a better physical connection to the iPhone. Either the USB3-speed Lightning port they used twice on a few iPads, USB3.x over USB-C, or even the brilliant Thunderbolt standard they helped make nearly a decade ago. But... the iPhone's physical transfer speeds are still stuck in 2001. It's genuinely an unbelievably amount of negligence fo…

USB3/USBC is coming in the next set of devices (thanks EU), so at least the speed issue will be resolved.

Using the USB-C connector doesn't guarantee high speed connectivity. Technically that connector can fall all the way back to USB 1 speeds. Hopefully we'll see higher speeds, but Apple never put their higher speed Lightning ports on the phone, so who knows.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#86
I have some personally owned music, as well as music I've recorded myself, and I have never been able to get it to sync to my devices since Music came out. It just perpetually has the cloud icon next to it, and Music says it's syncing (I think, been a while).

For the most recent time I tried, the music has been in this state for 2 months.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#87
post #51

> How can such basic functionality be this incredibly broken? That's what I'm thinking almost every day when working with Apple devices. There is so, so much basic stuff broken on both macOS and iOS. I truly miss the days where Apple devices were a reliable tool, even a source of inspiration.

The hardware is still incredibly reliable and astoundingly performant. The rate at which they're capable of delivering them to the store and your doorstep is too. Per number of devices sold, it's crazy that they encounter as few issues as they do. Yeah, they've had some real 'Oops' moments, but on the whole it's crazy good. As for software? Yeah, it's really, really bad. :( I think Apple has forgotten how to do softw…

They know how to do software that makes money. They don’t know how to enable their users. They stopped building bicycles for the mind and started building dump trucks for cash.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#88
post #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 goe…

All my Notes notes got erased when I turned on iCloud. Can't have NOTHIN around here!

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn’t integrating services with the OS the whole point of Android for Google? They aren’t licensing technology to handset vendors, they just are keeping the numerically larger but profitability smaller sector of the smartphone business safe for advertising.

Not necessarily. Google is certainly just as complicit as Apple in pushing their services, but you can still use Android and even Pixel hardware without Google (or with anti-Google mitigations). This mostly comes down to the openness of the AOSP and availability of unlocked hardware, which luckily for Google is not that attractive on either count.

So, I'd say that Google is to Android what Canonical is to Ubuntu. Both are developing "open" products that technically qualify as Free software, but use their services to lock people into convenient but exploitative agreements. They're bad, but using Android without Google is much easier than using an iPhone without Apple.

Re: Setting the bozo bit on Apple

#90
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and there is no easy way to get around this limit.. I mean, Apple could just add a better physical connection to the iPhone. Either the USB3-speed Lightning port they used twice on a few iPads, USB3.x over USB-C, or even the brilliant Thunderbolt standard they helped make nearly a decade ago. But... the iPhone's physical transfer speeds are still stuck in 2001. It's genuinely an unbelievably amount of negligence fo…

USB3/USBC is coming in the next set of devices (thanks EU), so at least the speed issue will be resolved.

The EU did nothing. When Apple moved away from the 30 pin connector to the lightning connector they promised they'd keep it for a minimum of 10 years since so many people were howling about the change. That was 2014. Guess what? It looks like Apple will be adopting USB-C in 2024, thus fulfilling their 10 year promise. Meanwhile, since 2014, Apple has been adopting USB-C across their entire product line - except the iPhone which they had promised they wouldn't do.

So, let's end the farcical statement that the EU stood up to Big, Bad, Apple. The EU did nothing.

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