Friday, December 1, 2017

Less happy with Apple over time

I have been writing less posts for the last year.  I am less happy with my Apple products.  And as I listened to ATP this morning (Accidental Tech Podcast) - episode 250, I heard Marco, Casey, and John variously complain about reliability and other issues.  I have similar feelings.  Marco also had an internet-famous commentary on the state of the Macbook Pro on his blog at https://marco.org/

What is bugging me now?
1) My old apple TV and trying to use it with an old iTunes server.  It cannot do 2-factor iCloud without shenanigans I have not gone through - actually getting a code and typing it in after my iCloud password.  Somehow, only my wife gets the code, and only a bit later, making it very hard to connect the dots.

2) A Macbook Air in my house is failing and rebooting most nights.  6 months ago it just failed from what appeared to be a block storage issue with the SSD.  After  rebuilt (and restore from time machine) it seemed "back to normal" at the time.  I had to force Apple support to let me bring it to the store - the old method to schedule with an app was removed from the support app!  They strongly discouraged me from bringing it in.  And the tests they ran found no problems... But, something was wrong, and something is wrong now (now that I'm out of support/apple care).  It is all my problem; Apple could not, or did not, help.

3) I have a Macbook Pro 15" 2017.  I also had a 2016 model.  The large touchpad causes numerous stray touches causing a myriad of weird unpredictable behaviors.  I cannot wear clothes with sleeves or this escalates to a continuous problem.  Apple's stray touch avoidance does not work for me.  I have had to re-select where I am in this short blog post many times.  And I've had to cut/paste text, and figure out where my cursor moved to, or remove some weird pop-up...  This is infuriating.  If you spot egregious typos in this blog post including words in the wrong place, then this is the cause.  I tried to correct every time, and re-read, but... this is hard. 

I have made corrections about 30 times during the writing of this blog post, as I have sleeves today.  This is unusable.  

4) TouchID on the Macbook Pro is extremely unreliable.  Between that and the fact that the computer is often unresponsive at wake, it takes minutes away from my work many times per day;   I am often mobile.  When it works, TouchID on the Mac is a wonderful feature.  It clearly does not "just work".

5) I just bought Air Pods.  Again, when they work, they are amazing!  However, they are not so smart about pairing.  I must open the airpod storage container next to my iPhone to get them to re-pair after charging; they do not just re-connect automatically.  My wife (uses my Apple ID so we can share photos) has her iPhone wanting to pair with the AirPods at times - she has never used them.  There is something amiss here.

6) Going back to photos - this is an old story that is still there.  I have no real way to share photos automatically with my family in a way that I would want to with Apple products.  My family uses Photo Stream.  I use iCloud photos.  I cannot access Photo Stream.  Why, oh why, Apple, did you switch to this state and stay that way?  I would pay money for a service from Apple that would let me have every family member use a different Apple ID and share every photo taken, but not have every family member with the ability to delete photos from the iCloud photo library.  I trust my family members but we do not all want the ability to accidentally permanently delete trip photos.

7) Thunderbolt 3/usb-c.  I'm not bitter about the dongles.  But, my LG 5K display USB-C hub capabilities sometimes work, sometimes do not.  Rebooting my MacBook Pro temporarily fixes it when it is a problem, making me think it is Apple's problem (even if at some level it is really Intel's issue as well).  I have heard from podcasters that dongles do not produce utterly reliable USB connections either.  This just makes the pro not a pro.

8) I have wanted a new Mac Mini for about... 2 years.  I'm not buying the 3-year old design.  I hear Apple is coming out with a new version... some day.

I'm sure that there is more, but this is my stream-of-conciousness unhappiness today.

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