Apple locked me out of its walled garden. It was a nightmare

I'll just leave this here (Stallman, 1997) : https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

It really is funny just how many people learn this the hard way. Almost anything you have an account for can be suspended at the drop of a hat, usually with little or zero recourse against the company. Just about every T&C (the thing that nobody ever reads) states that your account can be suspended or permanently banned at the company's discretion and that you have no right to challenge this. And that's all they'll tell you. Google, Amazon, FB, PayPal, just about any online service. For years and years you can just blend in with the crowd, but the moment you start to stand out for whatever reason, the company tends to conclude that it's easier to completely remove you than deal with whatever the reason is, all to get back to its everyone-the-same list.

I buy my music in DRM-free formats and keep local copies (this is also for convenience, as it means I don't need an internet connection). All of my devices use local accounts and can live without cloud connectivity. It's a lot more work but no single company can lock me out of my media library, no matter how hard they try. I don't pay for Spotify because I want to own my music, not rent it. Movies and TV shows are a lot harder; despite the success of legal MP3 stores, nobody as yet allows purchasing of DRM-free MP4s. So I have to buy and rip DVDs and Blu-Rays, despite not having enough space for them.

It's a sorry state where faceless corporations have so much power over our lives.

You know what you will never get in a thread complaining about Apple? “Hey send me your contact details and I’ll see what we can do”

This is really sad, question is are we just renting stuff?

Mirror: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTbZV3W9PZeRdS1yzjhbazg7BzNq2VqPpQsbyd...

https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmTbZV3W9PZeRdS1yzjhbazg7Bz...

I bought an old touch wheel iPod and copied all my music to it just so I could have it all on one hard drive.

I stopped clicking on titles containing "nightmare" and "horror". Halloween is just one day per year.