14 OTPs sent to their mobile number, frequently being dumped back to the login screen. Maybe this was the reason, but damn this has discouraged me from ever going into their walled garden.
In the small, iOS devices are one of the few things I can set up fresh for technophobes out of the box and over the phone.
In the large, while bringing Apple ecosystem BYOD into a 15K employee bank, we got to see a good amount of setup challenges with various lines of phones, laptops, and desktops (main competing products were Surface, Microsoft’s first party line), and these are the ones that cost us the least to support.
The flip side of your experience are my wife and my phones which seamlessly and with zero telco/carrier interaction, upgraded both phones to new hardware (11 to 12) while bringing over both dual SIM card and eSIM plans.
First time I’d seen the “We found an applicable cellular plan that could work on this phone, want to bring it over?” (paraphrased) dialog box. There’s just no way clicking OK on that is going to make Verizon, T-Mobile, or AT&T do the right thing — but it does, in seconds.
Both also used the new device-to-device content transfer rather than iCloud restore from backup, with devices usable again in under 45 minutes from start, complete with watches and headphones etc repaired to the new devices.
Maybe I’m jaded, but damn this encourages me to evangelize their well-curated garden.
With that said, what part of the failure mode was user-hostile? I have an ATV, various Chromecasts, and Amazon streaming devices, and the ATV is by far the best, most reliable experience. My only complaint is the price, and if they were cheaper they would be on every TV in my house.
Funny enough, I can’t get my dad to run the Apple TV app on his Xbox. He switches inputs, he can’t wrap his head around Apple TV being on or in the Xbox!
Side note: To me it seems a lot of people rushed to activate their new Apple devices on the Christmas day. I was expecting the pandemic to have people to cut down on purchases that were not strictly necessary. What did I miss?
Honestly, it didn't use to be like this. Hey Tim, you should at least pretend you're caring about something more than your profit margins.
Now Apple Music is terribly confused about owned music versus streamable music. I haven't tried the owned library sharing in years, but I have problems trying to get tracks I own into audio processing apps - they should just be available, but it seems I have to download the track in Music first, then wait some unspecified amount of time before the audio is allowed to see it. The whole things counters the convenience I thought Apple was selling.
Also no, with Authy, as long as I have my master password somewhere, I can still login and get my 2FA codes.
Just so I'm clear, you're saying Apple sends a 2FA request to devices that are no longer tied to your AppleID? That seems like a huge security hole, and one I'm sure they would like to have reported.
> Also no, with Authy, as long as I have my master password somewhere, I can still login and get my 2FA codes.
Keep in mind that while Authy is great, it does weaken 2FA a bit. Now a hacker can hack Authy and then gain access. In a maximum secure 2FA setup (with a hardware token or Google Authenticator that is tied to the device), if you lose the second factor it's supposed to be hard to get access. Some companies even tell you up front, that if you don't have the codes shown when setting up 2FA, and you lose the 2FA you lose your account.
I'm pretty sure you've had tons of opportunities to spend far more than "1 hour" diagnosing, fixing, and handling some hair pulling desktop/server/embedded Linux issues - even when there was no outtage involved.
Did these equally discouraged you from ever going into desktop/server/embedded Linux?
First, because we could also have server-class devices that are quite easy to setup (similarly to how consumer PCs where much harder to setup in the past and are much easier now). We just come to not expect it, but that doesn't make consumer vs server something that inherently justifies "more difficult to setup".
Second, because the "spend 1 hour to add an account on an iPad (and during an outtage at that)" is far from the common behavior of the iPad, to be representative of some inherent issue with it.
So, it's more like "I had a quite unlikely and unrepresentative experience with an iPad and it put me off from such devices, whereas I tolerate the same far more often from servers and desktop machines and don't think twice about it".
Which, put that way, is much less potent than "that damned iPad and Apple's walled garden wasted 1 hour of my life, I'm never going back to those", isn't it?
From the perspective of an individual, whether or not your experience is representative of most people's experience of a similar thing only has moderate relevance. Most people find serial killers to be normal, or even charming. This is of little comfort to victims.
Sounds just like "I am a Mac user installing Linux on a cheap best buy laptop and whoa it doesn't work as well supporting a pretty obscure config that macOS would never even boot on, but am going to compare to my top of the line MBP and complain".