Setting up a new phone prompts you incessantly about Apple Wallet, iCloud, etc. and uses badges to make you think something is wrong until you begin the process for each (the badges go away if you cancel out of it).
Such things have only continued. They're adding new products and paid services at a slow but steady pace, and regularly sending me notifications to sign up for those services. When you "upgrade" the OS, you're confronted with a whole slew of opportunities to sign up for more services, with no way to just ignore these prompts. I don't blame them for doing this, but it's become increasingly grating, and turned me off of Apple in general.
Like a lot of companies, they're focused on growing their bottom line, and don't see how they're angering their locked-in customers.
yea those apple employees are so stupid they have no idea that nagging you constantly is annoying. no of course they just don’t care about other people including their customers.
although to be fair sociopathy is essentially just another form of stupidity
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by this?
It's all seamless and I rarely think about it. Yeah I could spend Apple prices for Apple gear and not get the cloud stuff but. Why?
Music just doesn't sync well across my devices. Full stop. I can start playing something on my phone, select my Homepods as my speakers via Airplay, and it will play. But if I lock my phone and come back a few minutes later, it'll forget what is currently playing on my HomePods and make me "replace" the music. If I try to control it from my other devices it's the same story. More than once I've had it yell at me for trying to play music in more than one place at a time and try to get me to upgrade to a family plan. I'm single and live alone.
Siri also often misunderstands scene names. I just turned to one of the HomePods and said, "Hey Siri, activate 'Nightlights Only'" (a scene name). She said, "Good night." and did nothing. This happens no matter how well I enunciate (general American accent) or how many times I try.
In the process of messing with it just now to prove my point before sharing, Siri hit a snag and told me to go update my iCloud account in the home app, so I did and ran into the same problem as this user[0] did two years ago (disappearing password prompt). It's wild.
This is not the Apple that made iMessage and Messages in OS X the most seamless text messaging experience I've ever experienced before.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomePod/comments/jsw122/homepod_upd...
Edit: I had my iPhone’s wifi off. Apparently I had to be on the same network to resolve the iCloud issue. Why not mention that?
I have two HomePods setup in stereo mode configured to an Apple TV 4K, and I cannot reliably get it to tell me today’s date, start a timer, play a movie, and not even pause or resume the Apple TV 4K.
It is so bad, that recently, if you say “Hey Siri, resume”, the audio resumes playing from the Homepods, but the Apple TV 4K still displays the screensaver until you press play on the remote. I do not even understand how that bug works (and it is a new one, the software continuously gets worse).
Overall I agree though. The core products are still good, but I’m hard pressed to spend any more money on this until they improve Siri and Homekit. I know there’s a big UI refresh coming that is welcome, but it feels bigger than that.
I wonder if it has to do with my five HomeKit secure video cameras and the HomePods or Apple TV 4K acting as a hub. And the fact that my Apple TV 4K is not wired to network.
I do still have all my old itunes music in the Music app, so not sure if that's what you're complaining about.
OTOH both Music and iTunes can only handle a limited set of file types; neither can do anything with my huge library of flac files. Perhaps that's your complaint, which I agree with.
Plus, I can edit the metadata for tracks that come from Apple Music to my own tastes so I can tag that a song from the service is one version while my copy of it is a different version.
For me, Music is one of those things I hope Apple never "modernizes" because I feel like a lot of this nerd-level functionality would be lost in a major rewrite. It's certainly light years ahead of Spotify's truly pathetic "local files" function.
Apps like Ecoute are alternatives and better in some respects (better navigation IMO), but worse in others.
Oh wow I remember when Microsoft did that! Wow that turned out badly for them, even if the Zune app had an amazing UI.
Same mistakes, different decade.
I think I might have ADHD and I like to minimise any visual distraction by removing everything I can, else it becomes overwhelming for me, just seeing that badge marker when going through something was enough to annoy me.
I really wish there was more customisation so you could turn all that crap off that you didn't need / use so it wasn't even through, there is just too much junk on these devices but it's there to serve Apple and not you as a user.
The fact that you can't click a band name to navigate to that band's list of albums when playing local media is perhaps the thing I hate most about iOS. The band name renders in the color of a link, but is non-interactive.
So dumb.