Dan Moren at Macworld reminds us that there are some Apple practices that continue to greatly annoy customers. In this case it’s all about revenue, and the argument is that Apple could please us greatly for not much loss of income. But at least we have a choice: buy or not buy.
Check It Out: 3 Things Apple Does That Keep Annoying Us
Dan and John are right – it’s all about the money with those annoying anti-user Apple practices: rising iPhone prices, expensive built-in flash storage (without micro SD card slots and with terrible support for USB storage), and stingy cloud storage.
My greatest peeve with iOS however is how unstable the platform is in terms of application compatibility across OS versions. Basically Apple breaks most of my apps every year, and the onus of updating them falls on the developers to provide constant updates. Breaking things on a yearly basis is fine for Apple but terrible for users and developers. It’s particularly bad for developers to have a constant maintenance burden on apps just to keep them working across iOS updates, and it motivates them to adopt subscription pricing. It’s annoying for users to have to buy a subscription to an app just to keep it working across iOS updates.
Desktop platforms such as Microsoft Windows are bunch better in terms of maintaining application compatibility across OS updates. Game consoles are even better – usually games work for the life of the console (typically 10 years or so), across many firmware updates and hardware revisions.
One thing Macworld did which continues to annoy me greatly: they obliterated the comments section on the macworld.com web site! Oh, and they also stopped publishing the print magazine which they’d been publishing since 1984. And froze macosxhints.com in stone in 2013, preventing any new content from being added to it.
A couple of comments:
The size of the iPhones. It seems that a lot of folks want the big model and many of them are the vocal writers in the tech media. I fine with my fun sized iPhone, but I opted for the 15″ iPad Pro.
iCloud storage space. I find that the free amount is fine, but I don’t store everything up there. I take a lot of photos with my iPhone, but most of them are not worth automatically saving to iCloud. We need a way of saving specific photos, not just none or all, I do use PhotoStream whichnis different. Another thing would be to let us choose the iCloud server without resorting to FTP so that I could use my webhost’s servers.