I am rapidly losing faith in Apple products. I mean, seriously. Over the last few months, here’s a sample of the ridiculous issues I have been facing.
iPhone 4S
- Random freezes where the unit seems to power down, but sucks battery like crazy, getting hot and draining it to almost 0 within 1 hour.
- Various apps, including iTunes, randomly crashing for no apparent reason.
- Siri? ah Siri. Well, she’s still in beta, so I won’t complain about how it is sometimes down for days at at time.
- Update: The evening after I posted this, iTunes would not open. It just kept immediately closing every time I tried. Then the iPhone would not shut down. I had to do a soft reset to be able to power it off again.
OS 10.7
- While the system itself seems stable, I have random, spontaneous crashes or freezes with nearly every application I use on a regular basis, including, but not limited to:
- gedit
- Thunderbird, Firefox, Seamonkey
- Safari
- Evernote
- iTunes. In addition to crashing and iCloud issues (see below), I attempted to authorize a new PC today so that I could share an app or two. After entering my Apple ID username and password, the dialog box silently went away. It wasn’t until significant time had passed that I realized I was attempting to authorize the 6th PC (out of my allowed 5) that this was the problem. Hey, Apple! How about, you know, a little message or something saying “you’re over your limit’ instead of just failing silently?
- Microsoft Remote Desktop
- Microsoft Crash Reporter (which makes me chuckle)
- Address Book
- Quicksilver (which I’m not using anymore)
- iCal. In addition to crashing at least once per day, it consistently creates appointments which I cannot delete. Actually not true. I delete them, and within minutes, they come back. The only way I can delete them is from the Google Calendar interface.
AppleTV
- Constantly having to reboot the thing to get it to play from iOS devices.
- Regularly drops its connection to iOS devices.
- Inconsistently will or won’t access shared libraries.
- I can sometimes play a movie or music from shared library on my MacBook Pro via my iPad, but I cannot play it directly from AppleTV.
iCloud
- This new service is really unpredictable. I uploaded a new album to iCloud yesterday on my MacBook Air. It’s still not on my MacBook Pro today. I even deleted the local copies on my MBA, and have the option to download them again, but they don’t show anywhere on the MBP. Next to “Music” in the upper left pane in iTunes, the little cloud is spinning away, seemingly indicating that it’s doing something, but I don’t see anything happening.
Update: After installing iTunes 10.5.2, my missing music magically appeared on the MacBook Pro. - This whole “you can’t sync music that’s not in the cloud to your iOS device” is absurd. Give me a way to put stuff on the iPhone if I can’t upload it into iCloud!
- I have Spin.com’s playlist for August, which I DOWNLOADED VIA iTUNES and it won’t let me sync it to iCloud. Huh? I got this music from YOU, Apple!
I didn’t want to believe the “Apple will tank now that Steve is dead” crowd, but wow! The evidence is really starting to back them up. Apple’s products feel more like Microsoft every day. That’s just sad. Please, Apple, wake up and pay attention to quality.