A Quick First-World-Problems Technology Rant.

This is going to be a quick first-world-problems technology rant. I will try to keep it short.

So I have an iPhone, and its great. I have an Apple TV, and its great. These things are great as long as they’re working.

Last year I had an iPhone 5 and it was great. I really liked it. I also have a Chromebook, which I genuinely love. People make fun of me, but I love it deep down in my heart; it is simple. It updates itself, it turns on right away. It doesn’t weigh very much. It is integrated with Google Drive and for awhile last year everything was great. I had the Drive app on my iPhone 5 and I could write something on my Chromebook and throughout the day I could go through and edit it on my phone. Everything just worked.

Then my iPhone 5 stopped charging. I tried a bunch of stuff and then went to the Apple store and the dude there looked at it and told me the pins were dead and that once the battery died, the phone would be a brick. There was, apparently no solution. So then I went to Sprint and the dude there was GREAT, he found a way to renew my contract (at a lower price) and get me a new iPhone. That dude was awesome.

But then I had the new phone and for some reason all the memory was eaten up, somehow, by the old phone and I couldn’t back up the new phone or run the new upgrade (the new upgrade on my BRAND NEW PHONE). I read all of the internet trying to fix this, but it didn’t matter. Finally Apple wore me down and I bought the goddamn additional storage package for $0.99 a month and I was completely pissed off about it. I felt like I was being completely screwed with my pants on for precisely $0.99 a month. For less than $12 a year, Apple was perfectly happy dick me over. Wouldn’t it be easier to simply make something that worked properly? And I really think that the answer is ‘Yes’, only they wouldn’t bleed an extra $12 out of me that year.

So fine, I upgraded my storage and I ran the updates. Then I realized that with the new update my Photostream was gone. For those of you not using Apple, there were two main folders for photos; the Camera Roll (which held all of your photos) and the Photostream (which you could curate). Well I have an Apple TV and it has a function that will stream the Photostream pictures as a screensaver. I really like that. It has been one of the small joys in my life that, while I am working on schoolwork at home I can put on some music and let my custom-build screensaver do its thing. Well once the Camera Roll disappeared, so did my ability to curate. This pissed me off in a way that even I will admit is disproportional, but as I said, this ability to curate was one of the small things about my existence that I found real joy in and I am all about finding joy in the small things.

BUT THEN! There was ANOTHER update, so I ran that one and then the Photostream was back! Hooray! Except that then my Apple TV stopped working. BOO!

I tried to recover it but couldn’t because I don’t own the proper Apple-only cable that I would have needed to do that. So I went online to get the phone number for the local store to make an appointment, only I couldn’t make an appointment online because I don’t pay for the proper sort of account which would allow me to make an appointment online. So I went down to the store (it took a week to get down there because I was very busy) and they set me up with an appointment and told me it would be an hour, so I went to buy some pants (because I was at the mall, which I don’t go to very often and because I needed some pants), I came back after 45 minutes and they said, “Oh, we already called you and you weren’t here” and I said, “That’s because you told me it would be an hour.” I realize now that what I was supposed to do was hang out in the store so that I would play with all their stuff and then want to buy some more of their stuff and I object to that because I like my Capitalism to at least put in the work of being a little bit less obviously manipulative than that.

Finally I waited another half an hour and finally someone could see me. That dude played with the Apple TV, then decided that it was dead and simply gave me a new one. When I asked what had happened, the dude said he didn’t know. So sure, it is great that they just opened a box and handed me a new one, but all I really ever wanted was for the original one to simply work.  

That brings us about up to speed except that the other day I was reading the “Tips” thing on my phone and it said something along the lines of, “You have a lot of photos on your phone, why not try the iCloud Photo Library Beta?” Well this made sense to me because it had always bothered me that none of the photos on my phone could be accessed when I logged into iCloud. So I turned the iCloud Photo Library Beta thing on and now my photos are all there and accessible through the iCloud.

Yay?

No.

Now my goddamn Photostream is gone again! I am so fucking frustrated. I went online to read the various complaints like this one and found out that if I turn off the iCloud Photo Library Beta that I have to download all of the photos back to my phone, but I am looking at my phone and the memory usage is the same as it was before, so I’m not sure where the photos are right now.

This is all very confusing and frustrating and that is my larger point (I do have one, I’m not just bitching). I remember that back in the day when Apple was trying to build its market share, that their products were incredibly easy to use. That was one of the selling points: they were intuitive. Apple made Microsoft seem like this big, bloated, slow, uncaring, hegemonic, money-grubbing machine that didn’t work very well. Well, after all of this, that is how I feel about Apple now. So every time I hear that they are making more money than oil companies, I start to think that it is because they are behaving more like oil companies. Sure, their products are great, but I’m beginning to see that there is a very looooooooong tail of costs that come with these products. The thing that pisses me off most is that I’m not seeing the virtue in the things that are being done here. I don’t give two shits about their new iWatch; I just want the things I have already paid for to work the way I was led to believe they were going to when I bought them. I don’t feel like Apple treats me as a customer, I feel like they are treating me as a pupil.

Now this is not just an Apple rant. As I said, I use Google Drive and they did this idiotic thing last year where they separated the individual kinds of files into different apps. This means that I had to download a separate Google Docs app onto my phone in order to continue editing on the fly the way I had been doing before. What used to require ONE app now requires TWO apps. That is a pain in the ass, but the big difference here is that Google Drive is completely free. When they do something stupid I know that it is because of some misguided desire to improve, not out of a sycophantic desire to squeeze more money out of me.

Quite ironically, I learned this week that Microsoft offers something called Office Online, which works exactly like Google Drive but allows me to create real Word documents in the cloud (my only complaint about my Chromebook has always been that its functionality with Word totally blows). So now I am in a situation where Apple seems like a big, bloated, slow, uncaring, hegemonic, money-grubbing machine that doesn’t work very well, while the combination of $200 Chromebook and a completely free Microsoft app offer me (a writer and grad student) the same capability that a $1,200 Apple laptop would.

At the moment I am so desperate and frustrated that I am actually writing all of this down. When my contract is up with Sprint in about a year, I am seriously going to consider not staying with the iPhone. I love the capabilities of the iPhone and having had a Samsung Galaxy in the past, I understand that the iPhone is better, but what it isn’t, is better enough to bridge the gap in trust that Apple has dug with me over the past year.  It should not be true that I trust Google and Microsoft - fucking Google and Microsoft, I know! - more than I trust Apple right now.

And this is all to say nothing about Foxconn and how guilty every single one of us should be feeling about all that.

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