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> It just manages itself, and all that hard problems (backups, updates, ease of use, experience homogenity, etc.) are solved. My wife switched away from an iPh
by RHSeeger 4y ago
> It just manages itself, and all that hard problems (backups, updates, ease of use, experience homogenity, etc.) are solved.
My wife switched away from an iPhone an an Android device less than a year ago exactly because this _wasn't_ the case.
- Restore from backup failed... pretty much impossible to solve as far as we could tell
- Tell iTunes what songs you want loaded onto your phone and sync. Then leave the house and it downloads some of the songs off the internet, because it _didn't_ actually sync them to the phone. It just loads a placeholder. Pretty severe impact for someone not on an unlimited plan.
- Ran into a problem and had to get the music library from itunes/phone. I don't recall the exact details (it was years ago), but every song had been renamed to some random alphanumeric string. It took a long time to fix them.
Honestly, it was one long series of the system doing something that clearly wasn't what she, as the user, would expect (or exactly _not_ what she told it to do).
- koenvdb 4y agoTo be fair, most people using an iPhone don't download music onto their phones but instead just use Spotify/Apple Music/whatever other music service is hot at the moment. It still sucks, but this is a fairly specific usecase imo.
- RHSeeger 4y agoFor anyone that isn't on an unlimited data plan, being able to play music located on the device is critical.
- danaris 4y agoYou list several fairly serious failures that are absolutely not typical. I have had to restore my iDevices from backups several times. It has worked flawlessly every time. I have been syncing my music library from iTunes to my iDevices since well before the iPhone existed. The only times I have ever had a problem with songs not being on the iPhone are when a) I wasn't actually syncing my whole library, but a subset, and I had forgotten which songs I hadn't synced, or b) the songs failed to sync, and iTunes/Finder gave me a big dialog box saying so, with a message explaining why for each individual song that didn't sync. This is true for songs I bought through the iTunes Store as well as those from other sources. Does this mean I expect these things to work perfectly for everyone, every time? No, of course not. I've had my share of problems with all my Apple devices. But it does mean that either because of user error or unusually bad products (ie, you got a lemon), your experience is not typical.
- RHSeeger 4y ago> The only times I have ever had a problem with songs not being on the iPhone are when But would you even notice if the song showed up in your itunes list "as if" it was on the phone but, when you played it, it grabbed it off the internet (with not delay, because it streams it). I expect most people wouldn't notice this at all. > But it does mean that either because of user error or unusually bad products - The issue with it loading songs (that you have told it to put on the phone) from the internet is, as far as I was able to determine, intended behavior. - The issue with it renaming every song to a "random" alphanumeric string is, also as far as I was able to determine, intended behavior. Although needing to get the songs "back out of itunes" is, I imagine, an edge case. - The failed backup restore, I have nothing on. It didn't work, but it was long enough ago that I don't recall why. I do not think it was faulty hardware. It could have been user error... but the entire point of the iphone argument is "it just works"; "you didn't do it right" isn't really a reasonable response in that context. Especially when you consider we really couldn't find a way to recover from it.