Apple Stole My Music

Re:Apple Stole My Music by delinka on Thursday May 05, 2016 @07:14AM (#11635126)

"I can't think of a single reason why Apple would want to delete the files from the user's computer..."

Well, to save precious local storage space of course. Apple's just being helpful here.

But seriously, sounds like a "good idea" gone wrong - "I know! Let's save the user some space by serving all their music from the cloud!" The moment that file deletion came up in the design, the option to opt-in should have been added. Unless someone at Apple did indeed intend lock-in ...

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by jlg23 on Thursday May 05, 2016 @08:24AM (#11635418)

The funny thing is: Disk space is only worth more than bandwidth in a few select 1st-world countries. I've been traveling in rural areas of South America for about 18 months now and regularly I had to turn off my MacBook because its automatic update "features" were consuming all of the available bandwidth, making it impossible for anybody to actually work.

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by JadeNB on Thursday May 05, 2016 @11:12AM (#11636794)

> I had to turn off my MacBook because its automatic update "features" were consuming all of the available bandwidth

Which automatic update features, by the way? While I definitely don't like or defend such features, all the ones that I know about can be turned off—which gives a more useable result than having to turn off the whole computer! Maybe my Mac is silently doing some behind-the-scenes updating that I haven't noticed hitting my data, though.

(Windows 10 is the real pig here, though. Bye-bye, option to download only on request! Bye-bye, this month's data allowance before I realised that it was downloading what turned out to be a huge update! I did eventually discover how to designate a connection as 'metred', a nice feature that I wish Mac OS had.)

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by dingo_bat on Thursday May 05, 2016 @07:46AM (#11635253)

> Well, to save precious local storage space of course. Apple's just being helpful here.

Yeah, storage that was made precious by apple by not supporting an SD card slot. Very "helpful".

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by oarsinsync on Thursday May 05, 2016 @09:30AM (#11635876)

This isn't about a lack of expandable storage (all Macs have at least one USB port, some come with SD card slots), but rather that a lot of Macs come with very small SSDs.

I can totally see how this might have seemed like a good idea. Shame it's just... not.

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by dingo_bat on Thursday May 05, 2016 @12:21PM (#11637443)

I was kinda assuming the iphone here. Didn't think the app on a desktop OS would show that behavior. Is this true? Do people really run out of space on laptops and desktops due to photos?

I just checked the apple website and it seems you're right. 3 out of the 5 available Macbook pro variants have <= 256GB storage.

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by oarsinsync on Monday May 09, 2016 @09:34AM (#11659679)

> I had just explained to Amber that 122 GB of music files were missing from my laptop

This is very much about a laptop rather than a phone. And yep, I'm also suffering from this. I've got a 2010 MacBook Air with 256GB storage. I'm down to 10GB free space and struggling to decide how to cope with the now 160GB Photos library.

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by tim333 on Thursday May 05, 2016 @08:29AM (#11635447)

It could be helpful if they asked you first so you could back your stuff up to an external hard drive first.

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by JadeNB on Thursday May 05, 2016 @11:13AM (#11636808)

I think that delinka (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11635126) was being sarcastic (as evidenced by the next paragraph beginning "But seriously …").

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by JimDabell on Thursday May 05, 2016 @12:43PM (#11637652)

> Yeah, storage that was made precious by apple by not supporting an SD card slot.

This is an article about music in iTunes on a laptop. Apple sells laptops with SD card slots.

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by dingo_bat on Thursday May 05, 2016 @01:50PM (#11638264)

Yeah I kind of just assumed that it was talking about phones. Can't imagine running out of space for photos on a laptop.

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by Kadin on Thursday May 05, 2016 @09:45AM (#11635982)

On what devices is that really a good tradeoff? On mobile, sure (at least, on mobile devices like Apple's that don't have SD cards), but on a regular computer? I find it very hard to imagine that most people are more constrained by storage than bandwidth. Internet access just isn't that good. I can barely stream music over WiFi in many public places (coffee shops, airports, etc.).

If that's really the rationale, I think they're either optimizing for a use case that I find personally very atypical, or they didn't do their research.

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by danielweber on Thursday May 05, 2016 @10:54AM (#11636611)

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061101-03/?p=...

I often find myself saying, “I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature.”

“That feature” is something aggressively user-hostile . . .

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by Lawtonfogle on Thursday May 05, 2016 @09:56AM (#11636100)

>But seriously, sounds like a "good idea" gone wrong

Don't contribute to stupidity what can adequately be explained by malice, especially when dealing with a massive company who hires quite intelligent individuals.

Lock-in was intended, and then some smart people found not just a way to sell it, but make it look more acceptable even if they were called out on it.

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by NoGravitas on Thursday May 05, 2016 @08:13AM (#11635361)

My phone has very limited local storage, so I can't keep photos on it. Fortunately, ownCloud implements this "good idea" basically right. I have "instant upload on WiFi" turned on for photos and videos. It uploads them to my ownCloud server, and then moves them from the system photos directory to its own directory if successful. It doesn't delete them from there, but I know that if something's in the ownCloud directory on my phone, it's backed up and available online, so I can clear it out periodically.

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by SyneRyder on Thursday May 05, 2016 @07:23AM (#11635164)

I imagine their thinking (as flawed as it is) is that it frees up local disk space for the user. If you've got a base level MacBook Air with just a 128GB SSD, maybe it seems beneficial to have a 40GB iTunes library stored entirely in the cloud on demand, and suddenly have 30% disk space freed up.

Apple have a similar philosophy with Photos, where the photos on your device are just low resolution versions, with the original hi-resolution versions kept on iCloud, if you choose the Optimize Device Storage setting. [1]

Not a philosophy I agree with. I like to keep my data local so I can use it offline. It's one reason I bought a 2012 MBP - I could get 1TB of storage cheaply, and I can upgrade it to a 1TB SSD myself for half the price of what Apple charges (Apple charges $800 for a 1TB SSD in Australia).

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT204264

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by pmontra on Thursday May 05, 2016 @08:39AM (#11635521)

People shouldn't buy a computer with only 128 GB nowadays and have to use the network as storage. Ok, they want to sync across devices, still having at least one of them with a large storage makes sense.

SSDs are getting cheap http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-75E1T0B-A...

That's $320 for 1TB. Still 4x than a HDD but the difference in absolute price is getting down.

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by oneeyedpigeon on Thursday May 05, 2016 @09:48AM (#11636014)

You're not taking into account the fact that you can't easily replace the hard drive in a Mac laptop, nor the fact that Apple charges a huge markup on storage. I went with a 128 GB drive in my macbook to save money, and because I didn't want to use it as a mass-media storage device (I have a desktop for that).

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by junto on Thursday May 05, 2016 @07:50AM (#11635271)

I'd seriously been considering a Macbook, for home use, mainly due to the iPhoto app, since on Windows there is only Google Picasa, and they've killed it.

If there anyway to turn off that syncing and keep files locally only? Your comments have made me rethink my upcoming purchase!

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by ar0 on Thursday May 05, 2016 @08:01AM (#11635315)

Yes, that is absolutely possible. In fact, it is the default option, you explicitly need to enable both "iCloud Photo Library" (which activates your photos being stored on iCloud) and "Optimize Mac Storage" (which deletes the full-resolution photos from your Mac).

This is exactly how it should be, and how apparently it is not for Apple Music. At least this is true for today, who knows whether what is optional today might become the only option tomorrow...

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by SyneRyder on Thursday May 05, 2016 @08:48AM (#11635579)

ar0 is correct, it's now the default option. (I think at the beginning of the Photos beta it was the opposite.) To be super sure, you might want to double check your settings, Macworld has a how to guide here:

http://www.macworld.com/article/2955637/software-photography...

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by mratzloff on Thursday May 05, 2016 @08:48AM (#11635577)

I have never enabled iCloud anything. There's an option during setup to skip iCloud setup.

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by stevehawk on Thursday May 05, 2016 @11:34AM (#11637006)

problem is it only takes once..

i once accidentally enabled it on my phone and now, even though i have a reported 2300 songs on my phone.. as soon as i lose signal i have no music.. itunes wont even open up to a playlist in airplane mode.. made even better that it "syncs" my music when i plug in and reports the storage usage in GB.. its just not accessible...

apple's pushing of everyone into the cloud has me switching to Android in a couple of months when I move. I'm done with their shit.

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by ambulancechaser on Thursday May 05, 2016 @11:20AM (#11636865)

I uploaded all of my music to Google Play and deleted it off of my computer. When I get a new computer I only really need my google credentials and then between google drive and google play music I'm up to speed. I install a few packages and I'm at home. I have no need to keep my music there.

Thus there certainly is a reason to do this. Its how photos work on iphones and androids as well. You take pictures, they are put on the cloud, space can be freed up. Its not a malicious workflow

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by jpindar on Thursday May 05, 2016 @01:59PM (#11638345)

That's not how photos work on any of my Androids. The original files are on the phone, and if I need to make space I can move them to a computer via USB (or dropbox, email, etc.).

You must have the Google photos sync option (or something like that) enabled.

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by code4life on Thursday May 05, 2016 @10:47AM (#11636539)

I imagine it's intended to be a feature. You can instantly listen to any of your songs on any device.

They should have just left it on the local drive as well. Terrible.

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by Too on Sunday May 08, 2016 @04:35AM (#11653226)

Ransomware at its best.

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Re:Apple Stole My Music by givinguflac on Thursday May 05, 2016 @08:22AM (#11635410)

This article is total BS. Maybe this one guy ran into an issue, but everyone I know uses Apple Music and has not had a single file deleted.

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