No -- you aren't alone. Whenever I connect my daughter's iPhone to iTunes (say to add more music) we take our lives in our hands. You get scary popups that ask you a question and provides two options -- neither of which is what you want.

I don't know whether this is deliberate on the part of Apple to discourage the use of iTunes, or whether they really think that it works well and is intuitive. For anybody from Apple reading this -- iTunes is not intuitive. It is horrible.

"You get scary popups that ask you a question and provides two options -- neither of which is what you want."

This! One is something like "delete all the music from my iPod" and the other is "delete all the music from my hard drive". How on earth has this situation been allowed to develop?

I'd forgotten all about that question! It's like Apple never considered the possibility that you might connect an iPod and a hard drive with different files and want to keep the union of them.

Similarly, the default setting where Apply tries to copy all of your content to a new iPod when you plug it in, in alphabetical order. I have 300Gb of music, you should know that won't succeed.

Thats just it, they done want to let you keep both files as a way to try and combat piracy (Multiple people syncing all the files theyve bought separately). Its really frustrating, and they will never allow it to happen.

Itunes is the worst.

It can, without asking, delete the music from your device or your folders, reorganize your folders, rename your songs and reset their id3 tags.

The mentality of "our users are stupid, just do everything for them" seems pervasive throughout apple's products.

I only just started using a mac/iphone after many years of only using Linux and Android, and my impression is that although they'd object to the language, yes, that's pretty precisely their business model, and its an insane success. I'm not saying most people actually are stupid, but I'm saying that probably the set of people who either (a) are not stupid and want their computer to do something different than what iTunes automatically does, or (b) somehow, whether by ignorance or villainy, get screwed by a situation like the one in the post, barely register in Apple's statistics. I'm (a). The author is (b). We're edge cases. The moral flavor of Apple's business model will continue to not matter while people keep shoveling over the dollars.

Although (b) is small, it does tend to produce truly vocal enemies enemies of the company.

I had the joy of buying a product that Apple swears doesn't exist ("Our records say we never made a machine with that serial number, so I'm not allowed to put you into the support system.") Three dead logic boards later, I'm done with the company altogether.

I'd like to think that with market penetration nearly complete, Apple will start to face consequences for this. They're depending on beating competitors and pushing upgrades now (instead of selling to new buyers), so lost customers are a bigger threat. I'm not holding my breath, though, it's just too rare.

"our users are stupid, just do everything for them"

Oh, it's worse than that: "we know better than you regardless of your intelligence. trust us: this new UI is better for you; this new media file manager is better for you; this new gesture is better for you" - forget all the work you've done, forget all that time acclimatizing to the last set of UI and gesture changes ...

And it is a mentality that is spreading.

The whole "user is stupid" attitude was basically stated to me by a big name Gnome developer a year or so ago.

And his like seem to have their fingers in more and more of what lives above the Linux kernel (and are likely chomping at the bit to do the same to the kernel itself once Linus is out of the way).

That's because at a conceptual level, a "general purpose computer" is far from an ideal device for rent extraction.

If your user is stupid, they won't be able to manage a general purpose computer but will instead require a well-controlled computing appliance that will dutifully collect all the rents its creators can get away with.

Talk about scary! I managed to unintentionally delete all photos in my aunt's iPad. All I wanted to do was disable iCloud backups. And I am a postdoc in a CS department.

is this related to Apple Music use? I have never encountered this problem with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod. I have music on each and separate settings for all four devices and never once has it asked to delete, let alone with a popup.

No. iTunes is probably the worst piece of widely used software out there.

It's just a UX nightmare, hard to grasp how to do things, almost impossible to grasp what the consequences of doing things are.

I swear iTunes used to work great. When I got my first iPod it did the syncing correctly and played music, and those were about the only jobs it had. It has since bloated more and more, I don't even open it anymore, it's awful on both windows and osx

I have to run an old version of iTunes to have my 4th gen iPod even sync properly. :\

^ 100% agree, it is literally the worst UX design ever!

I'm currently using the 3 month free trial and every time I use it i have to tell myself "it's free money, just 1 more month until I switch back to spotify".

For example, the playlists I create on my laptop don't sync whatsoever with my phone. I spent a little time trying to research how to sync them and just said screw it.

On what planet does a user not want their playlists automatically synced between devices, let alone making that the default option?

Did you ever use Lotus Notes? I agree that iTunes is poorly designed but you can't just toss out "worst UX design ever!" without old Lotus Notes users taking exception.

I'm only 22 years old so no, I haven't had the misfortune of using Lotus Notes. Let me correct myself than, "It is the worst UX I've ever experienced in the 22 years in which I have lived".

True. Lotus Notes on a Mac in particular ;-)

I've always been a Windows/Linux guy, and I never understood the Apple "Just works" motto, because my experience has been largely the same as the issues you've laid out.

iTunes has always been the worst user experience, both for myself and setting it up for the less technically inclined. I've been a firm "no-Apple" camper because Apple products doesn't give you the control if you need it. For an obsessive music fan, fine-tune control over how the product interacts with your library is critical.

I am not surprised at all by the disaster mentioned in the article- it validates the paranoia I've always harboured against Apple products.

In my experience, Apple is the living embodiment of The Hitchhiker's Guide's "things that cannot possibly go wrong".

> The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

They might be slightly more reliable in their most standard use case, but you're doomed at the smallest hiccup.

>Yet everyone tells me that their Apple devices 'just work'. I don't have the same experience - I find their behaviour to be utterly opaque and non-deterministic. Am I alone?

Apple devices haven't "just worked" in over a decade. It's a testament to apples marketing that people still think this.

That's a bit of a stretch. The early iPhones 'just worked'. My Mac used to 'just work'. All was groovy in my Apple life as 'recent' as ~2011.

I wouldn't say my Mac 'just works' anymore, nor my iPhone for that matter. And this is commented on a lot by a lot of prominent Apple bloggers, to the point that it does get responded to by Apple SVPs (see Marco Arment and Phil Schiller)

EDIT: that said, my mum gave up the PC when she got an iPad 2, and was even happier when she got a hand-me-down iPhone 4S. She finds both slow now, but still won't go near the PC anymore. For her, the Apples still 'just work'.

I think we need to make some distinctions here. My Macs and iPhones have proven incredibly durable, reliable, and flexible.

It's the syncing services, specifically, that Apple is screwing up. They never figured this stuff out, even under Steve Jobs.

> Fortune magazine reported that during the summer of 2008, after MobileMe had launched to mostly negative reviews, Apple's CEO Steve Jobs summoned the MobileMe team to a meeting in the Town Hall auditorium at 4 Infinite Loop. After asking them "what MobileMe is supposed to do", when someone answered, Jobs reportedly shot back, "So why the fuck doesn't it do that?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobileMe

I recommend Android for anyone in a position to change.

I plug my Android phone into my Linux laptop. The phone's filesystem is mounted. I move, copy, delete whatever music and photos I want. Dead simple and rational.

I put Flickr on the phone. Photos I take with the phone are automatically backed up to Flickr, and I can see them from anywhere.

I make Android and iOS apps.

But only because people want me to and pay for it... I wouldn't inflict the trauma that is using these on anyone.

I had problems with every single Android I owned, here is the current one:

1. Super slow, even after reformatting everything and reinstalling, it is not even a cheap phone.

2. Terrible interfaces overall, specially as they keep removing physical buttons, and apps started to shove important buttons (like "menu") in random places.

3. The interface thread seemly is prone to freezing, for example yesterday I wanted to use youtube, and the interface froze, and then suddenly opened a video I didn't wanted, and started playing full blast volume and waking people up, and I couldn't figure how to close the damn video, and then suddenly it crashed.

4. This all applies to the actual phone parts... more than once I had to quickly dial someone for some emergency reason (not life or death, but still emergency), and the phone app decide to be slow, or crash, or reboot, and so on.

5. Had the phone app crash on me while I was actually talking to someone.

And this is just my personal phone, in other phones I had one that I had to reinstall and the phone antenna stopped working after the reinstall (it needed a custom antenna driver, that I had to track down on internet and install...), random reboots, slow, extremely fast draining of the battery, specially if you made some mistake like leave a GPS-enabled app running, nevermind the fact that the OS itself is so crap, that every manufacturer ship the phone with several third party apps to fix OS problems (memory managers and defragmenters, app killers, temporary file cleaners, and so on...)

iPhone has another set of problems, but still is problematic. I personally would never buy one (my current client I am testing his iOS code on a device he provided to me...)

The Android ecosystem us chock full of phones at various price points and quality levels, and questionable "value add" software added by OEMS and carriers.

I have been very happy with Nexus phones (going back to Nexus S), and have never experienced any of those issues.

We also have 3 Motorola G phones - which for the money (<200) are really hard to beat. Motorola seems to have not attempted to mess with the stock O/S all that much..

I love my Nexus 5. Add an SD card slot and a fingerprint reader and it'd be the perfect phone, IMO.

This has gotten worse over time as well. It used to be you could mount your phone's storage as a mass storage device, but now (as far as I can tell) MTP is the only option.

Yes, it's MTP with my current phone and linux installation. Is there a problem with this? After I figured out where the filesystem was mounted (a bit of a pain), I could use it like a normal mount, as if it were an external USB drive.

MTP is a bit of a mess.

First off, file access is mediated via software on the Android side. What you are seeing is a database representation of the device FS. And this database can be incorrect (people have in the past deleted folders they thought were empty only to lose files) or used to implement DRM.

Second, it is bloody slow.

Interesting. Is there a way to bypass this and mount the phone as an ordinary filesystem, as in the old days?

Depends on the device. Some offer it, some don't. And those that offer it run into the issue of having partitioned internal storage.

The one benefit of MTP is that Android do not have to unmount the FS you are trying to access.

You need a Linux kernel that offers the feature over the USB port

> Yes, it's MTP with my current phone and linux installation. Is there a problem with this?

For the longest time MTP & Linux was terribly painful, verging on unusable, while mass storage worked perfectly. It bit when I upgraded my Nexus phone and discovered I couldn't get to the files stored on it.

Fortunately, all seems to work well now.

The reason for implementing MTP instead of mass storage was clear, because you couldn't / wouldn't be able to access the files from the phone while the computer was accessing them. So I understand why they went in that direction.

But oh my goodness! MTP support on Linux was terrible for a while, and even on Windows it wasn't fast and reliable. It was easier at the time to just use a service like Dropbox to transfer files to/from the phone, than to use USB.

My HTC One M8 lets me choose between mounting as a drive, MTP, or just charging. Maybe that's a general Marshmallow feature but it's great.

Android, as an ecosystem, it horrible. I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

I have had a similar experience - finding out what is really going on with my iDevices always ends up being a giant time-suck. Things do seem to "just work" as long as you don't go looking too far - which, I imagine, is what most people do. I don't think this is unique to Apple necessarily, just more pronounced due to the "just works" mentality.

I remember reading "In the beginning was the Command Line" and the description of Apple products being hermetically sealed boxes sticks to me to this day. Even though the author said that the essay was obsolete within a year or so of release (due to Apple and OSX), it proves that even over 17(?) years in technology, some things never change. Almost every other ecosystem doesn't obsessively hide every adjustment knob and switch and force you into submitting to their way of doing things like Apple's does.

I got my parents an iPad mini recently and some of the contacts on my mom's phone sync and some of them don't. I am a developer and love tinkering with computers but for the love of me not figure out how to fix this.

I recently spent a good chunk of a day troubleshooting the problem "when certain people message my account on Apple Mail, I get the message twice."

Confirmed that it wasn't user error, and was common, never made got another inch of headway. My eventual diagnosis was "at least you're getting the message!"

Yeah I got my daughter a new Mac and synced it up to the iCloud so she could iMessage from the desktop and she got an odd (incomplete) set of contacts that don't seem to match any other device.

These are my main qualms with software these days: Logic went out of the window. Back in the days a good deal of software had great, albeit complex menus. The typical non-techy hated these interfaces because they didn't get results immediately and by not having an interest in technology most ruled out the idea of putting in some effort to learn the piece of software at hand. (no pain, no gain - duh!)

Next, companies "figured out" that usability is soo important and that it needs to get fixed because customers were having trouble. This was generally a wrong conclusion. Getting rid of complex menus doesn't necessarily increase usability. It irritates power users to no end and doesn't help casual users when they run into special cases. Heck, even the power users can't help the casual user anymore!

Every not completely trivial app(lication) should offer at least additionally a "complex" mode that offers a good old menu bar where deterministic, to some degree "atomic" functions (if you pardon the faulty analogy) are offered, grouped in a logically consistent way.

Yeah I had the exact same issue with syncing externally purchased music whilst using apple music, I honestly could not believe apple has delivered software that behaves in such a user hostile manner. It hurts their reputation and convinced me to give up on some music.

Not so much devices (rarely come into contact with them), but this is what finally pushed me away from iTunes - https://i.imgur.com/JUIXKTd.jpg

For various reasons, I have multiple Apple IDs with iTunes content linked to them (old account, new account, various region changes over the years etc.). At some point, Apple decided that you could only download past purchases with _one_ Apple ID per computer per ninety days, effectively locking me out of the content unless I had a local copy[1] and was using a pre-authorised PC (for context, this was after Apple had done the "It's all in the cloud; just stream it" push for movies etc.).

I ended up getting around it by firing up a bunch of virtual machines (one per Apple ID), downloading everything I end, striping off the DRM, and then never using iTunes again for anything other than music (and even then I favour CDs first and other download sources second).

I'd certainly been a long time coming (2010ish iTunes handled my large-ish media library fine, and the UI was fine. By 2014ish, every release was feeling slower and slower, and the UI felt more and more like the iOS interfaced backported to PC), but that was the final straw. Currently moving over to foobar2000 for music (technically I could just point it at my music folders and be done, but I'm taking the opportunity to make sure everything is tagged properly).

[1] Which of course I keep on my NAS, but a) I'm not always on my local network and b) I'm not always 100% diligence about making sure a copy ends up there.

> I ended up getting around it by firing up a bunch of virtual machines (one per Apple ID), downloading everything I end, striping off the DRM, and then never using iTunes again for anything other than music (and even then I favour CDs first and other download sources second).

This is ingenious and also hilarious if it weren't so damn tragic.

I owned my first MacBook 3 years ago. To me, the MacBook "just work" as much as any new Windows laptops I came across. So I'm clueless as to where did the phrase "just work" came from. Maybe Windows has improved over the years, or maybe a lot of things are done of the web now, the OS doesn't really matter as long as there is a browser.

'Just works' comes from the days of XP and before, where every doodad you plugged into your computer required its own driver disk on Windows. Even if something came with it's own drivers in that era, you'd get an installer wizard that you'd have to navigate through.

Back to DOS, You have to load your MXCDEX001 driver in order to use your CD-ROM.

You should try Windows 10, I've been Apple free for a while now. I'll never go back to OS X.

I don't know if I'm alone, but I find Windows 10 horrible. It consistently freezes on me for several seconds at a time (and usually when I'm doing something important), it takes longer to fully boot (background services seem to take way longer to start), it uses an incredible amount of CPU and disk in the background for no reason, the new Control Panel is impossible to sort through, and the overall UI/UX is a step backwards (IMO)--and all that without mentioning the privacy concerns. I'm really kicking myself for upgrading, because I thought Windows 7 was a really great OS. I ended up switching to Linux Mint, and have been very happy with it overall.

I can't comment on Win10 per se, because I haven't seen a compelling set of features that would cause me to upgrade my Win7 machine.

Win7 is essentially what WinXP was a few years ago; it's not perfect, but it's familiar and it gets the job done and it stays out of the way (most of the time). As a user, Microsoft has to offer me something significant if they want me to spend time learning something new, and I've not yet seen it.

Win 10 is to Win 8 what Win 7 was to Vista.

For me:

Windows 10 is to Win 7 what Win ME was to XP.

ME precedes XP, both architecturally and by release date. Can you clarify?

I run win10 at home since beta and also admin multiple windows machines at work. None have that issue. I would say with utmost certainty that something else is amiss. All of my machines run faster and smoother on win10.

Oh, I'm not saying the freezing is a general Windows 10 issue; I'll fully admit that there might be something wrong with my install. But it's just frustrating that it started happening on a fresh install of Windows 10 (not an upgrade) before I even installed anything abnormal. And there are others reporting the exact same issue as me, so I know I'm not the only one. We're talking about operating systems that "just work", and for me, Windows 10 didn't.

Weird, Windows 10/8/8.1 have incredibly fast boot times compared to 7, especially if you're on a SSD. The Control Panel is the same as 7 was, the "Settings Panel" is what is new...but it has a search feature. Sounds like to me, maybe you barely tried it; also the "privacy concerns" have been disproven countless times.

It boots quickly, but the background services take longer to start. There are a couple programs (AutoHotkey scripts and the like) that I run on startup, and those take significantly longer to start after boot than on Windows 7. And you're right about the control panel, but the new settings I've found to be extremely difficult to navigate; I even have a hard time searching for some of them. (Of course this is something that you get used to over time, but we're talking about things that "just work", and that's not one of them IMO.)

Re: Privacy: Maybe not directly a privacy concern, but one of my biggest issues with Windows 10 (and 8) is how many things are now out of your control. For instance, you can't disable automatic updates or the built-in antivirus for more than a short while. Given that, it's easy to imagine Microsoft pushing out a privacy-invading setting that you have to manually opt out of, which you won't do until you know about it.

I wouldn't say I barely tried it; I've had it installed since December and used it full-time for about a month before dual-booting Linux (and I still use it for gaming). Maybe I wouldn't be so frustrated with it if it didn't regularly freeze for several seconds at a time, because that's really the biggest issue I have with it (and I know I'm not the only one), but I'd say I gave it a pretty fair shot. Aside from losing access to a couple programs (which is why I dual-boot), I'm happy with Linux Mint.

Except that the Win8/10 fast boot time is a cheat; it's basically just hibernate mode. If you do a "restart" instead of a "shutdown" it will go through the full boot process, and that (on the Win10 boxes I've seen) is little or no faster than it was on 7.

I'm running 10 on a 3.5 year old i7 at home, and a brand new i7 at work.

I haven't had any significant problems with freezing and boot times.

I am a little biased as I'm doing C# MVC so I'm using Visual Studio, I think it's all pretty great.

You do have to get used to the new control panel, but all of the old panels are still there for you to use (I am nearly 100% sure), but it's not really _that_ bad. You get used to it.

I run Android on my phone so I'm pretty sure that overall I have no real privacy from any agency that really want to get in to my business... oh well.

Windows works fine for me, if I have any issues with it. It's due some anti-virus slowing things down and windows search service

"amount of CPU and disk in the background for no reason"

That's probably from the built-in spyware and forced upgrade processes that run in the background.

Try turning off Windows search service and the default Windows anti-virus

It "just works" if you fully buy into the ecosystem. i.e. all content stored in iCloud nothing synced via cable etc.

I happen to do this since i tend to need a new iPhone every 2-4 months and it's just easier to pick up a new one, sign in and let it set itself up exactly as the old one.

But anything that deviates from this workflow, you tend to run into problems.

> i tend to need a new iPhone every 2-4 months

umm... what?

Yer. it could be fairly argued i don't care for it well.

But honestly the iPhone 6 is the most breakable thing i've ever owned.

Yeah... 3 iPhones a year... what? Care to explain why?

i find the iPhone 6 to be very breakable, case or no case.

it could be argued i don't care for it that well.

My iPhone currently has two apps that somehow failed to install, and I can't delete them or open them. I tried rebooting the phone, signing in and out of the Apple store, all to no avail.

Also try force rebooting your device by pressing the home and sleep buttons simultaneously for several seconds.

This - the magic fix for 99% of issues.

Yet, people still buy it. They agree to pay for a product, at a bug price, and ask for people around them to do Apple's work to setup it up for them, but for free.

And they find that very natural. Normal.

Like they found normal 20 years ago we had to help them with their MS product they paid, but for free.

Agreed on all points, but email accounts have always been a breeze for me on iOS, although it's a bit limited it always did the basic stuff very well.