Most of your issues seemed like the old, rehashed ones from nearly a decade ago.
Photos is pretty great too, but I’m not sure how it compares to other photo services.
Obviously that's not the only reason, haha, it's gotten surprisingly good a few years ago. Public transit and cycling is better in Google (though nothing beats CityMapper for transit if it supports your city). But for walking and driving Apple Maps is my winner.
A quick google search to see if it was simply because of beta or there is a limited roll out, produced this:
>New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Shanghai and Beijing in China.
Mail is definitely a local app, even if they did screw the pooch pretty badly with that gmail bug they had a few years ago.
No. Strictly speaking, iCloud doesn’t even do backups; it syncs data. Difference is that, with backups, you can get a copy back if you accidentally throw away a file. You typically also have multiple ‘old’ copies.
iWork apps (1) kind-of have backups in the form of versions that get synced to the cloud (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205411), but I think that’s implemented independently from iCloud’s syncing (You can use it to have multiple versions of a document locally, too)
(1) Third-party apps can use this, too (https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...), but I wouldn’t know how commonly this is used
There’s literally a switch called “iCloud Backup” in Settings though. This isn’t a per-app data sync, it’s the full device restore that you can use if your phone gets stolen, dropped in the ocean, etc.
Although you should consider not using it for privacy reasons and running backups to a local machine instead, since last we heard Apple has the encryption keys and will happily hand the entire contents your phone to law enforcement given a warrant.
However, Apple operates many services at scales few companies ever reach, and doesn't seem to have outages much more often than those other few companies. So they're clearly doing a lot of things incredibly well, in the if-things-work-you-don't-notice sense.
They don't seem to emphasize their cloud services like Google does, and Apple charges for theirs at a much lower level than Google does, but I'm starting to think my vague intuition is wrong.
I don't know why anyone would think that Apple would make a web page search engine like Google. Apple has already launched the Apple version in your phones integrated into the software you use.
I don't use Siri or any assistant, so I don't seem to use what I'm being averaged into using. Majority opinion here is that Siri is seriously lacking behind the other offerings. Apple won't be oblivious to this. If it is solely due to their back-end search engine, then making that a public search engine website won't do Apple any favors if the results are truly that bad.
Yes I realize that the App Store has ads and it is a stain that should not have ever happened.
Apple isn't an ad-supported business. It's not going to look like Google. It looks the way it's already released.
That they use their own search for this is not a big headlining marketing feature so they aren’t really evaluated on it.
I do think that’s a direct consequence of their experience with Maps, though I guess their hand was more forced on Maps and they had to tell the world about it.
However, using Siri and search suggestion they can, bit by bit, replace search results from other sources with their own without telling anyone about it. It’s a more careful approach.
But the SEO market would certainly change if webmasters suddenly have to appeal to more than just Google to be successful.
How does this benefit Apple? They’re a hardware company.
How does a search engine sell more hardware?
They don’t have Google as the default search because of the money, they have it because they think it is the best. Even despite the privacy problems and the control this grants Google.
How does a maps service sell more hardware? Because using their own maps service Apple can completely control the experience.
Now maps was hard and search is much harder still so we may very well never see this released. But even then they can use this as leverage while negotiating with Google, both for money and for control.
Because your claim about them being a hardware company is incorrect.
They market themselves as a privacy focused company. Privacy is all about software and services, not hardware. Search is something they could add to their portfolio to strengthen their privacy stance.
Also, Apples main revenue isn’t hardware but services IIRC. They’re not a hardware company.
Services are ca. 18% of Apple’s revenue, after years of huge spending and tons of dedicated effort to grow this segment. The fact that it is as high as a fifth is itself a monumental feat.
Hardware sales of the iPhone alone, excluding all computers, AirPods, and iPads, is over 40%.
The last 10% quickly gets very expensive tho.
Apple’s view is that you consented to this sort of unaccountable invisible tracking by dozens of third parties (against whom you have zero recourse), when you agreed to the TOS of the App Store.
The data is aggregated, sold, and resold again.