How I Escaped From Apple Island. Part Two

For those of you who read Part 1 I apologize for the long gap between that article and publishing Part 2. The reality is that even writing this got me so riled up that I could only edit it in small chunks and would constantly need to stop and take very deep breaths.

When it came to ugrading my iPhone I got stuck on the iPhone X Max. I’d bought my girlfriend the 12 Max when it came out, and seeing her struggle with weight of that thing, and the sharp non ergonomic edges I thought I’d wait for the 13 – rumored to be a radical upgrade.

Except that it wasn’t any kind of radical. It was the same phone with some minor differences. The only thing that went forward was the price each time.

So I held out for the 14. Mmm, same thing.

Then the 15 – even worse.

And this became the pattern for Apple. Whereas the world had once been fixated on every utterance from polo necked Steve Jobs, people were now reacting ‘so what?’ to the announcements coming out from Tim Cook – a man who looked for all the world like that weirdo guy from accounting doing a party turn at the office party.

Meanwhile on the other side of Tech Planet, something extraordinary was happening.
Android phones had gone from nasty tacky designs to some ok ones. After all Samsung made the iPhone screens so they knew a thing or two. But the designs always let them down for me. That and the meddling in Android of The Do No Evil corporation (no names, no pack drill, but we all know who they are).

So I waited for the 15. Absolutely zero progress. And by this time the Apple led by bean counter Tim Cook with his cringeworthy imitation of Job’s new product presentations was only interested in collecting their blackmail level fees from the App Store and inventing useless items that no one wanted, including that awful electric car and a virtual reality helmet that not even ubernerd Elon would be seen dead wearing.

You may not remember but Apple’s prime source of income – the fees from sales on the App Store came about entirely by accident and only because third party software developers begged Apple to give them access to Developer Kits so they could make apps for the Apple products. At that point Apple honestly believed that they alone had all the apps and software that anyone would need.

Then suddenly, an announcment. Apple decided they would let third parties develop apps that would only be available via the App Store. Bingo, a mega income stream was created. Apple these days would have you believe it was all part of the big plan, but dig around and you will find the real history.

During this time the usefulness of Macs also declined drastically. No longer was it possible to upgrade. You bought it, you lived with the spec.

Want to upgrade to a more powerful chip? Buy a new model.

Want to add more space to the meagre internal drives? Buy a new model.

Apple’s answer to customers who complained that their new Macs were not as fast as advertised were told by Apple to upgrade to a better spec. If you trawl Apple official forums the amount of fanboy replies to people with genuinely shocking issues was often ‘buy a new one’. This is still the most common response on the official Apple forums to anyone asking why and challenging the cult of Cook. If it was still the cult of Jobs I doubt this Mac user of 30 years would ever have been here writing this!

When I bought the M1 it was with the hope that, finally, Apple was catching up with the Intel world.
But I forgot about the ever present Apple hubris. Ninety percent of developers had absolutely no clue how the M chips would work until after Apple started selling them.

Overnight, most of my music plugins stopped working. What to do? Searching the forums the answer was – run them in Rosetta!
Rosetta was a wrapper that allowed Intel Macs to open older software on M chips. A wrapper on a wrapper. Slow and clunky, any benefits of supposed speed were lost by this uneccessary need for Rosetta.

It’s worth noting that Native Instruments (the Apple level of arrogrance music software company) didn’t even bother to upgrade Kontakt until the M2 had been released.

But according to Apple’s own performance graphs – that actually were just lines on a grid and by this time had no x and y legend to actually prove the always upward trend of their graphs – the M1 was the second coming. There was nothing else like it! Well, there was nothing else like it in the Apple world for sure, but over on the PC side things had been way faster for years.

What we didn’t realise at the time was that Apple would be building their future M chips on the same base chips, but they would be crippling the power of these chips by software throttling. By the time we got to the M3 unless you were prepared to pay tens of thousands of dollars you could never get the full performance stated. Once again Apple’s stock answer was buy a new one. I saw one muppet on a YoutTube studio tour video who had just upgraded to M3 devices and paid $30,000 for the privilege.

My M1 first generation was throttled so badly that programs like Ableton Live went from using 10-40% of CPU for basic tasks to 60-1200 percent (how that’s even possible I have no idea but I have screen shots from the time showing those numbers, the highest being 0ver 3000 per cent!

Well after my M1 developed the infamous battery bulge, along with Apple’s hubris in not providing access to their new Silicon chips to third party software developers until they were actually on sale. The chaos that caused in the world of music software was untold. Apple’s answer was to use Rosetta a throw back to their Intel models that signifcantly slowed down any app forced to use it. Many music apps simply did not work.

All this time I’m using my MacBook Air M1 to make music. And to be honest it was like painting the hallway through the letter box. My album Samba New Wave was made entirely on my Macbook Air. Now I look back and I have no idea how I managed that.

Still sticking with Apple, I bought a large screen so that I could work more easily and at least see the legends on the plugins I was using. However, the Macbook only worked with the non Apple (but industry standard) port intermittently. Most of the time it simply would not connect, so I had a large blank screen that was as useful as a chocolate tea pot.

Meanwhile, a good friend had been showing me some things from the PC world. At the beginning I had my Apple fanboy hat on and just nodded politely. But then he started to show me things that shocked me. Microsoft Surface laptops designed and built like those 2016 Macbook Pros, Android phones that didn’t look like shit. Windows interface that was almost OSX level of simplicity.

The other trend from Apple – not content with crippling the expensive hardware they were selling us – was to make it near impossible to install software that didn’t come from the Apple store. For a time OSX simply refused to let me, the user, install third party programs. Then they switched things up to ‘allow’ it but only after a ton of ridiculous moves needed to let a software package install itself.

Everyone Needs a Touch Bar!

No, they don’t. The Apple Touch Bar served no purpose. Maybe if they’d let third parties like Ableton to use the keys for shortcuts it may have had some use.

In 2016 I bought a the new Macbook Touch Bar. The touch bar lasted all of six months, the finger print reader stopped working. The touch bar started to work intermittently once again, but only for the Escape button. Then there was the infamous keyboard. Plastic keys with fixings that were the size of a pin. Once again regular use wore off the legends on the keys. Particulary A, S, and X all keys constantly. Having ADHD I type using patterns but I need to see the key name. Having no A or S confused me constantly as to remember which was which and Save and Select All were keys I used all the time. Then the actual E key literally popped off one day, stick to my finger tip. A quick peek underneath showed just how crappy and cheapskate the keyboard was.

Random Apple Nonsense.

Genius Bullshit Sidebar

A side bar here for just some of the bullshit that Apple was capable of.

Endlessly ejecting a Samsung SSD that was connected with USB-C. It’s not an Apple product so despite USB being open source, Apple have to make their own version that doesn’t really work with other brands.

Coincidence? Of course not.

Constantly telling me my Apple ID password is wrong when it isn’t. Each time the password was correct, but Apple consistently said it was wrong. I eventually got in, without changing anything. I gave my previous Macbook to a friend to use as a bot server, gave him my correct credentials. Same thing, randomly would insist the password was incorrect. I lost track of the number of times I was forced to reset my Apple ID over the last few years.

Not letting me download programs of my choice simply because Apple doesn’t approve of them. There was even a brief time when you could not even override Apple’s denial of installation!

Never letting me upgrade OSX and constantly showing ‘there’s an error try again’ but at the same time not letting me delete 15GB of update auto downloaded and not able to delete even using a tool like Daisy Drive. The error by the way was not even correct. There was plenty of space on the HD.

Never able to install OSX upgrades, I ended up being 3 major upgrades behind.

First Aid, a program that was once awesome never, ever, worked. There was of course absolutely nothing wrong with the Samsung that wasn’t caused by Apple’s bullshit.

The Evil That Is iCloud

We haven’t touched on the subject of iCloud yet. But that is really what triggered this opus of rage against Apple.

When I bought my MacBook Air M1 with 500GB hard drive, I did so laboring under the false assumption that iCloud was a kind of backup service where everything could live and be pulled down from the cloud only as and when needed. I had my iPhone with 250GB, my previous laptop with 250GB and this new one with 500GB and iCloud with 2TB. What could possibly go wrong.

Well, within a day or so I discovered that my new unencumbered hard drive was suddenly filled with random shit from iCloud. Surely some setting I missed? I removed everything and got back to around 125GB used. Then it filled up again.

So I did something I rarely ever need to do with any tech – in fact I think Apple is the only company I’ve ever had to call – so I called the Apple helpline and told them of my issue. An extremely haughty and rude woman told me ‘that’s what iCloud is for, it’s a sync service not a backup service.’

Thinking that I’d never ever seen Apple marketing this explanation I told her the issue was that even my new MacBook Air was only 500GB. Her answer – if you want to use the iCloud properly you need to upgrade to a another new purchase. OK, I said, but what about the phone? The maximum iPhone capacity at that time was 1GB. ‘Then that’s all you can use’ said Cruella de MacVille.

I was lost for words. I started to investigate this and of course discovered hundreds and hundreds of others who like me believed they were sold a backup service. The general consensus was that iCloud was a clunker. I found my own solution to using iCloud as I needed it to be. I disallowed it from filling most of my hard drive, made my Documents folder local only and so on.

During this time my MacBook Air started to swell. Stories online about explosions and serious fires started to concern me. It was less than 2 years old but here I was needing to upgrade again.

But this time I was determined not to give money to this monomaniacal corporation. I didn’t know how I would be able to do this but do it I would.

First would be the phone. My X Max could no longer update to be useful with the few apps I used and had started to flash luminous green covering the whole screen – at first just a few flashes but as the weeks wore on it got so bad I couldn’t use the phone for anything). Next up would be a PC for my music with a real set of fast and upgradable chips and mega SSD space, and then a new laptop. Then finally I could cancel my iCloud and be rid of Apple forever more. And good riddance.

For the phone I settled on a Nothing 2a. A really neat piece of design, with their own cool graphical version of Android. Lightweight and only ONE THIRD OF THE PRICE OF AN IPHONE.

Bought it, took me a day or so to navigate the Android software. Never looked back.

Next came a PC for use as a music workstation. I got an HP pre made gaming machine that had latest gen Intel chips and a regular sized SSD. I swapped out the SSD for two drives giving me 8TB.
The PC has 16 cores – all of which are performance cores which means if needed all 16 cores can work in tandem for monstrous processing power. Meanwhile the M3 chip had been released and real world testers (not the bullshit graphs of speed that Apple produces with no x y axes) showed that depending on the price you paid for your laptop the SAME M3 chip was throttled to maximum. In other words Apple had a potentiall super fast chip but it was not going to let customers have access to it unless they paid top tier prices.

Next, on the recommendation of the same friend, I bought a 15″ Microsoft Surface laptop. Made of alimunm and of the quality Apple once had long ago.

No, not an Apple product. After 4 months the keys are still perfect and there’s no battery explosion likely.

Then in order to free myself from the every having to use the likes of iCloud or the very expensive Google Drive I got my friend to build me a NAS. A massive array of hard drives with built in redundancy – if two of the 8 drives die the other 6 can repair the lost data to 2 new drives.

This is connected by ethernet to my broadband. Now, my Nothing phone, my Surface laptop and my HP desktop can all talk to each other and access common data held on the NAS, such as movies, music, massive music software libraries, etc.

Time to finally cut the iCord…

So the very last thing to do was shut down my annual sub for Google Drive, then iCloud. I had already researched how to end an iCloud contract and from the hundreds of angry users on the Apple forum, I already knew it was not going to be straighforward. So, I decided I would start by downloading the content deleting everything and just stopping the payments going forward.

This process took me 3 whole days for Google and over TWO WEEKS with Apple.

First I tried simply copying all the folders in Google Drive over to my NAS. However, this was constantly failing due to ‘file errors’ from Google. I looked online and found out where you can request Google Taekaway and get access to downlaod all your data. After requesting this, it tooke Google three days to supply me with links. The links were in the form of multiple zip files. Kind of annoying and took forever to manage the downloading. But Drive was only 130GB.

My iCloud was 1.4TB.

FIrstly its not possible to download the entire iCloud drive to an external drive on the Macbook because Apple needs to make an image of everything on your Mac. You would expect that as it prepares to do this if you don’t have enough space it would tell you, right? But no, with iCloud after 7 hours of alleged data transfer and popup said ‘this transfer cannot be completed due to lack of hardrive space’

Now they tell me. Ok then I will be smart and get iCloud for Windows and download on the PC. Except that Apple HATES Microsoft, so what is supposed to work mostly does not.

On Reddit I could see so many people trying to reclaim their data and their photos from iCloud with many losing everything. I thought they are probably people who are not that bright and I’m sure with the right instructions it can’t be that hard.

Little did I know (even being cynical about Apple’s policy towards helping customers leave the Magic Kingdom) just how deviously fucked up this process is made by Apple. I can only conclude that this is on purpose in order to frustrate the average user into giving up and paying more subs for iCloud.

Copying the data from iCloud using Apple’s own app on Windows didn’t work. But more importantly in iCloud for desktop/laptop you cannot see where your photos are stored. This is insane. I had 48,000 images and videos backed up into iCloud via my old iPhone. When checking the iCloud storage on the phone its easy to see where they are stored and how much storage they are using.

But in desktop iCloud you cannot see your photos, not even a folder of where they are.

I read the saga of a guy on Reddit who had suffered through a similar experience and he said he had used Apple’s equivalent data retrieval service to Google Takeaway but that it simply never worked. The download speeds were very slow and constantly disconnecting.

He ended up paying 4.99 USD for an app that could save all your photso along with all meta data and Apple specific stuff like naming and album names etc.

When the time came to finally end my subscription I followed the instructions on the Apple site. They were reasonably clear at first. But literally every time I needed to hit a button to ‘downgrade’ it would require my Apple ID. I’m already logged in and doing stuff you can only do when you ARE logged in. But there were maybe 5 separate screens. Do you really want to downgrade? Yes, User Name and Password please. Note that at no time was the language ‘Cancel subscription’ used. I guess Apple has such hubris that they believe once you’re in the walled garden you will never want to leave…

I repeated this process 5 or 6 times, each stage of each time being forced to put in my User/PW. Now I know what my password is because its basically a sentence ‘Applec***s2019’. But time and time again using this password that was saved on my Mac I would get error messages. Wrong password. Clicking the ‘view password’ eye icon, and it was correct. I had to reset the password several times before it would finally let me in.
On the last screen of every attempt to cancel iCloud I was met with this…

Change storage plan leads to this (after signing in again several times)

Notice how the button DONE is greyed out?

That, as we all know, means you cannot click it. No amount of testing the other buttons or changing the selection would activate the done button UNLESS YOU CHOOSE ONE OF THE PAYMENT OPTIONS.

Cynical? Yes. Outrageous? Yes. Treating your customers like assholes? Absolutely.

In despair I googled it and found complaints on the Apple forum going back SIX years with people complaining about the same thing. SIX YEARS.

This can only mean one thing, and that is that Apple engineered this ‘glitch’ in order to try to get people to give up attempting to downgrade or in my language cancel the f**ker.

It took days for Apple to prepare the zip files for me to download. That was the next logjam, Apple’s download speed was pitiful. A joke, if it wasn’t clearly so deliberate.

It took me several days to download the 1.4TB in zip packets, at lease half of that time caused by Apple’s download connection timing out. Everything you can imagine, these assholes did it to try and wear me down.

But, friends, I did it.
I finally escaped from Apple Island.
And like thousands of once loyal customers I will never, ever go back. As I explained in Part 1 of this story I was in the Apple ecosphere for 41 years but did finally manage to escape!

Just to finish off a little humour from Ricky Gervais. Look at Cook’s face when Ricky tells it like it is.

Thank you and goodnight…

The Weejun