I’m an Apple Fan, Except When I’m Not
I’m an Apple Fan, Except When I’m Not
There goes my Special Sycophant Status
Apple
I own an Apple iPhone, MacBook Air, iPad, AirPod, Airpod Pro, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and other Apple stuff.
I’m happy to live in the Apple ecosystem. One of the big reasons for that is how well all that stuff can communicate with each other to make my life easier. If you don’t know about Apple Continuity, check this post out:
Yet as much as I love it, some things annoy me. More than annoy, sometimes.
The Apple TV Remote
This remote was so bad that Apple recently came out with a new version. Unfortunately, the new one is better, but still not very good.
First, remotes get misplaced. It would have been very logical to build in Find My to the new version, but no, they didn’t. Why? Apple says you don’t need it.
Gee, thanks. Update: Find My will find remotes in IOS 17.
You’d think that after all the usability complaints about the old remote, the new version would be fantastic. I bought one thinking it had to be better.
It’s not all that much better. It’s far too easy to hit Down or Up when you mean to click to start a show. It’s also far too easy to hit mute when you meant to pause the show.
And because you’d normally get at all the rest of the buttons with your thumb, having the Siri button on the right side is far beyond clumsy. You have to turn the remote sideways to use voice commands. If you are left-handed, you could reach it with your index finger. I’m right-handed and I use voice commands for TV very often.
The on-off button would have been useful if it were not so far away and so tiny. You definitely won’t hit that button accidentally!
Apple TV (the streaming box)
It seems that nobody at Apple reads program descriptions. That’s the only explanation I can imagine for displaying faintly dark text on a gray background. It can be very hard to read, but it is not always so. I have no idea why it changes.
I should say first that my wife and I have thoroughly enjoyed most of the Apple produced shows we have watched.
But releasing episodes once a week is more than annoying. Yes, I understand that Apple is trying to give people incentives to keep their subscriptions running. Yes, I know that almost everyone else plays the same game. It still annoys me. This isn’t network TV and Apple certainly is not dependent on this revenue source. Apple can afford to not play the string-me-along game.
The box or the app
Why not a DVR function to iCloud if we want? Why not? I have plenty of space, let me use it!
Apple Card
Apple and Goldman-Sachs don’t provide any interface that Mint can use other than a near useless manual export/import ability. Why? I have no idea. As I’m also royally chaffed about Mint’s failings to update even their most glaring deficiencies, I fume every time I have to deal with this — so much so that I sometimes won’t use the Apple Card even when it is the best choice. Update: Mint can now see Apple Card transactions,
Printing
IOS can only see AirPrint capable printers. Why? Why not probably the most common interface there is, the direct to port 9100 that HP and others have used for years?
Because they don’t advertise like AirPrint? Fine, either let me tell IOS about my other printers or let my Mac do the advertising of an available printer. There are third party apps for this, but it should be built-in.
Apple Watch Swipes
My watch often refused to go to Control Center. I spent many hours trying to solve this with Apple Support; they gave up and sent me a new watch.
The new watch does the same thing. I can get around it by holding the stem and telling Siri to “Open Control Center”, but obviously this is a bug and I can’t be the only one who has seen it. Why hasn’t Apple fixed it? Update: Perhaps they have? I haven’t had this problem in a long time.
Apple Watch Turn Signals
What a great idea this was! When using Maps navigation from iPhone or CarPlay, my watch vibrates and makes noise to signal turns. Supposedly a left turn is different from a right, but in fact, they are too close to call. It should be so simple: three bumps for a right, two for a left would work. Or three very quick for left, slow for right. Anything different!
HomePod
Don’t get me started.
https://medium.com/tonys-tech-corner/sometimes-i-get-angry-at-apple-1089043dca7b
Multiple Timers
Are you serious, Apple? I can do this on my HomePods but not on my iPhone, my watch, my iPad? That’s ridiculous! Update: coming in IOS 17.
https://www.imore.com/set-multiple-timers-homepod
Update: WatchOS 8 now allows this!
Shortcuts
I’ll admit that Shortcuts is better than I expected it to be. You can do some useful things without too much effort.
However, using it for more complex tasks can be maddening. So many things that should work do not. Sometimes I can work around it; more often I just give up.
Settings
Apparently, different teams are responsible for different parts of the Settings app. This means each team is also responsible for search keys that will let you find what you want. Not all of those teams put much thought into that, leaving you to manually hunt for the setting you want.
You should be able to export key-value pairs for Settings so that you can easily restore all your painstaking settings should you have to set up from new.
And wouldn’t it be nice if something in Settings showed you the default setting and when you last changed anything?
Charging
There’s an Optimized Battery Charging setting in IOS. The idea is that if you charge your phone at the same time each night, it will charge up to 80%, then stop. It resumes at a time that will have it at 100% when you wake up. Why? This explains it.
About Optimized Battery Charging on your iPhone
In my not so humble opinion, it would be smarter to have devices charge to 100% and then not do any charging until the charge drops below a user set amount. That would give you a charged phone if you wake up early.
This ability should be available on iPhones, iPads, Macs, Watches, everything. My iPhone 11 only loses about 1% per hour when I am sleeping, so I wouldn’t lose much overnight anyway.
By the way, your chargers aren’t energy vampires. Just saying.
Passwords
Keychain should have an export function and should let individual entries be shared with other people. Update: Sharing is coming in IOS 17.
Siri syntax
It can be frustrating when Siri doesn’t understand something only because you used a synonym or put a word in the wrong place.
It’s particularly so when you realize that your Apple device is quite good at foreign language translation without either of those limitations. Maybe they should employ some of the same code in Siri?
CarPlay
Why can’t Siri in CarPlay offer to read a webpage that it has found in response to my question? Shut off the screen so it won’t distract me and read it!
Same with Youtube — often hearing a show is all I need.
iCloud
I’m not going to bother to complain about the incredibly cheap 5GB of free storage Apple provides. What I want to know is why I have to buy it in specific sizes? Why not have a price per gigabyte? I need more than 200GB but I do not need 2TB. Update: with Apple One, you can get up to 4TB. That’s still not enough for some people.
I’m sure the Apple haters would have a much longer list, and I might agree with some of it, but this is all I can think of today.
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