Oh, Apple. What an enormous pain in the bottom you are at times! Nearly four months away, and I return to discover that your software is just as buggy as when I left. But, when it works, is infinitely better than that offered for and by Windows / Microsoft. The last straw was when I created a spreadsheet in Excel 2016 on the Dell UHD laptop, only to find that due to dodgy Windows scaling, the row sizes were all over the shop when the same file was opened on a Mac also running Excel 2016.
- Importing 8,163 photos and videos into Photos caused Photos to crash half way through. Thankfully as Adobe Lightroom organises photos by year, I did one year at a time and everything is now inside the Photos ecosystem.
- Restoring iTunes to a new machine (regardless of platform) while you have an Apple Music subscription is the biggest load of nonsense I have ever encountered from any software company ever. All seemed to go well – iTunes picked up the freshly copied Windows iTunes folder and organised/consolidated it as it should. But, alas, while Apple Music was switched on and signed in, iTunes told me otherwise. A workaround was to browse and/or play something directly from the Apple Music catalogue web site (within iTunes – iTunes essentially acts a glorified browser), then offline stuff could play. In an attempt to fix the problem once and for all, I turned iCloud Music Library Off (and Apple Music) and switched them back on. Big mistake. As soon as that happened, iTunes attempted to reupload music and match, resulting in the duplication of all Apple Music albums and tracks. At least some 2,000+. Sorting out the duplicates in the Gilbert & Sullivan 450 track multi-disc album was, to say the least, [censored] annoying. This was even after nuking the entire iTunes library and letting everything (inc. matched non-Apple tracks and iTunes purchased tracks) download again from Apple’s servers. This incident has made me extremely nervous of ever having to restore an iTunes library from a backup. Maybe Apple is promoting Apple Music’s strength as an online service that you really never need to back up to anything other than their servers? *shrugs*
- Playing Team Fortress 2 using the AMD Radeon R9 370X is fine and dandy, but things went a bit wonky straight after Steam/TF2 installation, with TF2 and Steam quitting immediately as soon as the game started. Restarting MacOS seems to fix it.
- Switching to Apple’s Two Factor Authentication was a pain too. If you had Two Step Authentication, you have to disable that, create a new series of security questions, then wait a bit before the Two Factor Authentication settings pop up on the iPhone or iPad. Trying to get the Apple TV to recognise HomeKit involved logging in and out about six times before it finally worked. Lots of logging in and out across all devices overall. Apple Watch needed a reboot to get the MacOS unlock functionality working, else the system complained that it couldn’t find the watch.
Otherwise, I am enjoying the Retina display, the quad core processor, and super fast SSD drive. I’ve come to the conclusion that Windows is not ready for 4K/UHD and above displays. Not until software developers start making the use of it.
But I will remain a Mac/iPhone/iPad user for the foreseeable future. The alternative is good, but for me – and despite all the problems with Apple’s software division – it’s not enough. Apple have won. I surrender.
