An Apple A Day Keeps My Blood Pressure High

After two years of only using our iOS devices we finally bought a new Mac Mini two days ago. I am beginning to remember how frustrating the Apple limitations can be. The bottom line is that IF you are a loner Apple’s system of controls and the box it wants you to play in work “ok”, but for each user you add it becomes exponentially less useful. What they are selling is not a great user experience, but a controlled user experience that requires additional subscriptions in order to work even reasonably well.

The problem I am running into today is that I want to share the Photos and iTunes libraries between users on my Mac, but it will only work if they are on an external drive (and even then it is not preferred). I even created a separate partition, but that is not good enough. “Warning: Permissions are being violated fat boy!” How in the name of Zues' butthole can there not be tens of thousands of people wanting to do exactly what I am trying to do? Nobody wants more than one copy of a 300gb library on their computer. All of this is especially frustrating in the contest of computers as opposed to mobile devices. Surely Apple could provide more flexibility for their Mac users?

In general when you point out your “problems” to the elect they will say, “just do…” and insert a costly, convoluted, unintuitive solution that is Apple approved. There are solutions. They just suck. My solution to this problem is that my wife will have the Photos media library in her home folder and I will have the iTunes media library in mine. The only difference between my solution and Apple’s solutions is that mine does not cost me anything. They both suck. Apple should be providing better solutions that make the user experience one of excellence, freedom, and flexibility. Instead, we are offered costly hoops that never do exactly what we want them to do in the first place!

Naturally Apple wants you to use their cloud services and the cost of doing that with hundreds of gigs of data is crazy. I do not hold it against Apple that they realized they could make money from subscription services. What I do take umbrage with is that while Apple is making money by controlling users they are presenting themselves as making money by providing a great user experience. Ultimately, I am frustrated that the best game in town is quickly becoming a lesser of two evils scenario rather than providing a better choice that adds value to users lives.