Did Apple lose its advantage?

Readers of my blog for a while probably know already that I’ve been an Apple user over time. What is not obvious is that I have scaled down my (personal) Apple usage over the past two years, mostly because my habits, and partly because of Android and Linux getting better and better. One component is, though, that some of the advantages to be found when using Apple started to disappear for me.

I think that for me the start of the problems is to be found in the release of iOS 7. Beside the taste of not liking the new flashy UI, what I found is that it did not perform as well as previous releases. I think this is the same effect others have had. In particular the biggest problem with it for me had to do with the way I started using my iPad while in Ireland. Since I now have access to a high-speed connection, I started watching more content in streaming. In particular, thanks to my multiple trips to the USA over the past year, I got access to more video content on the iTunes store, so I wanted to watch some of the new TV series through it.

Turned out that for a few versions, and I mean a few months, iOS was keeping the streamed content in the cache, not accounting for it anywhere, and never cleaning it up. The result was that after streaming half a series, I would get errors telling me the iPad storage was full, but there was no way from the device itself to clear the cache. EIther you had to do a factory reset to drop off all the content of the device, or you had to use a Windows application to remove the cache files manually. Not very nice.

Another very interesting problem with the streaming the content: it can be slow. Not always but it can. One night I wanted to watch The LEGO Movie since I did not see it at the cinema. It’s not available on the Irish Netflix so I decided to rent it off iTunes. It took the iPad four hours to download it. It made no sense. And no, the connection was not hogged by something else, and running a SpeedTest from the tablet itself showed it had all the network capacity it needed.

The iPad is not, though, the only Apple device I own; I also bought an iPod Touch back in LA when my Classic died. even though I was not really happy with downgrading from 80G down to 64G. But it’s mostly okay, as my main use for the iPod is to listen to audiobooks and podcasts when I sleep — which recently I have been doing through Creative D80 Bluetooth speakers, which are honestly not great but at least don’t force me to wear earphones all night long.

I had no problem before switching the iPod from one computer to the next, as I moved from iMac to a Windows disk for my laptop. When I decided to just use iTunes on the one Windows desktop I keep around (mostly to play games), then a few things stopped working as intended. It might have been related to me dropping the iTunes Match subscription, but I’m not sure about that. But what happens is that only a single track for each of the albums was being copied on the iPod and nothing else.

I tried factory reset, cable and wireless sync, I tried deleting the iTunes data on my computer to force it to figure out the iPod is new, and the current situation I’m in is only partially working: the audiobooks have been synced, but without cover art and without the playlists — some of the audiobooks I have are part of a series, or are split in multiple files if I bought them before Audible started providing single-file downloads. This is of course not very good when the audio only lasts three hours, and then I start having nightmares.

It does not help that I can’t listen to my audiobooks with VLC for Android because it thinks that the chapter art is a video stream, and thus puts the stream to pause as soon as I turn off the screen. I should probably write a separate rant about the lack of proper audiobooks tools for Android. Audible has an app, but it does not allow you to sideload audiobooks (i.e. stuff I ripped from my original CDs, or that I bought on iTunes), nor it allows you to build a playlist of books, say for all the books in a series.

As I write this, I asked iTunes again to sync all the music to my iPod Touch as 128kbps AAC files (as otherwise it does not fit into the device); iTunes is now copying 624 files; I’m sure my collection contains more than 600 albums — and I would venture to say more than half I have in physical media. Mostly because no store allows me to buy metal in FLAC or ALAC. And before somebody suggests Jamendo or other similar services: yes, great, I actually bought lots of Jazz on Magnatune before it became a subscription service and I loved it, but that is not a replacement for mainstream content. Also, Magnatune has terrible security practices, don’t use it.

Sorry Apple, but given these small-but-not-so-small issues with your software recently, I’m not going to buy any more devices from you. If any of the two devices I have fails, I’ll just get someone to build a decent audiobook software for me one way or the other…