I quite like my Apple hardware but I shy away from all their services or at least not use them for anything important/critical. Also Apple services don't often work with other products/services. For example, you can play Apple Music on Echo's but it's a subpar experience verses something like Spotify.

Now that I think about it, I really do avoid Apple's stuff by and large:

- Mail -> Google Apps (Gmail)

- Calendar -> Google Calendar

- Maps -> I do use Apple Maps, but also Google Maps and Waze

- Reminders -> Things (but I do use Apple Reminders as well, it just sucks)

- Music -> Spotify

- Drive -> Dropbox/Syncthing

- Books -> Kindle

- Weather -> Carrot

And I'm sure there are more. One thing Apple (had? has? probably "had") going for it was a lot of it's services (and apps for that matter) handle the 80% use-case and are good "default" for most people and there are power-user apps/services you can reach for if Apple's doesn't meet the bar. That is slowly not being the case and it's really sad to see (as much as one can feel sad/sorry for a massive company, moreso I'm sad for what was lost.

Recently I tried sync'ing a 10 minute video from my iPhone to my Mac through iCloud. I gave up after waiting for more than 30 minutes and just used Google Drive because airdrop for some reason is just completely broken.

Want to delete a song? Open the menu then, even though there’s ample screen space, scroll down the truncated menu to find delete well below more useless options. Why.

Want to scroll to the middle of a song? Hold up! The ‘lossless’ info is right there and you always hit that instead. Again, plenty of space to move that down and out of the way.

If anyone at Apple used Apple Music they would know all of this already.

Then there’s the keyboard in general. I spend so much time fixing typos it’s crazy. Someone had a video on YouTube showing that, even though he was typing correctly, IOS was messing up. Horrible experience!

Apple Mail automatically adds calendar entries from attachments in my junk mail to my calendar. I get tons of spam/phishing mails with appointments attached that i now manually have to delete from my calendar all the time. There is no dedicated setting to disable this, according to Apple support, deactivating Siri integration inside calendar and mail app settings will prevent this, but it doesn't.

MS Outlook has switched from their native code to a WebView inside a wrapper and that means we're back in the 90s when it comes to email. Basic features like adding an image inline no longer work, the option to enable this is buried in some badly worded menus and of course it resets after each update and also gets renamed in each update.

Software quality, especially from the big corps, is just absolute garbage these days. Designed by people that don't use it and built by people that have 6 months of web dev experience.

I’ve been using Apple Music, iCloud Drive, bookmark sync, etc. for many years with zero issues. I even host my email at iCloud (since Google pulled the rug on the free Google Apps tier)—no issues whatsoever.

My family has also had zero issues.

Google Maps has a disgusting UX and I hate it every time I need to use it (for the reviews). Apple Maps has been great for the past few years. And don’t get me started on Dropbox with their monstrosity Electron client. F*ck that. Or the silly Spotify client that can’t do smart playlists and has no concept of genres.

IME, while not perfect, Apple’s services’ quality is far above the competition’s.

“Sign in with Apple? It's convenient and permanently tethers your login to your Apple ID.

Weather? That's Dark Sky with paint.”

C’mon, now you’re just reaching for something to complain about.

And proofread if you’re going to complain about the fit-and-finish in the work of others.