Decision Made. I Gotta “Un-Apple” As Much As I Can ☹️

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I don’t think that I am alone in this category, the latest Apple updates are seriously broken, and to add to that, the promise of “someday we will fix it all”, just doesn’t cut it.

“My” thinking so far:

I use technology for my business. My business RUNS 100% on technology. (I am one of the lucky one’s, that no longer needs a storefront to work from). If a piece of equipment is malfunctioning, it gets replaced immediately. So, I have decided to keep my Apple products, because they ARE well built, and STILL work. Their software…needs serious help. Here is where I jump ship as far as I can jump.

. Reminders. I don’t trust Apple’s version. Looking at alternatives.

. Calendar. I don’t trust Apple’s version. I like Fantastical, but am having trouble warming up to it, (it’s totally me, too many extra clicks). I don’t like Readdle’s version. Going to give Fantastical another fair shot.

. Browser. Again, Safari is buggy. I have already switched to FireFox.

. ICloud/iCloud Drive. Again, no. Switching back to Dropbox. It’s taking forever, but everything is moving…slowly.

Mail. Dang if I know which way to go yet! Apple mail is failing me BIG TIME. I DO have the option to host my own mail, so I may go that way, but then I will need to do something about so many people/devices looking for me in my .me.

Contacts. I was reporting issues with that BEFORE IOS 13. S-T-I-L-L not playing nice. I gotta think on this one some more. I have thousands of contacts in iCloud. I would be better served if I had most of them where my contractors could access them too. Then that leads to, if they are not on my phone, then the call will get blocked. Yes, I know. I could turn that off, but that DOES seem to work great with IOS 13.

. I am not going to even talk about lost photos! Kicking my dog will not get you as big of a issue as messing with my photos. (although the kicking my dog will get you a return kick + more).

. I don’t use the Office Suite very much, but it is getting “re-thunked” too.

. KeyChain is iffy. I don’t know which way I will go there.

. Drafts is my GO TO App of choice more than ever now days. It just works.

. I am not even going to try to learn anymore about Shortcuts. It seems to have issues too. too many “yea buts”.

I am sure there’s more to cover, but for now, here is where I am at, and I must deal with today, because a promise of a better tomorrow, is still just a promise.

Wasn’t this why I left Windows?? :thinking::thinking::thinking::thinking:

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I ran email servers for decades and one of the last things I did before retirement was transition my company to Google. Everyone from small-medium businesses like my last employer (we had about 240 users), to large corporations are getting rid of their email servers and moving to Google or Microsoft. Just keeping your servers safe these days takes a lot of time and technology.

When your email, contacts, calendar, etc. are in the cloud, your choice of apps on your Mac and iPhone are less critical. Most/all sync with Google or MS so moving from one app to another doesn’t require exporting/importing your data. And when necessary you can keep working with just a browser. Even a browser on a Windows computer :astonished:

FWIW, my choice is Apple hardware and Google services. I mainly use mail/calendar/contacts/notes (google keep) via Google Chrome at home and Google’s apps on IOS. My photos sync to both iCloud and Google Photos.

Good luck!

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WayneG, you made me think! I read your post three times. All makes perfectly good sense.

I should clarify, that when i say that i can host my own mail, it is on a rented Apache server using Squirrel Mail. Ya right. Things are too complicated to try to keep the boogers out on your own now days.

I need to rethink Google. The two things that have always concerned me about them is, (1), what are they doing with my information? And (2), will this service all of a sudden go away, like so many of Goggle’s services? Like i said, i should study up on them more. Google sure would cover quite a few of my needs, should i decide to go that way.

You brought up some really good points, and I appreciate them!

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G-Suite terms of service are different from consumer. However, I would look closely at MSFT too. It’s 5 or 6 bucks per user per month (same as Google) and the reason I say this is they are a much better friend of iOS if you are all in on apple. If you decide to use Mail.app for example you get true push where Google tries to get you to use their software. Either does work though. If you don’t want either of the big 2, Fastmail gives you the full mail/cal/contacts as well. The only thing with them is that it’s harder to access from Windows if you have any users on that platform. Microsoft does not let you add any caldav or carddav servers that are not Google or Apple.

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Good pointers there HellsKitchenDweller! Thanks for pointing those out. I will most definitely review all three, and report back my decision when i have made it.

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I took this route a long time ago … not because of bugs (necessarily) but just because over the years I found the Apple apps to be less and less “serious”. What I mean by that is they are more and more targeted towards the “average person”. This makes sense from a business point of view. The effect that has on me has been that (1) the interface and behavior are less and less intuitive to me and (2) it is harder and harder for me to do the things I want to do.

This shouldn’t be taken as some kind of self compliment… It is just a fact. I have been a Mac User since 1985. I have used every Mac OS since System 1 and have used a half dozen other systems and operating systems over the years. I have also spent 50 years as a software designer and programmer. I don’t think about computers like the average person just like an accountant doesn’t think about income taxes the way that 25 year old dancer does. When something is “what you do” you think about it differently. So many interactions that are intuitive for an average person just dont make sense to me or just aren’t obvious.

I stopped using Apple Mail about 10 years ago when it had problems with Gmail. I haven’t gone back. Currently I am using MailMate although I used Postbox for a long time. I use BusyCal for calendar and BusyContacts for the contacts. I use Todoist for my todo list and reminders. I use DEVONThink (and a little Evernote) not Notes. Etc. This isn’t a rousing endorsement for these apps (although I like them and thats why I keep using them). And it is possible that some of the Apple apps have caught up.

I haven’t moved to Catalina yet…

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You’re welcome. @HellsKitchenDweller is correct, look at MSFT as well. I did a side by side comparison for management when we moved to the cloud.

Two of the reasons we choose Google were we are not a heavy Microsoft Office site (only 14 of 200 users needed MSO) and most of our management and many of our employees were already using Google for their personal mail.

I ran across this when I was doing my research. A selling point for keeping your data in the cloud regardless of your provider: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXV96vCx8Jg

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I was very hesitant to create this post, but I sure am glad now that I did. Y’all are offering up not only some great advise, but also have proven to me that I am not alone in my thinking. And I thank every one of you for you input!

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Starting to wonder what I’m doing wrong. I, too, run my business solely on Apple tech and none of the updates has affected my revenues or ability to get work done. Admittedly, I seem to be in a different line of work than @Ricky.

With such dislike for everything Apple, why even bother with the platform?

That said I am also very frustrated with Apple’s lack of QC on their updates. And this is across the board—macOS, iOS, iPadOS, the works. The initial quality of updates seems to have slipped a lot since the Jobs days. I have always appreciated Jobs’ perfection-demanding hard line on everything they did.

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I agree 100%. “I” don’t NEED to be the cool kid on the block that has a Apple brick. I neeeeeeeddddd solid functionality.

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One big problem is that Apple gives us a choice with iOS and iPadOS: update to the buggy new versions, or don’t get the security fixes. At least with macOS they keep issuing security updates for a couple of major versions back, so you can hold back on updating for a while.

No matter the platform though, if you buy new stuff you have to deal with their beta-in-production software.

I’m really quite worried that this is the new normal in Apple-land.

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Me TOO!! This is so much unlike the Fruit Company.

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I installed security updates for iOS 12 and High Sierra earlier today on devices that are six and nine years old respectively.

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The iOS 12 update was a very, very, very rare event for Apple (releasing an update for a previous version of iOS). I have no complaints about their support for previous versions of macOS.

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I have started to experiment with Linux on Mac :flushed:

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Well everything that ran iOS 11 runs iOS 12, so presumably they expected everyone to upgrade. iOS 13 excludes a lot of older devices that still run well, hence there’s more of a need for updates. I think the last version that excluded older devices was iOS 10 which required 64-bit processors.

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Um, yeah. See my other post today about how wonderful Reminders is working for me now. Who thinks the theme for iOS 14 will be the same as iOS 12? I hope this isn’t the new cycle. Year 1, new features that don’t work well. Year 2, fix the bugs. Year 3, more new features that don’t work (and old stuff that stops working)…

Marco Arment tweeted that his sources told him programmers aren’t given time to fix bugs. Sounds about right to me.

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I LIKE Linux. I have thought seriously about going back to it.

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Various Linux distros were my stepping stones from Windows to Mac several years ago. At the time, There was a libc hell very much like Windows’ dll hell. Inevitably updating packages for some application would lead to needing a different libc then the thing wouldn’t boot. Things may be better now, but it was just too kludgie for me.
One soup, thousand of chefs.

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HA! I remember that too JohnAtl. :sweat_smile::sweat_smile::sweat_smile::mask:

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