Apple Doesn’t Understand the Internet, and You Suffer For It

Apple doesn’t understand the internet. It can’t handle synchronization as well as Google and other companies. Mind you, synchronization isn’t easy. You’ll boggle your mind if you try to think up an algorithm that can account for any possible change in a file and then figure out which one to keep across all your devices. Even still, Apple tried to oversimplify the problem, which just made things worse. They keep local and cloud-based copies of your data, and you can turn synchronization on without that data ever leaving your device because you accidentally stored it in the wrong section. Let’s take a look at what you gain with Apple’s internet-based services: iMessage. While not perfect—something we’ll get to shortly—iMessage makes communicating much easier if you have iDevices and Macs. If you hate texting on your phone and prefer to type things out on a keyboard, you can use your Mac to respond. If you forego Apple services, you have to poke away at your iPhone or go through something significantly more complicated like Google Voice. All your personal data syncs and backs up automatically. In a perfect world, all your Apple data will sync. If you set it up right, you get everything everywhere—so long as you only use Apple platforms. This can help a lot of people who stick with in the Apple universe, but if you step outside it becomes very restrictive. iTunes Match eliminates the need to sync with iTunes. It didn’t work so well when it began, but now iTunes Match makes downloading the music you want and keeping the rest in the cloud a real possibility. I think this has more to do with Apple’s adoption of LTE than anything else. 3G just doesn’t stream so well, at least if you subscribe to AT&T. Now, let’s take a look at what you lose by sticking with Apple services: You sacrifice consistency and reliability. To give Apple due credit, iCloud works a lot better than it initially did and significantly better than its predecessors. That said, iCloud is much less reliable than other solutions. For reasons described earlier, sometimes things just don’t work because you didn’t set them up right—a very un-Apple-like problem, ironically—and network issues cause all sorts of problems from time to time. iMessage jumbles things up, causing your conversations to appear out of order on other devices. If you start a conversation on one device and switch to another, you might find certain messages came in at the wrong times, you’re missing half the conversation, or you’re missing the entire thing. That said, it still beats pretty much any third-party option around and hopefully iOS 7 (and the forthcoming OS X Mavericks) addresses this issue. So far, we have no official word or evidence but just hopeful speculation. You can't use cheaper, third-party music options like Google Play Music. That said, whatever happened to the Google Play Music app iOS users were promised? When it comes to the cloud, Apple just doesn’t do a great job. I still like a lot of the services and think iMessage justifies its bugs. That said, most everything causes a gigantic headache and you shouldn’t even bother. iOS allows you to sync with Google services, and you should just use those instead.