> so many people have only a phone now, so no reason to try to sync.
Wait until the AR glasses come out. I pretty much guarantee that media syncing will be a huge deal, and Apple had better get their iCloud act together by then.
iCloud is a shambles; and I say this as an Apple user for more than thirty years, and has pegged his career to Apple.
We've seen this before, it's a bit like the "no outside food or drink" policy at the movie theater. Apple (and Google, Microsoft, et. al) want to stop you from using your media so you're funneled into buying theirs. If people can easily play local files, it diminishes the value of a streaming/music management tool. Probably explains why Groove Music and Play Music failed, while Apple Music still has a surprisingly devout userbase.
This is one of those things that will hopefully be opened up with more standardization. There's nobody to blame but ourselves for not enforcing this earlier, and hopefully in the future opening an MP3 file won't be harder than it was in 2005.
I spent good money for a ScanDisk double-pronged device (and app) to get around this problem. It does and doesn't work - I have to have it plugged into the iphone to hear my music that I didn't buy on the itunes store. Now I'm paused, not buying more music until the govt steps in. All my digital purchases were from itunes over many years; but that was before I owned any Apple devices, and so everything could work smoothly together.
I don’t think it’s really so much the hardware and software vendors as it is the music industry — and their very powerful lobbyists and lawyers. The tech companies have to play along with what the music industry wants — if they don’t, then they don’t get to have the top artists on their platform — and THAT is why Zune/Groove Music failed, not anyting tech related.
It regularly deletes music without warning -especially if I import it from CDs (that’s still a thing, for us boomers. I have even recorded vinyl records), and also regularly restores music that I delete.
I have also had it do that thing, where my (non-DRMed) song, recorded from a CD, is replaced by the DRMed “radio edit” version of the song, from Apple Music.
That’s fun.
Whether or not the sync actually happens, or if the song stays on the original device, seems to be a crapshoot.
Safari bookmark syncing is … not good. It rearranges bookmarks, refuses to delete some, refuses to sync certain ones, according to some internal algorithm. Etc.
Wait until the AR glasses come out. I pretty much guarantee that media syncing will be a huge deal, and Apple had better get their iCloud act together by then.
iCloud is a shambles; and I say this as an Apple user for more than thirty years, and has pegged his career to Apple.