And iBooks dropped all metadata at some point. The wrong network setting on iTunes nukes all your album art. iCal sync is a cruel joke. The moral is don't use Apple cloud services for anything you care about.
Apple doesn't have the right organizational structure to support cloud services across apps to a level of consistency and quality that Google and Amazon does. Nathan Taylor explains this quite well.
Speaking as a former resident deep in Cue's org, I believe this is common knowledge internally, but there isn't alignment on how to address it. Even at the IC level, most people I spoke with are aware of Apple's shortcomings in services. Services are not the favored child at Apple. iOS and hardware are, because of revenue. Services ICs know that, and it hits morale directly; I saw (and felt) this. There are attempts to fix it, too, but those manifest as reorganizations. I was subjected to four in a year and a half.
You hear pains from teams like Maps, who were moved from iOS to services during my tenure, and who immediately ran into serious organizational problems, dried up budgets, and so on. The gettin' is good in iOSville, and once you leave iOS, it's a whole 'nother Apple. There's a common story about the origin of Maps at Apple where Maps was basically given a blank check, and they're still mopping up some of that excess to this day. That doesn't happen in services.
Meanwhile, organizationally, Siri is kind of outside the typical services structure for various legacy reasons and they're off iterating like all getout and having a blast without the encumberance of the services organization. Every time I met with Siri I always came away with questions like, in this organizational climate, how on earth are they getting so much done?
Apple needs a serious Microsoftism on services. If you would have told me five years ago that Microsoft under Nadella would completely reverse course and embrace the living hell out of services while Apple meandered in the "let's buy companies to implement our services strategy" grasslands, I'd have said the opposite is more likely, yet here we are.
It seems like the organization has developed a culture where the closer you are to the pipe that has the money flying in, the more rewarded you are. Because services that support each other are difficult to measure in these terms, they get treated as something less than the others that are. It's a blind spot where they are vulnerable.
The worst part of that is that there is no way to manually export that data and back it up yourself.
Its worse now because Apple is only providing some information as ebooks and not pdfs. So, I get something that can loose my notes and I cannot print out (sorry, I sometimes like to read on something without an LCD).
I really hope to see in my lifetime a move back to user owned data and a distributed internet again. This whole centralization and proprietary nature of things is really not to my taste. If anyone is going to lose my stuff, I want it to be me or at the very least allow me to back up all my own data to my own backup.
Maybe I'm totally wrong, but I just don't like this whole move to cloud computing and centralized data store.
If anyone is going to lose my stuff, I want it to be me
Tragically, the modal user has no backups and is more likely to lose their stuff than the cloud providers, at least in the medium term. This and the security issue lead to what Schneier calls the "feudal system": pick a provider, trust them with everything, hope for the best.
You can have it both ways though. Apple tends to make it difficult for users to be able to have a choice in the matter so you're forced to commit to their services. They do it for commercial reasons (platform lock in = good) - but then they're not great at services so consumers are left with a lot of risk.
iTunes also used to randomly delete music on updates. And they deliberately deleted non-iTunes Store music at one point (which AFAICT was a separate thing).
Do you have a citation on the deliberately deleting non-iTunes Store music? I've used iTunes since version 3 and updated along the way. I've NEVER had a file deleted (and 95% of my music is non-iTunes Store)
Purely anecdotal, but it happened to me. I had ripped (using iTunes) about 200 CDs I own, over the course of a couple of months of throwing in a CD whenever I wasn't doing anything too important otherwise. These 200 CDs were joined by about 10GB of legally purchased MP3s from sources other than iTunes. In fact, I've only ever bought two albums on the iTunes store.
Anyway, some time after I had ripped and cataloged all of that old music, I decided it might be a good idea to back it all up to an external hard drive for safekeeping. I hadn't really paid much attention to file sizes or anything, but I knew I had about 36GB total. Curiously, after copying to the hard drive, I saw I only had about 25GB on there. This was too big a discrepancy even knowing I hadn't really looked at my library before copying. So I dug in, and I realized that the vast majority of MP3s purchased online were missing completely. There was an odd song here or there, but there wasn't a complete album (and I almost always buy the whole album in MP3 format) either on the backup or in iTunes itself. From what I could tell, all of my ripped music was there, but it was as if iTunes decided to "forget" that I also had all those purchased MP3s, and somehow had deleted them from my library without asking me.
Further investigation revealed that the few remaining MP3s were all available in the iTunes Store for purchase, and almost all the missing music was not available for purchase from Apple. It's mostly indie and obscure stuff so that in itself isn't surprising, but I found it intriguing that iTunes somehow deleted music that it couldn't have sold me. I honestly think that's more coincidence than anything, since a small percentage of the deleted music was available from Apple at the time, but it was frustrating nonetheless.
The story has a happy ending though: I had previously backed up my purchased MP3s onto DVD-R media, so I never actually lost anything. But that was the last day I ever used iTunes for anything.
Added songs to iTunes outside of the iTunes store, and months later went back to play the song but couldn't find it in iTunes.
The first few times I chucked it up to me being crazy and misremembering but by the third and fourth time I was sure I wasn't.
I started putting my iTunes directory in a git repo but that didn't highlight any files that got spontaneously deleted which made me wonder if they were really gone. I checked the filesystem and they were right there where they should be.
I'm glad to hear that it wasn't just me, for the longest time I though I messed something up because my friends who use the iTunes store almost exclusively had no such problem.
I'm still on the lookout for an acceptable iTunes replacement that is open source and that can talk to my newish iPod. (Smart playlists are a must)
I've used iTunes since OS 9 and have had a number of songs go missing over the years. This hasn't happened in a long time, but I always suspected that iTunes had somehow removed them due to mismanagement of the library. I didn't investigate further, but now I'm interested to hear how many others might have run into similar issues.
The music itself or the playlist? I've seen iTunes corrupt its playlist, but the physical music files always remain. Don't get me wrong, it is still a huge pain in the butt, and one of the reasons I uploaded all of my music to Google Music and got an All Access subscription.
I had the underlying files deleted - 1-2 songs missing from what used to be a full album, and iTunes' XML index still had references to the files. This was several years ago, long enough that I don't remember what the iTunes version numbers.
> The moral is don't use Apple cloud services for anything you care about.
The moral is don't trust ANYONE for anything you care about [1]. Especially free services - the free service you use can go under or away in a matter of days. Example: google code.
I'm not saying don't use "cloud" services - but always think about what will happen if someone attempts to delete the wrong LUN on some random SAN.
> Especially free services - the free service you use can go under or away in a matter of days. Example: google code.
Google Code is a bad example, as it was announced 9 months before the actual closure, and it's pretty easy to take out your data from there. But, I get your point completely.
Well...kind of. When they announced they would be dropping support for downloads - at that point I know it wasn't if but when they were going to shut down google code. Also, if you look at their issue tracker - it's pretty clear there isn't anyone on the other end [1].
I mean I could probably come up with pages of instances where services are changing features, remove features, or go under. Remember Google Wave (I know people in business context that was using it)? How about when Github pulled uploads (but then reintroduced them later as "Releases") [2]?
