It just gets worse and worse.
As I discovered recently, I am no longer able to copy my Voice Memo files to my (Mac) computer via iTunes, as I had been routinely and easily doing for many years.
After spending hours over several days on the phone with an AppleCare senior advisor -— who, in turn, consulted with his Apple advisors and resources— he determined that it is no longer possible to use iTunes to transfer any of my recent months of important Voice Memos to my Mac computer. Instead I now need to either:
- Pay to automatically transfer to and store my vast quantity of Voice Memos in iCloud, which I refuse to do. I want to transfer them to and store them for free, as I had been doing, on my Mac and it's connected external hard drives, or:
2. Use "Share" on my iPhone to send them to my computer, so that I can then, as my long-established workflow requires, have file access to them there.
For the past several years, Apple seems to be making pointless or, more likely, profit motivated changes — perhaps to keep their legions of programmers busy and employed, writing new, unnecessary, disruptive to their customers and insufficiently tested code, instead of keeping their existing software robust and properly functioning.
in another, unrelated, serious problem, recently the editor at a newspaper that I contribute my syndicated columns to every week was unable to open the column files (Word documents and JPEGs) that I have been sending to him every week via Apple Mail. My Internet connection had gone down so I got in my car and drove 3/4 of an hour to hand-deliver them to him — duplicated on two differently formatted flash drives. At least one of those two ways should have worked, but neither did. Luckily I had also brought along a printout of that Word document from my office. In order to meet their imminent publication deadline, I had to completely re-type into his (Windows) computer my 750-word Word for Mac document.
With tens of thousands of files and emails stored in Apple-friendly formats on my computer system, I am committed to and stuck in the expensive and increasingly unreliable Apple universe, but I am most definitely unhappy with that situation.
Unfortunately, as I found out recently when I unsuccessfully tried to get technical support from Microsoft about Word for Mac, technical support from Microsoft appears to be far worse than that provided by AppleCare. There are, as far as I can see, no good alternatives...
