I'd been meaning to write this for a while, but well, I've been busy.

Apple has demonstrated that it sucks, too.

They restrict app publication on the iPhone/iPad to people who pay the per-app fee, plus there's no guarantee of approval.  It'd be nice to be able to write apps for one's own personal use.  Then there's talk of doing this for all Macs—perhaps it's already a done deal in the next OS, but I don't have time to follow such things closely these days.

They register hardware as Microsoft does, so in the end I didn't avoid that.  Of course, one can't really upgrade hardware on their Mac: if you've always been captive, you don't really realize that you're a prisoner.

Then there's the iCloud fiasco.  I'd been a subscriber to the .Mac / MobileMe family plan for years, mostly for the Backup software, which wasn't available unless one was a subscriber.  (I also bought it so that a few members of my extended family could have non-AIM iChat accounts.)  Then Apple released Time Machine, but my old iMac and PowerBook, being PowerPC-based machines, weren't supported by the new OS, so I was stuck with the old Backup software.  Then Apple end-of-lifed MobileMe for their new iCloud "cloud"-based service.  Which by the way is free now, with 5x the storage.  So why was I paying $100/year before?  (Actually it was more, but I found that one could purchase the package for cheaper on Amazon.  Yet another way Apple was trying to rape me!)

The icing on the cake is that their iCloud system screwed up my wife's mac.com email address, and we have no recourse.  .Mac members were allowed a mac.com email address, not just as an ID for the iTunes store.  When Apple converted MobileMe to iCloud, they required manual migration of accounts.  I'd installed Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro and updated my iPhone to accommodate the requirement for iCloud support.  As such, my conversion worked.  Sachie hadn't done either of these things, but we filled out the form online to preserve her account.  Well, that didn't work, and after the deadline, she wasn't able to check her mac.com address.  She didn't mention it to me for a month or two.  When I investigated, I found that the account no longer existed, and the deadline for restoration of accounts had passed.  I filled out the form for the iCloud activation, only to find that she'd permanently lost her mac.com address for a me.com address.

Even better, when I updated the login information in Mail App, the subsequent IMAP sync deleted all messages on her account.  Of course, she hadn't backed up in about a year, despite that I had set up Time Machine to back up to an external HDD.  Fortunately, she doesn't use that account for much.  There were a few friends who she had to mail that way because some Japanese cell phone providers block messages from my vanity domain.  (Apparently my hosting service is on a blacklist, or some systems don't like the fact that the IP address for the mailserver resolves to a different hostname than the address.)  Anyway, the primary impact was that Sachie's iTunes purchases were all on the mac.com address.  Well, she was complaining that one Japanese album she'd bought, something from MiChi, wasn't showing up in her iTunes purchases list.  I wanted to go back and dig up the receipts, but Apple had deleted those as part of the iCloud fiasco.

So screw Apple right in the ear.  I think I'll build a Hackintosh for my next desktop.

The problem is, I don't really want to switch to Android either, because Google has enough of my personal info, and Windows is a poor knock-off of OS X.  Won't some smart young hacker with lots of time figure out how to tweak an existing system to be usable but not spy on its user?