Sour Apple

The trouble began long ago when Apple fired its founder, Steve Jobs.

Apple then fell apart.

So Apple hired Steve back on and the company had one success after another. Then Steve passed away. Apple is now in a long decline as more and more customers find out how badly they are being treated.

Apple has joined the ranks of companies that do not care about customers or customer care. Apple only wants to sell new products (because of the huge profit margins) and they’ll do ANYTHING to make their older products slow down or break down to make customers shell out for a new product to fix the problem that Apple itself created.

Again and again they come out with toxic “upgrades,” that ruin the older product. They hope this will make customers want to take the expensive step of buying a new product.

My older iPhone 5 developed some dirt between the lens and the outside glass cover. It could no longer take photos. I tried to schedule an appointment using the Apple online page, but the appointment setting page did not work. Big surprise. Perhaps this alone will make some customers give up and want to take the expensive step of buying another new phone.

When I reached the store, the tech assigned to me was polite but adamant. “I’m not allowed to fix your old phone because what we really want to do is sell you a NEW phone.”

I’m sure Apple hopes this miserable excuse for customer service will sell more phones. The operation I was requesting would have taken a well-trained (?) customer service technician all of 2 minutes. No way. Apple just wants to sell, sell sell. The higher the profit margin the better.

Apple’s huge greed problem is not going to be cured; it’s only going to get worse as time goes on.

I have been keeping close track of all the harm Apple has heaped on their unsuspecting customers. Here they all are.

1 - OS 9

One weekend OS 9 was alive and well. The following Monday OS 9 was totally removed from every Apple webpage. Gone!

You could call Apple about an OS 9 issue but all the Apple employees were allowed to say was, “we don’t support OS 9 any more.” No help. No hope for your already-purchased and expensive investment in Apple hardware and software. No help. Nothing!

Literally overnight, Apple orphaned millions of customers and their millions of computers, software and everything else. Apple management should have been arrested and sent to jail for such a HUGE offense. (Just like the bankers who were involved in ruining the lives of 150 million Americans with the sub-prime mortgage-backed investment PONZI scheme. Like Apple, not one banker went to jail.) Nothing bad happened to The Bad Apple. Only the millions of once-faithful customers were harmed. I was one of them. I can never forgive Apple for throwing all their customers overboard so brutally.

2 - iPhone

When Apple announced the iPhone 6, they also provided a toxic update called iOS 8 for all the iPhone 5 phones happily running iOS 7.x

iOS 8! What a disaster! Siri became as dumb as a box of rocks. She would gleefully find me addresses (for local Tucson business) in Guatamala, Indonesia and Hong Kong. Siri’s IQ went from 300 to 2. iOS 8 turned Siri (and therefore the iPhone) into an idiot.

I called and called to request that Apple send me an iOS update back to the iOS 7 that worked perfectly. Again and again Apple said, “Oh no we can’t provide you with the iOS that would make your phone work perfectly again! Apple doesn’t want that. We want you to buy an iPhone 6.” Apple wanted us to spend a lot of money on an unnecessary new iPhone.

I left apple for an Android phone and never went back. A lot of smart people did.

Apple has been providing broken and toxic iPhone updates ever since.

3 - iPhone FM Radio

The iPhone has a perfectly good FM antenna and FM radio in it. Apple forces it to be non-working. Eric Estrada of the CHiPs TV series appeared on the Breakfast With The Beatles radio show (WMGK Sunday mornings) to blow the whistle on Apple’s refusal to activate the perfectly good (free!) FM radio that is in every iPhone. In case of natural or man-made disasters, your iPhone has been prevented from bringing you FM radio news of what is happening. I called Verizon but they told me they, too, were appealing to Apple to turn on the FM radio.

Apple didn’t budge.

My guess is that Apple is in bed with makers of the for-pay data-driven FM radio “apps.” These apps will be useless in case of a social breakdown or upheaval because ALL data will be shut off by the feds to prevent Americans from finding out what is happening throughout the country. Proving, once again, how corrupt Apple is, their iPod Touch product had a perfect FM radio at 1/10 the size of an iPhone.

4 - iTunes

iTunes suddenly stopped allowing us to buy music in April, 2019. The software “silent update” confounded the long-working use of each person’s Apple ID. iTunes began to fake that your rock solid Apple ID was no longer good. This toxic update ruined iTunes. Apple wanted us to spend a lot of money on an unnecessary new Mac.

5 - Time Machine

In the good old days, you could hook up each of your Macs directly, one by one, to an external hard disk and back each one up in minutes using Time Machine. When all your Macs were backed up by direct connection, you could then move the external hard disc to the Apple Extreme router and continue having Time Machine back up all your Macs through wifi. No wires. No muss. No fuss.

Then, Apple came out with their highly-flawed Time Capsule product: an Airport Extreme router with an expensive, failure-prone hard drive built in. The flawed Time Capsule product was slow, could not be backed up and could not be maintained with Disc Utility. What a useless product!

Suddenly, Time Machine did not work any longer thru wifi. You could only back up by walking your external hard drive around to each Mac. What nonsense! It was a devious and silent update that destroyed the original Time Machine product. Apple wanted us to spend a lot of money on an flawed and unnecessary Time Capsule. The news got around quickly: the Apple Time Capsule product is junk. I was given a Time Capsule but never used it because it is junk.

6 - iMovie

Before Apple acquired Final Cut Pro, their (free) iMovie app worked great. Once Apple “acquired” Final Cut Pro, a very expensive replacement for iMovie, Apple sent out a toxic “update” that took away most of the best features of iMovie. Apple wanted us to spend a lot of money on the unnecessary Final Cut Pro so they ruined iMovie on purpose with another toxic “update.”

7 - Apple Maps

Maps used to work perfectly. It would quickly ID your home location and quickly draw a Directions map from there to anywhere else. Both of these functionalities were removed in May 2019 by another silent toxic “update.” Apple wanted us to spend a lot of money on an unnecessary new Mac.

8 - iWeb

Apple’s darling web design tool was abandoned. Not only did Apple fail to release iWeb updates, it also failed to support the millions of iWeb customers. Worse than that, it forced each new release of OS X to refuse to run iWeb. All iWeb customers world-wide were thrown overboard again! This shoddy treatment by The Bad Apple has become legendary.

9 - The Terrible Apple ID

Lo and behold, the Apple ID is perhaps the worst idea Apple ever had.

1. If you lose or forget your Apple ID apple will lock up your photos and music forever with no way for you to ever get it back. No matter that you have a dozen top secret federal ID badges to prove that you are you. Forget it.
2. Much to my astonishment, I discovered that when you install an app, the Apple ID at that moment is locked to that particular app. Later when your Apple ID fails (again!) you naturally start a new Apple ID. Now when you try to use the app that is attached to the Apple ID that just failed it won’t work because its Apple ID no longer matches your current Apple ID. You have to delete all your apps and reinstall them using your current Apple ID. This works right up to the time when your current Apple ID fails (again!) at which time you have to go through the delete-reinstall procedure for all your apps AGAIN.
3. If you put off installing a new OS too long, your attempts to upgrade your OS will fail because your Apple ID will prevent the installation.

What a misery the Apple ID turned out to be. If Steve Jobs were still around, he’d fire all the idiots who thought of assigning the Apple ID to apps!

INSTEAD OF THE APPLE ID BEING ATTACHED TO A PERSON, Sour Apple assigns the ID to each app?

What nonsense!

My Apple ID just failed AGAIN!
Apple promised to call and verify me.
Have they called? No.
Have they re-activated my Apple ID? No.

One awful let-down after another. That’s The New Normal. THAT, AND

PROFIT AT ANY COST

10 - Apple Kills FTP At OS High Sierra

12/25/2021

As part of the celebrated release of OS 10.13 (High Sierra) Apple engineers played the dirty trick of all time on hundreds of thousands of web designers: they shut down FTP.

Quietly (as always) they yanked FTP so that web designers could no longer enjoy their expensive web hosting disk drive allotments.

When I updated my iMac from Yosemite (OS 10.10) to Sierra and then to Mojave (OS 10.14), it took me two solid days of fretting and fuming trying to figure out why my long-trusted Fetch FTP software would no longer work. I even downloaded the File Zilla FTP app only to find that it wouldn’t work either!

Yesterday, I spent two hours with a VERY bright Apple telephone support person. She, like me, had NO IDEA that Apple had decided to disable FTP. All the Apple customers who needed FTP to do their work were, like all the others, thrown overboard. One of the critical questions I asked is why FTP works inside my Sparkle web design tool but not with Fetch FTP or File Zilla FTP. Sparkle is what I chose for web design after Apple threw all their iWeb customers overboard.

The reason Sparkle’s FTP works and Fetch and File Zilla doesn’t is because the Sparkle engineers wrote their OWN FTP system right into their software.

At this web address

https://osxdaily.com/2018/08/07/get-install-ftp-mac-os/

I found the answer.

First some quick background. Modern versions of Mac OS yanked FTP to instead emphasize SFTP usage. Likewise, telnet was removed in favor of ssh. These decisions were probably made to favor the more secure encrypted protocols of SFTP (and ssh), but nonetheless some users may still need to regularly use the older FTP transfer protocol, even if it’s not particularly secure.

Duh!
Ya think?
Every web designer needs FTP!

FTP was removed in macOS High Sierra and this terrible mistake continues in macOS Mojave.

Just like all their other toxic “updates,” this betrayal of all the web designers (like me) who use FTP every day is intolerable and inexcusable.

Thanks to yet another betrayal by Sour Apple, when I want to upload something from my iMac I have to

1. save it to a flash drive
2. move the thumb drive to a Windows computer (yuk!) and
3. use an FTP system from Windows.

I can’t really express, here in print, how angry I am at Apple (again!) for this, their newest betrayal.

11 - The Horrible Broken Keychain

In order to be able to shut down all their user’s computers quickly and easily (in case of civil unrest or anarchy) Apple has inserted a horrible keychain system between each user/owner and the programs they want to use. When Apple shuts down a user’s keychain, the Mac goes dead.

Trying to re-establish a broken keychain is very very difficult. It took me three days. Even calling Apple tech support didn’t work.

There’s a dandy Catch-22 involved. To “fix” (not!) the keychain, the keychain must be working.

In trying to repair the newest incarnation of the previous (also failed) Apple ID for phones, I broke my Keychain.

BOOM ! All my software quit working.

Somehow, I was able to get my Keychain repaired.

BOOM ! All my software worked again.

August, 2020

So the feds have tried and succeeded in turning off all cell phones for the better part of a day. From www.downdetector.com in August, 2020

Here’s the shutdown that happened to Verizon. The feds flip their switch and nobody talks to anybody else. Neat, huh?

Now Apple has found a way to shut down all their user’s computers. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

It’s a horrible turn of events, once again, brought to you by Apple.

January 19, 2022

It’s happening again today! The feds are testing their Internet kill switch. The primary purpose of the Internet Kill Switch is to shut down all communication when the feds commit tyranny again.

• gmail.google.com went out of service yesterday afternoon. Today it produces this message: “The webpage at https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.”
• contacts.google.com produces this message: “This site can’t be reached. contacts.google.com took too long to respond.”
• YouTube can’t produce a page
• www.guardian.com can’t produce a page display. Instead this message is provided: “The connection has timed out. The server at www.theguardian.com is taking too long to respond.

12 - Apple Shuts Off Music Inputs

Starting in Mojave or perhaps High Sierra, Apple quietly shut down all music inputs. Musicians who record using a Mac could not get any of their instruments to come through. They could play back old recordings, but not make any new recordings!

This is madness!

You have to get help to find out where Apple did The Bad Thing.

To get your music turned back on you have to click this in the System Preferences

Then click “Microphone” which is actually all music inputs.

Click the lock icon and type your Mac start-up password.

Finally turn the audio back on to reverse the dreadful and secret Apple move that killed audio.

Hey Apple! Ever heard of something called MUSIC? Do you know or care how many MUSICIANS use Macs? Do you know how many musical lives you have put on hold by your stupidity?

I spent days trying to figure out why my expensive Cubase Pro 11 Digital Audio Workstation and Scarlett audio interface stopped working. I was no longer able to record my instruments and voice.

If Steve were still alive he would FIRE all the idiots who brought on this catastrophe. Many of us think Apple software engineers have lost their marbles.

I get it. I do. You just do whatever you want even though thousands of customers get thrown overboard. You’ve caused me grief so many times I have lost count.

Just keeping track of your offenses has become a full time job.

Hey! It’s THE SADDERDAY TIMES. When we find abuses, we make it our job to let everyone know.

13 - Apple Mojave Shuts Down DVD Backups

Yes that’s right. You heard right. Apple in its (lack of) wisdom decided for all of us that it would best if Macs could no longer back up store-bought DVDs. Wait a minute! You bought it. You paid for it. You own the physical DVD but Apple butts in and prevents you from backing it up?

The part that really bothers me is that in the nasty message that says copy protected DVDs are “no longer supported,” Apple substitutes the backup software’s logo for the Apple logo making you think that it is the backup software that is preventing the backup procedure. How sly. How slippery. How dishonest.

My guess is that Apple was paid a hefty sum by the movie industry. Apple cares a lot more about “growing their business” than their customers so they “caved in” to the movie industry’s money offer.

Profit at any cost, again.

Why else would they perform another silent assassination of the very things their customers like?

In Mavericks, my DVD backup software works fine. In Mojave, Apple proudly presents a sour message that protected DVDs can not be backed up. That’s all she wrote. Game over.

14 - Apple Blocks Copying of DVD Backup Files

FLASH ! THIS JUST IN.

Not only will Mojave NOT allow you to back up your DVDs, it will now also prevent you from copying DVD backup files you already have on-disc! Yes that’s right. You heard right. Apple now blocks both DVD backing up and DVD library copying.

At first Apple was honest about their dishonesty. Their error message said something about copying movie files was “not supported.”

8/5/2022

Apple must have issued a Silent Release again. Now when copying of DVD files fails, Apple makes it look like the receiving drive disconnected. You re-boot your Mac. Apple pretends the drive disconnected again. Over and over, time after time. I then moved the backup project to my old MacBook Pro (running Mavericks) and the copy worked just fine.

Busted!

15 - A King Kong Bad Idea: Apple AirTags

Just when you thought it was safe . . . Apple invents a pure spying disc that will allow a criminal to track you. It’s called an AirTag.

From

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/20/apple-airtags-stalking-complaints-technology

we read

Police across the US have received reports of devices intended to help locate lost items being used for nefarious purposes.

An Apple AirTag costs the Bad Guy $29. All he has to do is slip one in your coat pocket, purse or car and then the Bad Guy can track you wherever you go.

In early January, Brooks Nader, a 26-year-old Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, was walking home alone from a night out in New York when she received a disturbing iPhone notification telling her she was carrying an “unknown accessory.”

“This item has been moving with you for a while,” the alert read. “The owner [the Bad Guy] can see its location.”

That’s when she knew “something wasn’t right,” Nader told the NBC news program Today. Nader discovered that somebody had slipped an Apple AirTag into her coat pocket while she was sitting in a restaurant earlier. Without her knowledge, the Apple AirTag tracked her location for four hours before Apple’s abuse prevention system triggered the notification to her phone.

When Arizona’s Kimberly Scroop went to local police after receiving an iPhone notification that she was being tracked in September last year,

“they were not interested in taking a report, and they didn’t [bother to] take my name or phone number,” she says. “They said if I noticed someone following me, to call the police then.”

Wait! What? A woman finds out she is being stalked and there’s no crime there? Give me a break!

So you put Apple’s AirTag spying/surveillance device together with a Bad Guy and the dumbed-down, modern-day, sleepy, lazy, unprofessional police and you have the perfect combination that enables Bad Guys to do bad things.

What level of crime will it take before the police wake up this King Kong threat? That’s anyone’s guess.

Thanks again, Apple!

16 - Apple OS Update Disables Their Own Software (Again!)

Yep! They’re at it again. If you make the mistake of advancing your Mac from Mojave to Catalina, iOffice apps will all quit working. If you’ve been using Pages, Numbers or Keynote you’re going to get really angry when they all quit running.

That’s OK, though, because Apple will provide FREE updates for the software that they, themselves caused to malfunction, right?

Wrong!

You must BUY an upgrade to fix the iOffice software that Apple breaks when the OS is advanced from 32 bit to 64 bit.

What else will quit working?

Should Apple provide free upgrades when they break their own software?

Yes.

Do they provide free upgrades the way they should?

No.

17 - Apple’s Toxic Keychain Ransomware

I don’t know what Apple uses to persuade honest software vendors to “slip” their dirty keychain system into previously clean software. Money, probably.

The keychain provides Apple with a simple way to disable all your software with one click. Apple turns off your keychain “permission,” and BOOM . . . all you’re keychain-infected software stops working. My guess is that Apple saw that the feds had a kill switch for the Internet and for all cellphone systems and they wanted a kill switch for their very own.

The software vendor made a BIG MISTAKE when they invited the corrupt Apple company into bed with them.

Here’s how Apples ransomware works with, for example, a website authoring application.

1. A software vendor “upgrade” is announced. So far, these have been OK so you perform the upgrade. The insertion of keychain ransomware is not mentioned.
2. The software with the poison pill keychain secretly in place allows you to perform edits.
3. You go to upload your edits . . . BOOM! “You must have a keychain to upload your edits.”
4. You are furious by the invasion of Apple into your business. When you purchased your web design application, Apple was not part of the deal. Suddenly, they are.
5. You revert to the app version just before the upgrade that includes the toxic keychain ransomware. NO WAY. You’re met with the poison pill: “You can not open your work with a previous version of the application. OUTRAGEOUS!
6. To get Apple out of the picture again, you have to resort to a backup of your application AND a backup of your website datafile before it was STAMPED with the Apple ransomware keychain.
7. Sadder but wiser, you begin the search for another website design application that DOES NOT include the toxic Apple keychain ransomware.

18 – Crooked “Update” For iDVD

Yes. That’s right. Just like with iWeb (where Apple dropped the product and then made their operating systems REFUSE to run it) Apple has also sabotaged iDVD.

You still have iDVD . . . and it LOOKS like it’s still working . . . but the app no longer makes DVDs.

Strike one.

Then, iDVD provides a false and misleading update available message. Great. You follow the link only to find

it leads to a monstrous
full OS update to the hated
Catalina OS.
You know. The OS that makes your
favorite software stop working.
God only knows what other
serious damage Catalina
is prepared to do.

Strike two.

Apple then produces some fake and misleading “hints” at how to get iDVD working again despite its having been sabotaged by Apple itself.

The false and misleading hints don’t work.

Strike three—you’re out.

So . . . what do you suppose? I took the 3 DVD mp4 files over to my MacBook Pro (running Mavericks, thank God) and the iDVD from the time of Mavericks produced a DVD disc for me piece of cake.

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