It’s been a while since my last Apple Music rant. After the recent iOS 17 update the Music.app greeted me with the splash screen on the left side of the above compilation – as I mentioned time and time again, Apple Music could not be disabled any harder on any of my devices or my account.¹ This splash screen has zero benefit or relevance to me.

Even more ridiculous are the constant and increasingly desperate-feeling attempts at trying to suck me into using Apple Music. To give some context for the two other screenshots from the compilation: The first time I got the ad this time was about an hour after the upgrade finished. It’s not the first time I’ve gotten and ignored the ad, it definitely popped up during iOS 16 as well. What is “special” about an offer that you try to get me to please take you up on after every iOS update? The third screenshot above happened after upgrading from 17 to 17.0.3 a few weeks later – is it a bug to be shown more than once per major upgrade cycle now, or just Apple getting more obnoxious? Hard to tell these days.

The most important context however: I own a single HomePod, and I bought it in 2018. Five years ago. How is that still eligible for a “special offer”? I’d have more respect if they simply said “We’d really like for you to fall into our services trap and think that this free initial fix might do the trick” than for this. It’s dishonorable and pathetic.

Can’t even pay the services revenue tribute without running into bugs, amazing. The solution to this You have not completed the entire form. error is to log into appleid.apple.com and perform the action there instead, obviously – entering the exact same information¹. D’uh, silly me! But I don’t want to be too harsh, it’s not like Apple had at least six years to improve this.

This is absolutely bonkers. Because the ML stuff used for “Look Up” and “Copy Subject” is taking a while, the menu item positions are changing around (multiple times!) under your mouse cursor. I’m not sure if there’s a simpler and more straight-forward rule in all of UX design than to never do that. I had to stop using Safari because of how often this would make me click the wrong thing.

(To the surpise of absolutely no one: The movie sucked.)

I guess I should be glad that at least there’s some information available about status, but… it doesn’t make sense. My internet was working fine at the time, and this wasn’t directly after waking the device from sleep or anything similar. This was after me already spending 15 minutes trying anything I could think of to get this damn thing to download the file I had uploaded from my iPhone (on the very same WiFi, mind you) an hour earlier. I waited another hour longer before rebooting, which did the trick.

This came in a while ago¹ but with the absolute shit show going on right now on Reddit, it fits very well. RIP Apollo.

“A 🌈 rainbow unicorn 🦄” wrote:

Anyway, this is about Reddit. Steps to reproduce:

1. Submit a comment on a post.
2. Observe that Reddit is like “OMG, 1 new comment”.
3. Observe that it’s the comment that you just posted.

Every. Single. Time. No, Reddit. I AM THE ONE THAT JUST WROTE THAT. JUST NOW. You were there, you helped me do it. I was authenticated. WTF is wrong with you?

I recently disabled Screen Time (Downtime more specifically) because “it worked a little too well” to put a positive spin on it. This isn’t the greatest illustration – I wanted to click slowly to better show what’s happening, but that hides the absurdity. What I experienced was that (in all applications, and 100% of the time) when attempting to use any of the temporary overrides, it took several seconds for anything to happen. During that time, it didn’t matter how often I clicked the unlock button, it would just throw me into the same loop until at some random point it finally unlocked. When clicking with normal speed I was able to perform the action 5 times or more before anything actually happened.

I guess it’s iMessage week at AT. I just don’t understand how iMessage is such a steaming pile of garbage. How dare I try looking up something from… *checks notes* yesterday! I’ve cut the recording as to not waste too much of your valuable data, but it went on for almost a minute (full video) before I gave up and force-quit the app.

iMessage, many many years ago, was amongst the very best instant messengers. I was converting people to using the app (or even to Apple altogether) just because how good iMessage was. It’s the opposite now, I’m trying to get the very few people I’m still using it with to change to something else.

That was a new one for me: The “Send message” arrow simply stayed disabled. For absolutely no reason at all. Closing the share dialog and restarting the interaction fixed it. Deleting the message and typing something else didn’t. Weird.

Setting aside how unbelievably cringe the translated versions of these Apple Fitness motivational default responses are (which is why I’m mocking my brother with a Kraut gif in response), it absolutely blows my mind that so many years later they still show up like a normal message in macOS. If I had seen the message on my laptop first, I’d have thought my brother had a stroke or someone stole his phone.

I was subscribed to Apple Arcade about two years ago, for a month. I guess I must have allowed it to send notifications back then. Or maybe I did allow Game Center to send them. Either way, I’m sure that it is technically perfectly fine for this push notification to be sent.

But as I’m currently not subscibed to Apple Arcade and haven’t had access to this game since my subscription ended two years ago, this is basically just a very personalized ad. And apparently an unintentional one at that: Unfortunately I didn’t have the foresight to start recording before I tapped it, but it just opened the App Store app. Not even on the Arcade page, just the default landing.