Appled!

They produce hardware and software to a design template which is the envy of techworld. Other tech companies emulate as best they can, often outperform but no Apple lover notices. So addicted to that logo,  metallic loveliness that concatenation with eye and hand, that often successful mind-meld which second-guesses one’s dreams and fulfils them with irritating alacrity and efficiency.

And while the Applephiliac is engaged in the dream, the beloved reaches invisible hands into the pocket and lovingly strokes the plastic therein until it ejaculates money all the way to Cupertino. And I’m not just talking about Apple Pay, which effectively cuts out the pocket completely…

Examples: Apple Music, say. A mere £10 per month. It won’t be for long, wait and see. And so music on the Apple Store immediately increased in price. So for me, who merely buys the occasional album, I have to carefully calculate which is more expensive. But Apple Music plays off the Internet! So when I have no internet connection, say in the tube, no music unless previously downloaded. It’s never mine! If I stop paying my monthly rental, it’s gone back to Mother Cupertino. And when I do have connection but no wi fi, the music would take up my data allowance. So I would rather have my music within the capacious memory of my phone. That’s why I paid extra for 128gb. Extra.

So Apple came up with another way to stroke money out of me. The Cloud!

All of a sudden I discover all the (purchased!) music on my phone is on the Cloud and I start to get urgent messages that I need to upgrade my Cloud allowance, more money! I call Support for a quick method to download all my music back to my phone. There isn’t one.

And then there are the Glitches, the eternal fucking Glitches.

Today I bought an album on my iPad from the Apple Store. £7.99, formerly £4.99. A bargain! Enter Password! How many times am I asked for my password and told it is wrong! I reset it. Wrong! Or ok on one device but not on another! Reset! Wrong! Reset! Wrong! Eventually I have the album downloaded on the iPad.

But not on the iPhone!   Which is asking me for a fucking password!

AGAIN.

So here I am seated in the Apple Store in Covent Garden waiting for my appointment to see a “Genius”. He/she won’t have answers. I know this because I’ve tried it before.

…2 hours pass….

Post Coital Depression

I feel fucked. Frazzled. Foiled. Fandangoed. Two hours with a perfectly nice Daniel, one of the better members of the Daniel clan although to be honest I haven’t yet found a Daniel I didn’t like. This one,  ginger as he is, perfectly cuddly, as harmless as a neutered ginger tom, singularly failed to sort a single one of my issues. Most of the time spent with this pussycat consisted of inputting my password into a vast variety of software scenarios until every possible variant of iTunes and iCloud and iPhone restore and reboot and reimage with its blasted password had been tried and retried and then again…and AGAIN AND AGAIN and….considering one if the main reasons I was there was the sheer fury suffered as a result of having to enter my password AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN this felt like a version of a ghastly punishment for some evil committed in my life – the Apple Store is obviously Tartarus, which is that place in Hades in mythology where the punishment fits the crime.

What on earth was my crime? Perhaps my passwords offended the Gods. mWhat’s wrong with “Fatefuck12s” or “Forgods32ake”? Or “Odinsucks52” or “Jesusfarted22” ?

I’m going home. The screen is showing “Some items could not be downloaded from Cloud” and when I click ok, “Enter the password…”